thingist June 2020

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call for textz
by sebastian＠rolux.org 21 Jun '20

21 Jun '20

--> inbox(a)textz.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Maybe I give it to you all on a dime o__o /##\__ textz.com https://textz.com/ 2000-2004 // 2020- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[Fwd: Episode 6: Jean-Marie Straub, France Against Robots]
by w 12 Jun '20

12 Jun '20

Sorry for the interruption, but I just had to forward this. Miguel has been running a fantastic program for years and he keeps on surprising me with material you don't usually expect coming from the traditional gallery scene...

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[Fwd: COVID COMMERCIAL]
by w 11 Jun '20

11 Jun '20

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we breathe again
by sebastian＠rolux.org 09 Jun '20

09 Jun '20

# machine-translated without any further editing # you may want to read the original, here: # https://lundi.am/Nous-respirons-a-nouveau WE BREATHE AGAIN "We know from history, no force is unbeatable" Appeared in Monday, June 8, 2020 (Monday, June 246, 2020) May 25, 2020: another image of police brutality on the internet, this time a small eye shaped tab covers it discreetly, the image is blurred and the digital giants - adding their little "benevolent" personal censorship - warn me of the violence of the images I am likely to see. Two months of immobility watching police violence without being able to react, without being able to share my suffering and despair. Two months of powerlessness to balance between denial and exposure, between a necessary protection and a will to know, in a relationship more than ever bulimic to militant news. I hesitate and I pass, I don't click to launch the video, I don't have the courage. As the cops took to the streets, images of smears swarmed on the internet, the more the police heads took over the public space, the more the police figure dominated online. Apart from private space - and still not for everyone - all living spaces during the lockdown, real or virtual, were saturated by the image of an all-powerful police force. Social networks, the dominant media, but also activists, became the echo chamber of this double symbolic and physical violence. Locked up, inactive, on all screens, the inhuman brutality of the condoms resounds through our optical nerves: in our eyes, our computers and our dreams. The muzzle that falls like a whip on a poor madman who has escaped from the asylum and the door that opens on the passage of a motorbike, the lethal gestures of the cops settle in our imagination and amaze us, taken as we are in our loneliness and our incapacity. The robotic, untouchable, imperturbable army of the immobile lines of CRS or the shattering irruption of the BRAVs - which we have experienced, put into images or seen - comes to bring down in our inner self the sketches of uncontrolled revolts, muscle relaxation and inconsiderate gestures. The impunity of the police figure that haunts the internet, haunts us and temporarily breaks our rebellion. Inheritors of an impasse in critical thinking, we continue to underestimate the power of images, and create ourselves the oppressive images of the invulnerability of the police. Yet, as we know from history, no force is unbeatable - think of the royal power invested with the divine: who would dare at the time to attack God's representative on earth - and we know from experience, the police are sometimes vulnerable. Contrary to the claims of security ideology, there is always a flaw in the system, always a mistake or a passage, never the militarization of existence, despite its stupid claims, will ever be total. Only sometimes fear wins us over and the irrational overrides reason, the magical police figure alienates us more than ever, the all-police man bewitches us, he keeps us wise and mute. I take refuge, I flee and the mechanisms of psychic self-defence are activated, I don't want to see or hear anything anymore. Meanwhile, we beat up outside, we beat up in our neighbourhoods, we beat up, for nothing, for race, for pleasure, for power. And the pride of the dominant spreads out from his disgusting rightness. I can't breathe. Everywhere their petty stories during the lockdown, their little fake problems, their world "after" even more disgusting and unfair than the one "before". It's suffocating. Their new and comfortable justifications for daily repression. Their untenable indifference to the oppressed, letting them go into the most banal and vile racism. We suffocate in the neighbourhoods, we suffocate in the cities, we suffocate with the police boot on George Floyd's neck, on the necks of blacks, on the necks of activists, on the necks of our comrades. He can't breathe, I can't breathe, we all hold our breath. But finally George Floyd will never breathe again, the police kill in full light, live. A stranger's neck is crushed in Minneapolis and blows rain down on friends in Paris. Always humanists, the police beat, maim and kill... to save lives. Then the anguish takes over, our breathing gets excited, old marks are revealed, bad memories come back: I am handcuffed - I wear my hands around my neck -. What if he had tightened the handcuffs? What if he had