« September 2005 | Main | December 2005 »
November 30, 2005
Redemption, and how
Regarding the ticket price, I might say that it was revealed to me by someone who knows, that the only expense – given that the room didn't have to be paid for – was B's travel and (one night's) accomodation. Oh, and the wine and...er...stuff on sticks. I don't know how many people were there, but it was a lot of £30's. So let's hope that all those funds are used wisely to organise another bigger and cheaper event next time...
Posted by robin at 06:44 PM
November 28, 2005
Badiou Transcription
Alain Badiou: Politics: A Non-Expressive Dialectics badiou-politics.pdf (678k)
Posted by robin at 10:05 PM
What is Ciné-Musique?
Day of Ciné-Musique. P. Mullins & C. Pellet. Lausanne: Art&Fiction, coll. ShushLarry, 2005
At any rate, it is not simply film music, diegetic or non-diegetic, soundtrack or incidental; although these enter into it, they do not exhaust or define its nature. The authors even say: cinema that is musical in feeling but has no actual music going on. Musical, first of all, signifies a sensory abstraction, freed from representational relation. Secondly, the dominance of rhythmic pattern (even harmonic consonance resolves to rhythmic congruences). It is entirely proper here to recall here Deleuze and Guattari's Ritournelles:
We must rather say that territorial motifs form rhythmic faces or personae, and territorial counterpoints form melodic landscapes. There is a rhythmic persona whenever we find that we are no longer in the simple situation of a rhythm which is itself associated with a persona, with a subject or an impulse: now, it is the rhythm itself which wholly constitutes the persona, and which, in virtue of this, can remaain constant, but can just as well grow or diminish, by addition or subtraction of sounds, of durations always growing and decreasing... [Mille Plateaux, 391]
We need here, of course, to translate this into the context of the cinematic experience in all its synaesthetic richness. But perhaps the melodies and rhythms that belong to the total experience of film are all the more abstract in so far as they cannot be wholly attributed to either material, sensory component. This makes it fitting perhaps, that Day of Ciné-Musique consists in the unresolved tension between the work of a painter and that of a musician.
In so far as it has already been recognised, the avant-garde quest to isolate the elusive ciné-musique cannot expect de jure to achieve more than the most hackneyed plot and setting: successes in this field, like Marienbad, are rare. Obversely, bad movies might well, and often do, make good ciné-musique. For it is fatuous to suppose that, in search of this abstract musical plane, one could do away all at once with character and narrrative, with sense and meaning in their brute senses: but one must say that the artform unconsciously approaches its essence when these become vehicles for the more abstract lines of sensation. Ciné-musique is thus the simultaneous affirmation of something beyond the immediate content, and the necessity and innate dignity of that content.
Truffaut, in search of the music that animated his boyhood: the narrative line of young Antoine Doinel is paralleled by an abstract intensive line, which accompanies but does not imitate or project the 'real' Doinel. Ultimately we must attach the proper name of Doinel to this abstract line, which expresses a joy and a life that cannot be contained in 'him', which burst his bounds, a transversal whose vector takes in the quick lightness of the young boy's limbs, his scuffling dashing passage through the streets, his physical and symbolic escapes, the teeming life of the city, and finally even the mercurial motion of the camera itself - and compared to which Doinel-as-character is only a pale cipher. Maximum velocity is reached in the hearts-and-diamonds sequence, where not only does the movie undergo a zoetropic redoubling, but film itself becomes a gigantic particle accelerator spinning at unbelievable speeds, a whirling siren tone.
Here the Doinel machine syncopates, and finally synchronises, with the very material support of the film as it passes before our eyes. This movement of joy, says Truffaut, is an innate potential of film; this medium is a becoming-child.
