The whole of May 6th was marked by demonstrations which turned into riots in the afternoon. The first barricades were thrown up at the Place Maubert and defended for three hours. At the same time fights with the police were breaking out at the bottom of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, at the Place du Châtelet, and in Les Halles. By the early evening the demonstrators numbered more than ten thousand and were mainly holding the area around the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where they had been reinforced only after 6p.m. by the bulk of the march organized by the UNEF at Denfert-Rochereau. On May 8th Le Monde wrote:

What followed surpassed in scope and violence everything that had happened throughout an already astonishing day. It was a kind of street fighting that sometimes reached a frenzy, where every blow delivered was immediately returned, and where ground that had scarcely been conquered was just as quickly retaken. . . There were dramatic and senseless moments which, for the observer, seemed rife with madness.

And on May 7th L'Aurore noted: "Alongside the demonstrators could be seen bands of young hoods (blousons noirs) armed with steel bars, who had come in from the outlying areas of Paris to help out the students." The fighting lasted until after midnight, especially at Montparnasse.

For the first time cars were overturned and set afire, paving stones were dug up for the barricades, and stores were looted. The use of subversive slogans, which had begun at Nanterre, had now spread to several parts of Paris. Insofar as the rioters were able to strengthen the barricades, and thus their own capacity for counterattack, the police were forced to abandon direct charges for a position strategy which relied mainly on offensive grenades and tear gas.

May 6th also marked the first intervention of workers, blousons noirs, the unemployed and high school students who that morning had organized important demonstrations. The spontaneity and violence of the riots stood in vivid contrast to the platitudes put forth by their academic initiators as goals and slogans. The very fact that the blousons noirs had fought in the streets shouting "The Sorbonne to the students!" marked an end to an entire era.

Tags: collage, history, nostalgia, politics, theory
Current Location: 85704

For Walter Benjamin, the aura of a work of art is a function of two qualities: its presence and its cult value. The aura signifies all that is eliminated when “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.”Not surprisingly, given the definition of the work of art’s presence as “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” the aura is conceptualized in spatial terms as the “unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”

Interestingly, the etymology of the word "aura" aligns it, not with the senses of sight or hearing -- the senses that the mechanical reproduction of cultural artifacts is meant to satisfy, but with the senses of touch and smell. In Greek, the word meant "breath" or "breeze," precisely the sort of sensations that frustrate our impulse to copy the world. We can do a good job of capturing the sound of a concert and can even, with enough camera coverage, make it paradoxically more visible than it would be to any individual concert-goer. But we haven't come to close to distilling the feeling of being there: the aroma of smoke, liquor and sweat; the bracing contrast between the packed interior of a venue like Plush and the outdoor patio; or even that waft of cotton that drifts through the air every time a T-shirt is plucked from a box and handed over the merch table. That's what missing in the reproduction and must be imperfectly conjured in words that were not there at the show, but come now, as memory reminds us of what we're missing.

Tags: autobiography, collage, language, music, nostalgia, song, tucson
Current Location: 85704
Muse: Merry Go Round - Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Live - 2007-01-09 Plush, Tucson

From Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Convolute N--

It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.

The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash. What has been is to be held fast -- as an image flashing up in the now of its recognizability. The rescue that is carried out by these means -- and only by these -- can operate solely for the sake of what in the next moment is already irretrievably lost.

Tags: archive, collage, daughter, history, nostalgia, photography, theory
Current Location: 85704

Tags: art, collage, everyday, theory
Current Location: 85704

When Thomas Frank's book The Conquest of Cool came out, I was torn between the appeal his incisive critique held for me and my reservations about its purpose. As much as its bite appealed to me at a time when too much cultural analysis was unwilling to draw blood, I worried that Frank had made mordancy an end in itself. A decade later, the differences I then perceived between The Baffler's political aesthetic and my own have been softened by nostalgia for an era that seems absurdly remote, like the Roman Republic viewed from the year 1000. Today, I'm far more likely to identify with Frank's work than to identify the ways in which it clashes with my convictions.