continued? Maybe I'd have died too, just like Floyd. Except he let go of me and sent my head against the hood of their car. "Save," why? Cause I'm white? Maybe, although these days what they call "black" blocks tend to be prime targets for armed racist peacekeepers. Let us also remember the new High Court of Clichy, an immense ultra-modern maze with a fascist aesthetic where the scoundrel laws are applied, a building besieged by tens of thousands of demonstrators on Tuesday, June 2, 2020. The building visible from all over Paris is only the top of the iceberg of repression, underneath it hides the black part of the pacified world, in its basement: the "depot". A veritable clean dungeon, under the glassed and luminous court of resplendent justice, a gigantic, sanitized and inhuman prison unfolds. Going "to the depot" - while waiting for an immediate appearance for example - is like paying a visit to the other side of the modern world, to a penitentiary universe where humans are treated like animals: abandoned in individual cells for an indeterminate period of time, up to 48 hours, everyone there screams in rage and hits their bars in distress. The policemen are the lords and devils, the prisoners, stripped of their rights, defenceless. The depot is a good example of what can be prison, the CRAs or the madhouse. I saw there the reality of this racist world where eighty percent of the prisoners are racist people who are regularly subjected to this punitive treatment: gardav, depot, prison. Escorted by two policemen, I am taken to an office where I have to sign in at the depot, I ask for a lawyer and a doctor, both are not on my file, I refuse to go back to my cell but the cop threatens me and says to his colleagues in a threatening way: "Hey guys, the black block doesn't want to sign in". As I go to get my blanket, I witness a chilling scene: two fat white cops shouting orders, in a language he can't understand, to a half-naked migrant, shaking like a leaf. Tears run down his dirty cheeks. In this "other" world, certainly dystopian, for those who live in it or pass through it, shouting the slogan: "cop, rapist, murderer" does not sound like an exaggeration or a mere watchword, but a cathartic ritual, a vital necessity. We would like to scream at the top of our lungs, but we are out of breath, we can't breathe, we are suddenly alone. On the other side of the world, a black man has died, who will remember him in this dark time? He will join the long funeral procession of the forgotten oppressed, and the image of his unpunished murder will be added to the symbolic weapons of the police. We will remain there, with our images and our regrets, our rage and our pain will be covered with ruins. Fortunately, the uprisings will bring us relief. They make the rage explode and we throw the pain overboard, we share the suffering with comrades and executioners, we put it in front of the indifferent, we transform it and share it together. Also the uprisings give reason to those raised before, against media sorting, against forgetting, against renunciation, the raised support each other psychically, they ensure the continuity of a power. Thus in 2019, after the unpunished death of Rémi Fraisse, the mutilations and wounded of the social movements and the expulsions of the zads, the defeat at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, comes the Yellow Vests movement. In 2020, after the repression of the movement against pension reform, the massacre of the Gilets-Jaunes, the unacceptable death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement. In each new uprising, what is at stake is the mental health of the activists, their capacity to fight over a long period of time - necessary for important transformations such as the removal of the police institution -, the security of the populations who have always been disarmed in the face of the police or their new targets. Here, the current uprising, if it is an epidermal reaction against police violence, if it is a movement for the emancipation of ethnic minorities, if it is an anti-racist movement, whatever happens, it is fighting for all the victims of police violence, and they are very numerous. In reality, it also fights for the "Youth from the suburbs", for the "ultra-left" activists and the criminalized Yellow Vests, as well as for the repressed trade unionists. The more the Black Lives Matter movement spreads, the more the images of these actions spread, the more the images of barricades in front of the White House and of fires arrive in Europe. The images of the uprisings heal us, it is no longer our powerlessness that is running in a loop on the social networks, but our power. The world is no longer connected to images of French policemen throwing a racist person in the breast with insults dating back to the Algerian war, but to African-Americans setting fire to the cars of the racist American state. No longer on advertising presentations of police drones by the proto-fascist town hall of Nice, but on demonstrators on horseback raising their fists; a police station burning down, a construction machine used as a battering ram, a heroic boxer demonstrator, monster demonstrations in all the major Western cities ... so many images that give us back our power of