Flower Thrower

Envisioning the image as  “a complex configuration of visual, verbal, and aural signs….it is manifest not only in films but in all kinds of media texts” (Richard Dyer).  To me, the hardest element to weave into a logo is the aural aspect.

“The time has come to bring back more symbolic marks whenever possible and appropriate because we’ve been over-saturated with abstractions… the best communication is something recognizable that people can relate to”

--Steff Geissbuhler

TRIGGER: Finding inspiration in nature, man-made constructs, and art as fusion of the man-made, the natural, and the in-between (the digital?)

Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.

And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.

But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.

“Walls” – Constantine P. Cavafy (1896)

Bansky decorations on the Palestinian side of the controversial West Bank barrier in Israel (9 in total)

Resting on Laurels

STATEMENT

On Saturday night, the Greek police assassinated a 15 year old student.

His assassination was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It was the continuation of a coordinated action, by state terrorism and the Golden Dawn, which aimed at university and high school students (with the private universities first), at migrants that continue to be persecuted for being born with the wrong colour, at the employees that must work to death without compensation.

The government of cover-ups with its praetors, having burnt the forests last summer, is responsible for all major cities burning now, too. It protected financial criminals, all those involved in the mobile phone interceptions scandal, those looting the employees’ insurance funds, those kidnapping migrants, those who protected the banks and the monasteries that steal from the ordinary people.

We are in Civil War: With the fascists, the bankers, the state, the media wishing to see an obedient society.

There are no excuses, yet they once again try to use conspiracy theories to calm spirits down.

The rage that had accumulated had to be expressed and should not, by any means, end.

Throughout the world we are making headlines, it was about time that people uprise everywhere.

The generation of the poor, the unemployed, the partially employed, the homeless, the migrants, the youth, is the generation that will smash every display window and will wake up the obedient citizens from their sleep of the ephemeral American dream.

Don’t watch the news, consciousness is born in the streets

When the youth is murdered, the old people should not sleep

Goodbye Alexandros, may your blood be the last of an innocent to run

Cinematic mnemonics

Scene from Wolfgang Becker’s film Goodbye Lenin! (2003).

East Germany, 1989: A loyal Socialist  living in Eastern Berlin during the Cold War loses her husband to the West. After seeing her son protesting against the Socialists, she suffers from a heart attack and falls into a coma. While she is in a coma, East and West Germany reunite. When she awakes from her coma, her children try to prevent her from experiencing shock by converting their now westernized lives back into an Eastern-Socialist lifestyle…

*                                      *                                     *

The shock of discovery … the shock at discovering that the disaster has come and gone (was it ever here?), and I could not bring myself to its site. The disaster is beyond me, beyond time, beyond comprehension. A film/ a ” reality”/ a fiction/ a myth conveys this feeling better than I ever will.

walls

Mythical or Hyperbolic Cancer: Repetition with a difference:

” … here is a cell that doesn’t hear the command, that develops lawlessly, in a way that could be called anarchic.” More so, this cancer “destroys the very idea of a program, blurring the exchange and the message…

Cancer, from this perspective, is a political phenomenon*, one of the rare ways to dislocate the system, to disarticulate, through proliferation and disorder, the universal programming and signifying power…

Something we cannot understand maliciously neutralizes the authority of a master knowledge.” (Blanchot).

* If mythical cancer is a political phenomenon, then Bathes’ assertion that “myth is depoliticized speech” is flawed (even though he offers a broader understanding of the word “political”,  as the network of human relations and their influence in creating the social order).  Ding, Ding, Ding! >>  Round 1 winner: Blanchot >>

Anarchy NOW

Anarchists, like the disaster, are situated outside the experience economy. Like some aspects of the disaster, anarchists place themselves inside the experience economy only to destroy it.  The fact that anarchists remain powerless against (and within) the experience economy makes them more determined to find their power outside of it. However, they usually end up becoming part of the experience economy by their very opposition towards it.

Anarchists = otherness. Their/ Our obsession with others.

Example & Application: the Greek Riots

The defacement of public property in large Greek cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki has impacted tourism, a contributing aspect to the experience economy >>> The anarchists have been integrated into the experience economy model through the commodification of their acts: for instance, millions of photographs of the riots and of public property damages have been circulating around the world.  The riots and their aftermath turned the world’s attention to Greece and Europe in general. The apocalyptic overtones attached to the disaster by various global media outlets have placed Greece at the center of it all, only to ultimately decentralize it.

Profit/ credit= e.g. international exposure, profile, capital  ## #

Debit= e.g. impact on: tourism, government, education labor…

Corporate media tend to ignore anarchists, or try to minimize their impact.  The fact that corporate media outlets have been forced to detail the anarchist involvement in these and other struggles in Greece attests to the significance of anarchist activity. Leftists attempt to portray the events in Greece as a general uprising of  “the people,” and this is not inaccurate, since countless “normal” people have participated. However, from the vantage point of anarchist supporters and those intimidated by anarchists, it is the anarchists that have instigated the riots and have remained the most influential force within the “movement”.

From one perspective, the anarchists – and “anarchy” in its abstract form – function as a political scapegoat. A scapegoat that is used to let the government almost entirely off the hook. A scapegoat that does not point to what is wrong with the System, but serves the purpose [to some] of placing blame outside the system and displacing the flaws outside the system.

If only it were so simple.

Democracy is dead. Long live democracy.

“Shall I project a world?”

(Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49)

Easing myself into the blogging of the disaster. Here we go…

“It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.” (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster )

“The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing… The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe”.  – Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

Yes, but dwelling on the representational and the simulated still does not resolve the identity issue. It does not negate – and does not ultimately discard – the aporia.