My metamorphosis has been facilitated by the ever-expanding access we have to cultural evidence that makes what I once regarded as Frank's exaggeration for effect seem like a model of understatement. The Presidency of George W. Bush has turned showmen into servants of modesty. And then there's the wealth of material available in collections like the Prelinger Archives, which reminds us that the madness of the present conjuncture represents the convulsions of a longer durée:

While the 2000s are probably the low-point of American history, at least as it is viewed from the perspective of foreign policy, the 1960s for which I still have vast born-too-late longing were not much better. But the confusion they introduced into consumer culture was considerably more intense. Those children, myself included, who were conceived in the Summer of Love were born into a Spring of Hate. And do-it-yourself refrigerator decoration: "Commodify your failure to dissent."

Tags: autobiography, collage, politics, theory, video
Current Location: 85704

At the lunch break, the presence of the wives, who otherwise keep out of the action, is gratefully acknowledged. Opening the back doors and trunks of the Land Rovers and other cars, they break out elaborate dishes for the hungry guns.

In the middle of the grouse-shoot day, guns, beaters, dogs and distaff spectators take time out for a picnic lunch. The spread, packed by the ladies, includes fancy pâtés, cheese and cakes, along with more solid fare. The lady above, ignoring an imploring spaniel, is passing around her fruit cake. Plainer and less high-toned food is brought for the hired beaters, who eat separately after helping the dogs retrieve fallen birds.

Tags: collage, food, humor, politics
Current Location: 85704

From J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1969)--

Elements of an Orgasm. (1) Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door; (2) the conjunction of aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs; (3) the crushing of her left breast by the door pillar, its self-extension as she swung her legs on to the sandy floor; (4) the overlay of her knees and the metal door flank; (5) the ellipsoid erasure of dust as her hip brushed the nearside fender; (6) the hard transept of the door mechanism within the absolute erosion of the landscape;

(7) her movement distorted in the projecting carapace of the radiator assembly; (8) the conjunction of the median surface of her thighs with the arch of the motor bridge, the contrast of smooth epithelium and corrugated concrete; (9) her weak ankles in the soft ash; 10) the pressure of her right hand on the chromium trim of the inboard headlamp; (11) the sweat forming a damp canopy on the cleavage of her blouse-- the entire landscape expired within this irrigated trench; (12) the just and rake of her pubis as she moved into the driving seat; (13) the junction of her thighs and the steering assembly; (14) the movements of her fingers across the chromium-tipped instrument heads.

Tags: collage, commonplace book, literature, theory
Current Location: 85704
Muse: Atrocity Exhibition - Joy Division - Heart And Soul

From Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics--

The linguistic sign, being auditory in nature, has a temporal aspect, and hence certain temporal characteristics: (a) it occupies a certain temporal space, and (b) this space is measured in just one dimension: it is a line

This principle is obvious, but it seems never to be stated, doubtless because it is considered too elementary. However, it is a fundamental principle and its consequences are incalculable.

Tags: autobiography, collage, language, photography, theory
Current Location: 85704

Tags: collage, history, politics
Current Location: 85704
Muse: a memory of Cabaret

From Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism" --

It is not true that the child emerges from his experience of seeing the female parts with an unchanged belief in the woman having a phallus. He retains this belief but he also gives it up; during the conflict between the deadweight of the unwelcome perception and the force of the opposite wish, a compromise is constructed such as is only possible in the realm of unconscious modes of thought -- by the primary processes. In the world of psychological reality the woman still has a penis in spite of all, but this penis is no longer the same as it once was.

Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its successor, so to speak, and now absorbs all the interest which formerly belonged to the penis. But this interest undergoes yet another very strong reinforcement, because the horror of castration sets up a sort of permanent memorial to itself by creating this substitute. Aversion from the real female genitals, which is never lacking in any fetishist, also remains as an indelible stigma of the repression that has taken place. One can now see what the fetish achieves and how it is enabled to persist. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it.