Von Sternburg's The Blue Angel: Of course, there is the spatial, there are spaces - the club, the stage, backstage, and the spiral stair, leading to Lola's room. But (to state the obvious) to the viewer their spatial existence is on the level of an illegitimate metaphysical speculation, since for him they exist only as the spatium, the transcendentally-deduced condition for series and refrains of states of intensity related only to each other, and known only through constant rhythmic passages through their thresholds. The elevated threshold of the spiral stairs, the (deceptive) transcendent access upwards around which the whole plot pivots and for which Lola is only a cipher; the backstage area, through which lugubrious omens circulate (the man with the bear, the glowering clown) like the figures of a swiss clock on their mechanical promenade.
At the end of the film we will see, unexplained, exactly such a clock; when professor Rath has already become part of the infernal motion, the automata whose impulsive force, figure of desire, is Lola (but even she, famously, can't help it!). At last the contrapion will reach its terrible climax, its point of possible breakdown, as Rath oscillates around the liminal veil that separates stage from backstage, hopelessly fights his absorption into the machine: This short delay has been due to mechanical difficulties.... Not only is there nothing behind the glamour (if there was ever an anti-showbiz film this is it), but at the terminus of our desire there is only a becoming-robot-clown, an absorption into the uniform unstoppable motion of the celluloid fabric, a revelation of what was always our sleepwalking (Those behind the stage always knew this of course, which is why they only looked on sardonically; and incidentally this does not invalidate the Truffaudian proposition, since children are also automata, they love to spin and spin until they fall down). Yes, there is the pathos of rhythmic repetition, the reprisal of objects (the Lola postcard portraits, the egg, the clown) in different circumstances, taking on different meanings. But more profound is the fact that these passages through the spatium, the way we inhabit the space of the film, are no different to how we repeat and inhabit, in-habit, our lives, and our impulsion by occult forces (the irresistible black hole of Dietrich's weird luminescence: this is where stars – such as they once were – play their part in the generation of ciné-musique).
What moves us in film: Ciné-musique is intimately temporal, one could say it is tied to metrics or relative velocities: frames per second. So that we most easily reproduce the ciné-musical state of mind when we are becoming-automaton, subject to involuntary motion or limitation: LA from a cab window. This is music that enters us unconsciously, whose continuity with, or continuation through, other media, through life itself, is quite possible (to keep living this ciné-musique, we turn the materials of movies into objects that go beyond them - because we want to keep something of what moves us in film). It is true that we might speak of composition, montage, synchronisation, a whole admirable arsenal of technical knowledge – but none of these would capture the movement of the whole. Likewise, as Mullins writes, an 'appreciation' of the technical and organisation business of making movies gets us no further towards an understanding of what movies do. This question can only be pursued through a sort of instinctive groping, a dangerous procedure which, if we pursue only the easy tracks (precisely, LA from a cab window, radio on) might misfire into mere imitation, preciousness, acting-out or ironic reproduction. Doubtless we have all at some time sought to achieve that state when we "feel we are living in a movie": the question is how to take this desire beyond a wistful adolescent longing.
Then what are the fictions of Pellet's paintings? In spite of the fact that they are (at least) triple reproductions (with the painters models already standing in for characters in cinematic scenes) they too do not seem destined to reproduce - at least, not anything that exists prior to its reproduction. The people who inhabit the canvas knowingly act out slices of fictional situations, like actors trapped in a single frame, their eternal congelation intensifying rather than neutralising the tension of the arrested narratives, like the insistence of a scratched record. Frozen plot constellations, moments of ciné-musique where emotional encounters form vertical dissonances. In this respect they are peculiarly non-visual, not in Duchamp's sense of the deposition of the retinal, but in that, like Bacon's canvases, they are machines for reproducing rhythms whose visuality is only incidental. A synaesthetic calculus, they attempt to determine the instantaneous velocity of celluloid emotion (It is just that I can't stand not to, I can't stand not to stop time, says Mullins). Like the last frozen frame of Les Quatre Cent Coups, its tangent flashing forward on its course through the imagination.
The potency of figure is corroded - Pellet's people are only empty points constellated by flows of becoming that have nothing to do with persons: an antihumanism unconnected to the cold irony of the screen; beyond glamour, into the rhythmic dynamics of ciné-musique.
