I’m in Cannes, just played at Midem, a music industry conference that is a big deal… if you are in the music industry. After playing I was being interviewed, the writer told me he was put-off by the “violent” protest imagery in my live video. I’ve got a lot to say on the matter and was frustrated by filtering it through a french translator and then seeing it further reduced to a few key words on a notepad.
So here I am at 4am jetlagged, unable to sleep, and thinking about what I would have said could I could have spoken fluent french and had the word count to express myself.
France was occupied by the Nazi’s and nobody disputes that violent resistance was a reasonable course of action. In fact the Nazi collaborators, or the simply complacent, are now viewed as cowards. Everyone likes to compare their enemies to Nazi’s, and that’s not what I’m doing here, just making a metaphor for their specific occupation of France.
The way I see it most of the world is now occupied by corporatism, or at in the process of being conquered by it. The result is the slow-motion death of the planet, creeping monoculture, the commodification of everything from genes to plants to water to air, and a growing wealth gap. There are no longer “great” wars like the first, second, and cold third, rather we now live in a state of permanent war, a prerequisite to maintain the interconnected web of markets and insure it’s chief lubrication- oil.
In response to the Nazi’s occupation of France it was reasonable to bomb and assassinate, in response to corporate fundamentalist global takeover I think it’s reasonable to aggressively block the summit’s of world leaders, tear down some fences, and make a fracas, as featured in my videos. And I don’t weep when someone busts up a McDonald’s or some multinational banks. The images that circulate from these trashings are potent zero-budget anti-advertisements.
Sometimes I have problems understanding how, when we live in this atmosphere of generalized violence, when the exploitation of human-over-nature and human-over-human is at an all time high, someone can think that an act of symbolic property damage is unconscionable.
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the interesting thing about violence is that it near-instantly becomes images of violence– as featured in your videos, as featured on nightly news around the planet. So the various logic/systems of negotiating,interpreting, dealing w/ various violence is weirdly synced to images, tele-visual identity. btwn 30min sensationalist TV “news” and video games and ‘action’ movies it can be hard to deconstruct / offer alternative pathways thru the thicket of violence.
i tend to go back to Frederick Douglass — an amazing section where the former slave narrates how striking out w/ violence against his master changed — utterly and irrevocably — the relationship they had, which was legal but also psychological, internalized. Striking out changed all that. Fanon was on this tip too. In 1990′s terms, the person through a rock through a bank window gets changed more than the bank does.
so it then becomes — you’re changed, the world is changeable. NOW KEEP BUSY. bigger rocks, bigger windows.
recent words from Subcomandante Marcos, lovely spokesmodel of the Zapatistas. thanks to Djenn for passing them along in an email:
No estoy haciendo una apología de la violencia, estoy señalando un hecho constatable: en guerra nos conocieron, en guerra nos hemos mantenido estos 15 años, en guerra seguiremos hasta que este rincón del mundo llamado México haga suyo su propio destino, sin trampas, sin suplantaciones, sin simulaciones.
El Poder tiene en la violencia un recurso de dominación, pero también lo tiene en el arte y la cultura, en el conocimiento, en la información, en el sistema de justicia, en la educación, en la política institucional y, por supuesto, en la economía.
Cada lucha, cada movimiento, en sus muy particulares geografías y calendarios, debe recurrir a diversas formas de lucha. No es la única y probablemente no sea la mejor, pero la violencia es una de ellas.
Es un gesto bello el enfrentar con flores los cañones de los fusiles, vaya hasta hay fotos eternizando el acto. Pero a veces es necesario hacer que esos fusiles cambien de objetivo y se dirijan hacia arriba.
Amen Grey. Well said (if slightly late for the reporter)
lines = walls = violence
there’s an inherent violence to taking any stance on anything, or drawing any distinction. some fall into the ‘corporatists’ category, some into the ‘resistance,’ others into the ‘passivists’, and if these distinctions are made, you will always lump folks that identify to some extent with the other categories into one group or another, thus destroying complexity.
prior to the spanish civil war, when anarchists lined barcelona’s streets with the coffins of the clergy and opened them so that the rotting bodies inside spilled out, they completely disproved the belief in their physical assumption into heaven, a belief held by traditional catholics at the time. they also lost a lot of support. their (arguably) violent act ended up drawing lines that sliced through their own and provided a reference which united and galvanized the traditionalists they were opposing (a reference which persists today).
when police shot alexandros grigoropoulos a similar thing happened, but in a different direction.
+
the only people i imagine as actually having a problem with fucking up a bank or a mcdonald’s are the workers who will have to clean up the debris. but hey, given the current employment situation in a lot of places, a little job security goes a long way. doctors know this, just ask’em about epidemics and stuff.
Wow! Thank you!
I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my site?
Of course, I will add backlink?
Regards, Timur Alhimenkov