action, that frighten the leaders and that circulate our collective intelligence. We know that a struggle of representations accompanies our struggle, but there is a lot of confusion about it. Let's just say that for each creation of a police drone image, we need an image of a drone shot down with a roll of toilet paper; for each beating, a stoning, etc., we need an image of a police drone. An audiovisual rule that also supposes that before making images you have to create the necessary situation, and see the satisfactory result: when only one car burns and all the media use the image, individual repression is very strong (as in the case of the Valmy dock), when hundreds of cars burn, you are already more quiet. And then surprise, populations are set ablaze when you least expect it: banned demonstrations, covid19, totalitarian health measures, permanent emotional blackmail, and now tens of thousands of young people, in all the big cities of France, decide not to let it go on any longer and to change the fear of the camp. The uprisings heal us, we find our brothers and sisters, our comrades, we can finally get our breath back and scream at the top of our lungs, we can clear the police boots that compel us. Show our strength to the police institution and its defenders, threaten the state power with a popular counter-power. We breathe again. And in these processions that are so pleasantly socially mixed, the images create dialectical sparks: the image of Athenians attacking an American embassy in Molotov reminds us of historical elements and the imaginations open up to the possibilities of the past. There are more links in these global revolts with the 1970s - a period when feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements were even more powerful - with images of the Black Panthers and their allies than with the television images of the "suburban revolt" of 2005. With this uprising and the images it creates, the dominant images are far away now, and we can hope that they will lead to their disappearance, the multiple exotic - and partly racist - fantasies of the supposed alliance of the revolutionary movement with the suburbs. We breathe better. But an uprising is not a revolution, and experience teaches us this too, the breath is exhausted by only breathing during uprisings and holding the rest of the time in apnea. The question is always the same: how to become solid, how to hold on in time, how to organize ourselves, how to no longer run out of air? If for the time being the situation is not under control by the government, the media remain silent and the government reflects, the reactionary movement will come sooner or later in the coming weeks. Let us remember - for those who have known it, or share it with those who have not - the month of December in the Yellow Vests: the rioting situation peaked, then fell further and further to suffocate under bloody repression. We can bet that the government will try the same stupid strategy with populations that are all the more easily criminalised the more the state is racist. Today that we are relieved, let's ask ourselves the right questions, for example: 1) how to preserve a social mix that only a spontaneous movement could allow? 2) how to keep the struggle in an anti-imperialist and internationalist field? 3) how to keep control of the street and the pressure on the forces of law and order 4) how to anchor the movement in time and space? If the answers to these questions are to be answered with the help of our individual and collective imagination, it is almost certain that we must draw on the historical and necessarily unknown experiences of the American Black Panther Party. There is already there: the evidence of a political foundation by neighborhood, a synthetic organization ranging from childcare to hijacking and "police surveillance patrols": "In January 1967, the party officially opened its first office in Oakland. Within months of its establishment, it began a patrol campaign to monitor the actions of the city's police. The action was supposed to respond to the seventh point of its program: "We demand an immediate end to police brutality and the killing of blacks. The Black Panthers were inspired by similar actions in Watts, California, the previous summer. Negro Citizen Alert Patrols were organized by equipping vehicles with scanners to listen and track LAPD cars. Equipped with law books and tape recorders, the patrols made sure that every law enforcement action was legal. However, the operation had to be stopped after the police destroyed the recording devices and forcibly dispersed the patrols. The Black Panthers added an element to the Los Angeles group's initial panoply by arming the participants of the Oakland City surveillance rounds. The group's goal, however, was to stay within the strict framework of legality. It relies on the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America and the laws of the State of California to justify the carrying of concealed weapons by its members. Members receive training on the basic constitutional rights to arrest and carry weapons." Signed X Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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The Re-uptake of Labor
by sebastian＠rolux.org 02 Jun '20