And what of Mullins' delirious travelogues: weightless jetlagged hotel moments, depth-charges of memory, moments of low-rise immanence? The appreciation of the authenticity of that most infamously inauthentic of all places, Holywood. His texts go in search of the real glamour which, as the second-generation cliches would have it, is a pure fiction put out by this unsavoury pit of snakes. He finds a glamour-in-depth, a luminescence lent by faraway silver-screen reflections. Aiming to go beneath the hypnosis of a lifetime of infection by Hollywood, he finds another, more profound mesmerism beneath.
I have also written these as a writing which eats the movies: Ciné-musique escapes (or rather is pursued) out of the work of art itself into the social and commercial networks and locations that produced it. Here the authors perhaps seek a further abstraction: the ultimate matrix of all those singular threads of ciné-musique. They want to go further than this first abstraction, the abstraction which reveals the essential real of the cinematic; to locate that massive assemblage which lends its orchestration, its tonal colour, to cinematic movement in its entirety: and of course they go to the geographical seat of its power and glory; Hollywood. Once more one does not expect imitation: art does not imitate life in such a straightforward manner, especially when a massive commercial structure intervenes; and yet in LA Mullins does indeed find anticipatory echoes, half-explanatory moments, which suggest a common thread - now lost in time - to those glorious cinematic lines of sensation.
Beyond LA: The way to understand the further deviations that constitute the greater part of the text is perhaps that eventually we reach the point where, trained by a lifetime of infection by Hollywood, the writer begins to generate his own autochthonous ciné-musique. One begins to recognise in sequences of lived experience itself the same structures of reality one found, the same sensations one sought, in film. One no longer needs to take a cue from fiction, one has become (or discovered one's own) fiction.
A second sojourn in Tahiti was undertaken from August 27 to September 3 2004. In this second trip my long obsession with Tahiti became more of a reality-tinted matter. It was a way of seeing how much the first trip had transformed me - and yet how I had managed to keep the fantasy intact
To capture ciné-musique efficiently would be to master the capacity to repeat moments as identical. But we find the copy always shifting, fading, not quite similar. A confounding repetition almost Beckettian in the precision of its jetlagged hysteresis, one whose resolution is not advanced a jot by the writer's obsessive recitation of precise dates and room numbers:
I think that for awhile I did remember the first night of the third Los Angeles trip as being the 'same' profound thing that the first night o the seond had been; but by now I seem to have forgotten the specificity of the third one - this third of a series. The series were: #1) Jan 2001; #2) December 5 (Wednesday) to December 13 (THursday), 2001; #3)December 5 (Wednesday) to December 12 (Thursday), 2002 - clearly the virtual replica of #2. I had undertaken this project (the third trip, the 2002 one) for two reasons: That it be somewhat if not almost exactly like the second one; and that it also free me from the second one, which was still poised to take me 'away' (The 'actual first trip to Los Angeles' in 1984 spawned this recent series, but it is nonetheless a discrete thing, from times long past.)...
This is the search for the paradoxical 'original print' amongst the distributed copies, or the attempt to identify where one began to live a particular fiction, where its reality began.
In between the discontinuous double series of the two authors contributions to the project, one discovers sometimes confusion, sometimes clarity, but never a clear point of coincidence between text and image. Occasionally the book offers us a rush of sensation that reminds us what film is, or was once, capable of. It is perhaps hopeless to make sense of the book, even more to offer a 'review' of it: better to make sensation of it, or to let it effect a sort of contagion of sensation, to propogate refrains of ciné-musique: release the kinematic muse. In this regard, there is little to be gained from studiously pursuing all of the (sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure) movies mentioned. Aside from the fact that every reader who understands what ciné-musique is will already have their own favourites, their own films and experiences through which ciné- musique speaks to them, the movie reviews are in certain respects a red herring with relation to the problem that Mullins and Pellet set us. A fortiori we might say that any given part of the text, at the time of reading, appears disposable: but it would only be so were there a straightforwardly discursive method of going about the work of this book. At its most ambitious, the project would be a complete theory of how the movies changed the world forever and irretrievably. At its other pole it could be a rather affected peripatetic postmodern phenomenology. But instead, cine-musique remains a defiantly concrete poetic undertaking, repelling on all sides the discursive disciplines that menace it (film studies, urban theory, psychoanalysis, the novel, psychogeography, the travelogue, and of course the film review itself) in order to maintain a passionate fidelity and an amplificative relation to its source.