Tags: autobiography, collage, commonplace book, theory
Current Location: 85704
Mode: tainted
Muse: Michael Jackson?

Tags: art, collage, theory

From John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson & Brian Roberts, "Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview" in Stuart Hall & Tony Jefferson, editors, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1975):

At one level, middle class counter-cultures -- like working-class sub-cultures -- also attempted to work out or work through, but at an 'imaginary' level, a contradiction or problematic in their class situation. But, because they inhabit a dominant culture (albeit in a negative way) they are strategically placed (in ways in which working-class sub-cultures are not) to generalise an internal contradiction for the society as a whole. The counter-cultures stemmed from changes in the 'real relations' of their class: they represented a rupture inside the dominant culture which then became linked with the crisis of hegemony, of civil society, and ultimately of the state itself. It is in this sense that middle-class counter-cultures, beginning from a point within the dominant class culture, have become an emergent ruptural force for the whole society. Their thrust is is no longer contained by their point of inception. Rather, by extending and developing their 'practical critique' of the dominant culture from a privileged position inside it, they have come to inhabit, embody and express many of the contradictions of the system itself.

Naturally, society cannot be 'imaginarily' reconstructed from that point. But that does not exhaust their emergent potential. For they also prefigure, anticipate, foreshadow -- though in truncated, diagrammatic and 'Utopian' forms -- emergent social forms. These new forms are rooted in the productive base of the system itself, though when they arise at the level of the 'counter-culture' only, we are correct to estimate that their maturing within the womb of society is, as yet, incomplete. They prefigure, among other things, the increasingly social nature of modern production, and the outdated social, cultural, political and ideological forms in which this is confined. The counter-culture comes, at best, half-way on the road to making manifest this base contradiction.

Tags: archive, collage, commonplace book, music, theory
Mode: fair to meddling
Muse: Rainy Days And Mondays - Schlong - The Essential Schlong

From Sigmund Freud, Project For a Scientific Psychology (1895):

Alongside of cognitive and practical thought, we must distinguish a reproductive, remembering thought, which in part enters into practical thought, but does not exhaust it.

This remembering is a precondition of all testing by critical thought: it follows back a given thought-process in a reversed direction, as far back, perhaps, as a perception -- once again, in contrast to practical thought, without an aim -- and, in doing so, makes use to a large extent of indications of quality. In thus following a backward direction, the process comes upon intermediate links which have hitherto been unconscious, which have left no indications of quality behind them but whose indications of quality appear subsequently. This implies that the passage of thought in itself, without any indications of quality, has left traces behind it. In some instances, indeed, it looks here as though we should only be able to guess certain stretches of the pathway because their starting- and end-points are given by indications of quality.

In any case, the reproducibility of thought-processes goes far beyond their indications of quality; they can be made conscious subsequently, though perhaps the outcome of a passage of thought leaves traces behind it more often than its intermediate stages. [CUT]

In the end, then, it becomes possible to cathect the memory of the pain in such a way that it cannot exhibit any backward flow and can release only minimal unpleasure. It is now tamed, and by a thought-facilitation strong enough to exercise a permanent effect and to produce an inhibiting action once more at every later repetition of the memory. The pathway leading to the release of unpleasure will then, owing to disuse, gradually increase its resistance: for facilitations are subject to gradual decay (forgetting). Only after this is the memory a tamed memory like any other.

It nevertheless appears that this process of subjugating the memory leaves a permanent effect on the passage of thought. Since earlier the passage of thought was disturbed every time the memory was activated and unpleasure aroused, there is a trend even now towards inhibiting the passage of thought as soon as the tamed memory generates its traces of unpleasure.

Tags: archive, collage, commonplace book, memory, theory
Mode: working the eery canal
Muse: Skylar explaining the cardboard house she constructed last night