02 Jun '20

totally unfinished business (the translation) but what isn't ;) https://thegermanissue.com/jpg/reprise.jpg The Re-uptake of Labor BERLIN, MAY 3, 2020 | #ECOLOGY #LIFE #WORK Filmed on 10 June 1968 at the entrance to the Wonder factory (light bulbs). We see a single woman, in a large gathering of men, the moment which, after the strike of a thousand events in May '68, everyone is supposed to go back to work. The voices of reason, embodied by the male functionaries of uprising, remind the woman of the small concessions they have been offered, also the possible concessions with regard to an indefinite future, the potentiality that lies in the events of the strike itself, and so they ask for adjournment and await a concession from her in return. But she doesn't want to. She doesn't want to go back. Her "emotionality" in the face of what she is so bad at "mediating" with "reason": that this situation here, the ordered return to the dirt of the factory, is about her life, which in the moment of the interruption of everday sameness had opened itself up to her, in a completely different projection, towards completely different forms of production, maybe even the opposite, an end to permanent production - that makes the men around here visibly uncomfortable. And that's how hands end up on shoulders. There also appears a man, the figure of The Young Man, who is ready to face the camera discursively, which means properly. This doesn't disturb the sequence, in the film she will now disappear among the talking heads and bodies, he keeps playing on the predefined territory. More men follow who will always be right, also in their life after the film, but they will never find justice, and then they'll be wondering why the one they keep talking at, whenever they are in the right, always reacts so "hysterically". Even though hysterical, that's only and exactly what they are themselves, as they exploit every possible situation to perform forms of speech (almost always ideological and almost never spoken from experience) that, without consideration for losses, maximize their own profit. Of course, May 3 2020 is not just literally about the return to the factory. Because the factories of the 21st century, the logistics centers for example, are still hives of activity. On May 3, 2020, what she doesn't want, what she doesn't want to return to, is the fabrication of life. The return to a fabricated life that is not only unsustainable and irresilient, but also mendacious and violent and boring and false, unbearable not just a vision of the future, but unbearable now, in every moment. The ecological crisis of capitalism is merely the sum of billions of individual ecological crises, of individual lives that have become too abstract and careless and miserable and uncontinuable: a global desaster that is bearing your name. That has been going on forever, and that will continue with certrainty, while we're busy figuring out who is at fault, and carry out wellness therapy against corona in social separation, without a practical critique of separation. And in the case of the Germans, who are already celebrating themselves as Weltmeister of Coronabewältigung(1), May 3, 2020 is all about cautiously ramping up export production again, to make sure the virus doesn't cause a true catastrophe. That means car production, and everyone will be ordered to drive to Rimini for holidays, just like in the 1950s. And in this respect, the reprise du travail is not only about the labor of life and its reproduction - in the kitchen, by the stove, in bed and on zoom - but also about the fabrication of death and destruction. The Germans owe a large portion of their their prosperity to the production of a machine that kills over three and a half thousand people every day, nearly one and a half million per year, and these are people whose sudden but still often miserable deaths are already priced into German prosperity, including the five thousand Euros of free money for freelancers, by which the Berlin Senate puruses its clientele policy that promotes: "Keep it up!" and "Carry on as if nothing happened." And she'd rather not. She prefers not to(2). And that(3) remains our house(4), and finally throw the cars out of Kreuzberg, and if that doesn't work out then throw out the Greens and the Left and the Social Democrats.(5) Notes: (1) World champions of "coping with corona", derived from the noun "Vergangenheitsbewältigung", "coping with the past", which is the term Germans use when they celebrate their victory over the holocaust, the fact that they've managed to cope with it. The verb "bewältigen" means "to successfully deal with" a workload, or "to overcome" a difficult task, but clearly there is "Gewalt" ("walten" means to govern) and "überwältigen" in it, to overpower a victim in the moment of arrest or assault. (2) Melville, Bartleby (the last consensus concept persona of the radical left, or at least of Diedrich Diederichsen and friends, which includes piratecinema) (3) The end is a quote from one of the most famous Ton Steine Scherben tracks, "Rauch-Haus-Song"(6), about the occupation of Bethanien and the cops on Mariannenplatz: "This is our house! Throw Schmidt und Press und Mosch out of Kreuzberg, finally!" Schmidt and Press and Mosch were representatives of the real estate mafia who at the time were constructing the NKZ (Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum) at Kottbusser Tor, which was finished in December 1972. Lead singer Rio Reiser would later pursue a solo career, see "Junimond". (4) "That remains our house" refers to the "House Bartleby", the name of the allegedly former leftist association that in 2020 initiated the nazi demos at Volksbühne. The "House Bartleby" is where the Tocotronic-Left(7) - who we have to thank for the lie of the "Querfront"(8) on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz(9), and who always just wanted "to be part of a youth movement"(10), no matter for or against what, or if at 17 or as pensioneers - has, hoping for hard times, holed itself up. (5) "Then she's alone with CDU and AfD?" - "No, they have to be kicked out firse. Alone with the Bergpartei(11) and KPD/RZ(12) hopefully." - "Hmm... aren't they all infiltrated by Die Partei(13)?" - "The party that put up K.I.Z.(14) as Kreuzberg candidates?" - "Yes, those with Sexism Against the Right(15)." - "Hmm..." (6) "The double album Keine Macht für Niemand ('No power for no-one') was released in 1972 by rock band Ton Steine Scherben. The track "Rauch-Haus-Song" describes the scenes when the police attempted to evict the squatted Georg-von-Rauch-Haus in December 1971. Members of the band were involved in the squat and were present when the police attacked. A derelict nurses' dormitory, part of the former Bethanien hospital, had been occupied in early 1971. It was one of the first buildings to be squatted in Berlin. The squatters had renamed the building Georg-von-Rauch-Haus after Georg von Rauch, a leftist who was shot dead by the police on 5 December 1971. The police action was unsuccessful and the Georg-von-Rauch-Haus remains in existence almost fifty years later. Within the German squatter movement, the "Rauch-Haus-Song" became an anthem, with the refrain 'Das ist unser Haus' (This is our house) being shouted out as a motto." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rauch-Haus-Song) (7) The founding pamphlet of "House Bartleby" prominently refers to the German band "Tocotronic" - which piratecinema strongly dislikes - as a witness for lazyness as a political strategy. Singer Dirk von Lowtzow attained nationwide semi-prominence and is, among other things, a Texte zur Kunst regular. via: https://thegermanissue.com/texts/the_re-uptake_of_labor.html german version: https://piratecinema.org/screenings/20200503 video: https://piratecinema.org/videos/reprise.mkv

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thingist June 2020