Posted by robin at 09:53 AM
November 27, 2005
Life is not a bowl of cherries, dead frogs and dried mud
Fasolt und Fafner [n.b. Badiou says he'd rather be Fafner than Fasolt, since the latter is already dead by the end of The Rhinegold]
I was in a better mood today (LOL). Although the boyscouts were still out, I didn't let them get to me! I do fear I was looked upon rather unfavourably after my question to Zizek concerning the banlieue points below (the gameboy generation etc.). The point wasn't that I maintained that the riots were merely a bit of fun for some middle class boys; rather, it is interesting to see the unraveling of the story given by the police, each version of which contains a part of the truth, but each of which is essentially designed to 'cover' (in all senses) the meaning of the event. Of course I agreed with Z that the reduction of the events to a set of "demands" was exactly what would neutralise them. So the idea of a popular contagion born from the sensational matrix of capital and irreducible to circumstances (which can be "addressed" liberal-politically) of poverty is intriguing,and must form part of the explanation of what was going on: in fact what needs to be said against the Parisian police spokesman is that there is nothing so trivial and dismissable about the vector from pacifying entertainment systems full of screened virtual aggression, to gleeful material revolt - this, it could be argued, would have more revolutionary (because unpredictable) significance than burning cars for government or media "recognition" or for jobs - This particularly in view of the preposterous demands being made by revolutionary intellectuals on a "working class" (noting that – as Zizek rightly pointed out – in European countries the 'poverty' of the underclass does not necessarily manifest in terms of lack of access to consumer goods) that would in general unequivocally prefer to stay home with their Playstations. Anyhow it did serve strikingly to take me right back to AntiOedipus: oh, how marxists and lacanians alike flinch violently at the very suggestion of some positive desire - as if torching cars isn't fun! As if there were something positively indecent in the idea, that pleasure could admix with political anger.
Incidentally the question was not thus misunderstood by Zizek, who I warmed to somewhat today (not just because of this); his own presentation was extremely interesting, but then in debate he reverted disappointingly to his previous persona: sweaty, ravaged (len)in-joke cracking (his fans guffawing obsequiously on cue). What was interesting however was his autodissection of his media celebrity as "rock'n'roll intellectual". Having accused the press of encouraging this cult of personality as a defence against his thought, he then admitted his own complicity in the process, with no real pleading other than perhaps an implicit gesture to human frailty in the face of filthy lucre. One's general impression of Zizek is that his undeniable mercurial talent struggles to translate into a sustained philosophical project, falling back on entertainment value (despite his own professed ambivalence on the subject of irony, the performance at moments seems permeated by it) and horrendous overproduction; something like Baudrillard before him, perhaps...
So finally, and as something of an antidote, at last the large man in green took the floor (and, thankfully for our recording, the mike) - his voice a mellifluous softly-hooting euphonium to the Slovenian rockstar's splutteringly percussive assault (too much of the old Kate Moss versus a nice mellow claret, I'll wager.)
The mayses are divided into clayses, and so honn.
Aside from the lovely gigantomachia photos, I confine myself to ad hominem attack and vague musing: No point in my giving long accounts of the papers since you can listen (see below) (– and also IT has promised a full and detailed report, as penance for past blog frivolities [no pressure!]).
