It begins with an image we discover in a book. 1 The image is of a stamp with a rocket on it. The rocket bears the colors of the Lebanese flag—an image we don’t recognize, we don’t understand. It does not belong to our imaginary.
What does it show—a weapon, a missile, a rocket for space exploration? Is it serious or just a fantasy? Did the Lebanese really dream of participating in the conquest of space? It’s hard to believe and rather surreal. We ask our parents, our friends … No one…
Issue #43
March 2013
With:
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle, Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, James T. Hong, Marina Vishmidt, and Marina Gržinić
In last month’s editorial for the February issue of e-flux journal , we proposed that the communication networks that now saturate our working and private lives have forced us to become cosmopolitan creatures. Our relations to place and time have been shredded to pieces, and we, as those proud pieces, circle the earth like satellites clustering in various locations simultaneously. Aliens to our homes and neighborhoods, we develop terrible posture slouching over screens while simultaneously…
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7 Essays
March 2013
I don’t know if Pasolini ever visited the United Kingdom. Maybe yes, maybe no. I don’t really care. I would like to talk about Pasolini in Tottenham. I want to question the sensibility of the poet of the mid-twentieth-century Roman borgate from the point of view of a violent rebellion of lumpenproletarians that took place in the English suburbs in August 2011.
The visions and predictions that we find in his writings and films are good starting points for a discussion about what…
Continued from “ From Guilt to Sickness, Part I: Looking for Plague in All the Right Places”
November 18, 2012: Unity is Strength
Today we will commemorate the seventieth anniversary of a biological weapons attack on Chongshan, a village near the city of Yiwu. I am not as rested as I would like to be, since I know this will be a long day of carrying heavy equipment.
The night before, my roommate, Professor J., excitedly showed me video clips of what he called the real “qi…
We have invented ourselves, so to speak, the social contradictions that made our freedom necessary. Where invented doesn’t mean made up but found and translated the facts that reveal their dormant political dimension.
—Claire Fontaine, “Human Strike Within the Field of Libidinal Economy”
The title “Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated” comes from a phrase used in an essay by Theodor Adorno called “Situation,” published in his book Aesthetic Theory . In this essay Adorno…
“Perhaps contemporary art is an art to survive our contemporaneity as an artist.”
—Boris Groys
Since the early days of modernism, artists have faced a peculiar dilemma with regard to the economy surrounding their work. By breaking from older artistic formations such as medieval artisan guilds, bohemian artists of the nineteenth century distanced themselves from the vulgar sphere of day-to-day commerce in favor of an idealized conception of art and authorship. While on the one…
We ourselves, the refugees, make the demonstration, and we are the ones who want it. It is our fight. We thank everybody for their help, but we don’t allow anybody to use us. This is a self-organized struggle of and by refugees, one that needs your support, your presence on the street on Saturday.”
—From a speech by refugee Salaheddine Najah during a protest song contest at the Rabenhof Theatre, Vienna, February 12, 2013
Since November 2012, refugees have been protesting in…