Badiou pleased by beginning with the affirmation that a "classical age" of modern politics (mayses...er masses, classes, parties, leaders) was finished. I believe that along with this unequivocal opening statement, some were disappointed by the modesty of Badiou's conclusion: a poetic expression of hope rather than a militant affirmation (I heard a certain Slovene muttering "when you end with a poem, it's always bad news..."). In what came between, there was something faintly 'unbadiousian' despite the familiar themes. The search for the generic as a creative affirmation of life? The need for a new fiction (not even an axiom anymore)? My unanswered question: is malign genericity unthinkable, or is the generic itself a sufficient condition (what a triumphantly abstract conception of politics!)? And then of course that old question of the transferability of set theory to politics...
Slavoj Zizek & Lorenzo Chiesa
Alain Badiou & Alenka Zupancic
FInally, we should let Badiou have the last word on my foregoing musings on the banlieues:"The burning [in '68] was different, because the fiction was not dead."
Posted by robin at 07:51 AM
Badiou&Zizek Live
Badiou : Politics: A Non-Expressive Dialectics (badiou.mp3, 26.6MB)
[Many thanks to Sphaleotas and Adam Kotsko for hosting: the comradely spirit is not dead!! Transcript of the Badiou to follow soon.]
Incidentally no disrespect is meant to the other two speakers, who no doubt were anyhow already resigned to being regarded as support acts, but whose papers were actually for this reason more surprising and novel (to me, anyway); and whose noninclusion is only down to my missing half of Lorenzo's most instructive (for the nonlacanian) paper, and to my being wary of waning batteries and storage space in the case of Alenka Zupancic's beguilingly subtle thesis on comedy as affirmation of our leaky finitude.
Posted by robin at 07:46 AM
November 26, 2005
À propos des banlieus...suite
[In haste...]
So it wasn't about jobs, after all...? An article in today's Le Monde reveals:
Contrary to the claims of the minister of the interior, the majority of minors who were arrested and presented before the judge following the urban violence...were unknown to the courts...Most of the 577 minors who appeared before the judge were "ordinary" young people. Aged from 16-17, often french, they had obtained average results in their studies. Most of them were enrolled on vocational courses, often as apprentices.
Response to this 'surprising' finding is somewhat inadequate: the director of the PJJ quoted thus:
Certain of the participants in the violence were motivated by hatred (la haine...) and the desire for destruction, but there was also a ludic dimension in all of this...the "game boy" generation behaved as if in a virtual world
The vague evolcation of a 'ludic' dimension, whilst perhaps lending strength to our '68 parallel, hardly serves to explain this contagion. And, we suspect, neither will it prevent the social hardliners and the new intellectual theocracy from the wealth of opportunity the émeutiers offer them. In the same newspaper 'philosophe' Régis Debray affects to support the call for a return to religious values with a return to Freud: in an article entitled 'Civilisation and its Discontents...continued', he speaks up against any inflammatory linking of the violence with religious (presumably, islamic) motive, arguing that the religious problem here lies deeper. Taking up with relish what he imagines a wise old man caught in a ring of burning Renaults might say: "The problem here is not too much, but not enough religion." The transmutation of religious fervour into the culte republicain and the "messianic progressivism" of workers movements, has now somehow been lost altogether.
Evoking an absolute discontinuity between "the ancient struggles for hopes and the current despair of vandals", he decries the absence of leaders, martyrs: Tony Montana, the 'icône des quartiers' if there is one, is hardly a suitable model like Trotski, Stalin or Ché. A proper "super-ego" is what separates revolutionary fervour from mere "jacquerie urbain" "without leader, without slogans"...
And this is the very impulse of religion – to "reunite isolated individuals, by channelling, or more often inhibiting that (quoting Freud) instinctive primitive and autonomous tendency of the human being: aggression".
For it is remarkable that the need for religion is always for them...Freud's insight was to understand that the "opium of the people", writes Debray, could in reality be "the vitamin of the poor", contributing to a "programme of civilisation", which "distinguishes us from the chimpanzees": In Freud this was an historico-psychoanalytic thesis. Here it becomes dangerously close to an intellectual-elitist prescription: religion is good for the poor, it provides a necessary pacification and civilisation, drags them up from the level of animals, or racailles.
Then we get the by now irritatingly banal 'radicality' of defending this 'politically incorrect' position. A bit of discipline is good for you...would be good for them, to make them into the type of revolutionary mass that would get us excited. Stop the desublimation of civilisation! One need not disagree with Freud, or even with the contention that "a supermarket is never going to be enough to make a community," to find this suggestion, this programme, dubious in both logical and pragmatic terms.
If this argument – the youth "unaffiliated to anything except consumer goods, apparently more preoccupied with the signs of wealth than with the redistribution to all" – recalls Badiou's incisive article on the veil, where he demands "a law against brand names...the conspicuous symbols of Capital" as more divisive than religious symbols, we must say that the suggestion of an anachronistic return to unifying religious faith is less convincing, though perhaps its clumsiness reveals something underlying about Badiou's own more sophisticated position.
Which brings me to the Politics of Truth. Because Alberto Toscano very convincingly picked apart the apparently simple continuity between religious fanaticism and revolutionary zeal, the idea that what constitutes modern revolutionary politics, and what needs to be renewed, is less a secularisation than a 'respiritualisation' of politics. What remains an open question, however, is how far even Badiou's nominally secular position remains subtended by a cryptotheological agenda; how far the absolute indifferent binding, this universal unification is necessarily religious in all but name, and thus as preposterously idealist as a return to village community and church on sunday.
There is no doubting the depth of research and ingenuity showed in these earnest attempts at a renewal of the political. But uncomfortable questions certainly hang heavy for me, amongst the Leninist quips and the gleeful affirmations of political uncorrectness which delight this crowd. In the radical rhetoric it is difficult not to sense a comforting return to old certainties, a reignited boy-scout fervour of party meetings, which fails entirely to engage with the complexities of the contemporary world. Sometimes one is struck by the preposterous nature of the stupendously ambitious notions: but of course, one must not limit infinite thought! And of course, this constellation of intellectual positions almost defines itself by a repudiation of complexities: pleading the impossibility of political action on the basis of the density of the world is defined as the most heinous crime against 'fidelity'. But one need not be a 'postmodern defeatist' or a devotee of nomadic chicanery to suspect that what the domino-fall of the eastern bloc, where the wake of an apparently revolutionary democratic agency of the people guided in property developers, rapacious investors and McDonaldisation taught us was that the only revolutions that would take place from now on were those required by capital. One need not be an 'impossibilist' to argue that there is no 'outside' of capitalism from which to set up a 'front' or a political encampment (and one certainly isn't convinced by Negri's – or Seattle's – "multitudes"): Precisely Deleuze and Guattari's genius was to have described the logic of capital in great detail – of course, they are not at all the spontaeous anarchist clowns that the new theocratic right-left wants them to be (a dissmissable 'ludic dimension', living in a 'virtual world', perhaps!) – rather than to have merely got excited over faded photos of lenin and images of the absolute (the 'Deleuzian century', crossing Y2K, will still be in force long after 'public intellectual' Zizek has been forgotten).
It remains to be seen whether what Badiou has to say today can allay my suspicions.
Posted by robin at 07:38 AM
November 24, 2005
Père et fils...
...Deleuzien...
...Badiousien...
Posted by robin at 09:14 PM
November 22, 2005
3 April 1955: À propos des banlieus
No more quiet days in Clichy...
'55, '68, '05,..plus ça change. But of course a repetition is not the repetition of the same: and I do not repeat because I repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat. [Deleuze Difference & Repetition]
In May '68, from the first sparks to the local clashes, the upheaval was brutally transmitted to the whole society...Vested interests prevailed in the end, but only after a month of burnings. We're headed for explosions of this type, yet more profound. [Félix Guattari 'On Capitalism and Desire' (Desert Islands)]
When Simenon completed L'Horloger d'Everton in 1954, just as the storm was building in Algeria which was to make 'necessary' the first application of the quasi-martial état d'urgence that, with the import of colonial discontent into France's "internal souths", would later be reprised.
Simenon was far away, having forsaken France for Connecticut, where he based his novel. A father – a watchmaker – separated from his wife, and his adolescent son, a couple whose lines of communication form the psychological heart of the story. Simenon's wonderfully flat prose details how the watchmaker's steady, measured life is overthrown by his being forced by circumstances to question his knowledge of – and his relationship with – his son.
The father learns suddenly that his son has run away with a girl, and is suspected of committing a murder. The interference of the police and the media in the hunt for the boy only serves to uncover slowly in the father an obscure solidarity with the estranged boy and his lover in their flight: "they were of the same breed, all three of them. ... It seemed to him that, in the whole world, there were only two sorts of men, those who bow their heads and the others." Reunited finally, uncomfortably, with his son, who refuses to give any justification or defence in mitigation of his act, the watchmaker discovers in this solidarity another time, another mode of connection, he finds again what he had lost in the measured quietitude and satisfaction of middle-age.
It is only in Bertrand Tavernier's 1974 film adaptation L'Horloger de Saint-Paul that the secret charge buried in this psychological drama is catalysed. In the first scene in the film we see a burning car, a motif that runs through the film (and beyond). Transplanting the action back to France, to Lyons, Tavernier uses the troubled father-son relationship as a synechdoche for the apparently unbridgable gap between the generations that '68 had made all too tangible.
The boy has killed one of the private security police hired in to protect the factories from protestors. Whilst on the run, the combination of the media, unionists, and public thirst for sensation makes a political terrorist and cause celebre of the boy. On the other hand, when he is finally caught his lawyer insists that a crime of passion defence is the only way to ameliorate his lot. But the accused refuses this psychologisation just as he refuses the media's attempts to make him the representative of any assignable political movement.
Finally, the father stands by his son: they find a sort of understanding and a solidarity in this total, unassignable revolt, they reach an understanding, a common cause, against that which is simply insupportable, a sort of absolute revulsion at the world that demands to be expressed in an act, even a violent act. This understanding which was never reached after '68, and whose absence continues to haunt the country, erupting wherever socially-attenuated circumstances weaken the surface, on the peripheries. Is it sick to compare '68 to '05? An overinterpretation of a purely sociological picture?...depending on how you think it, the comparison could reveal a shocking decline from idealism, either to brutal realism (where once the youth revolted for dreams and freedom, now they demand the right to work?) or to mere confusion (nowadays, they don't even make demands, not even impossible ones....).
The Ancien Regime's refusal to give up their ideal of a social closure, their elitisms, their blocking out of the internal south....as Badiou says, 'we get the riots we deserve'; and however preferable to the Sarkozy hardline, it is no good, at this point, trying to 'understand' in sociological terms the 'agenda' (or likewise decrying the lack of agenda and impropriety of means), putting in place money and schemes which will only trickle away without changing anything. A public display of guilt and self-flagellation together with a refusal to recognize the events as political in themselves ('...but still, they must realise that this is not the done thing'). Platitudinous demands for signification: "There is a lack of political consciousness of the objectives, what Marx called the for-itself. This movement wants something, but it does not yet know what it wants." - Negri
They may not be able to formulate what they want; Maybe there is no formula. They know very well what they are against: everything, because everything is against them. Why did the watchmaker's son kill a man? "Because he was filth." It's all filth. The imperative is to act.
- Twenty years, my God!
- They made him pay for what he said.
- Yet they didnt let him speak long.
- I know.
- They shut me up too.
- They tried him as a terrorist, yet tried to supress the political aspect.
- I'd have liked to say...how you break windows when you cant breathe. We're stifling here in this rotten country where the cosy status quo must be preserved at all costs.
"A state for which what they call public order is nothing but an excuse for the protection of private wealth and for letting loose on working class or foreign children is purely and simply disgusting." [Badiou] Totally revolting; demanding a total revolt.
It's not hard to imagine a modern day update of the story: Badiou provides us with the back-story. The runaway would no doubt be 'linked' vaguely by the media to Al Qaida, etc.etc...L'Horloger de l'ENS? Once again, asking the question who finds time for the youth...
Posted by robin at 10:14 PM