UCFML, Questions du maoïsme: De la Chine de la Révolution Culturelle à la Chine des Procès

“The failure of a revolution universally sets the task of specifying what it has stumbled up against; what internal political question kept it, in positive mass conditions, from reaching its principal conscious goals. Today a Marxist is someone who, within the framework of an organized politics, makes an effort to resolve for him or herself the PROBLEMS left hanging by the initial Maoism, the Maoism of Mao Zedong, the Maoism that is contemporary to the Cultural Revolution. There is no other Marxism except this one.”

morning, on top of a hill

the grandmother on wheelchair,
it was recent that she lost the ability to walk.
the bliss of having so many family members around her.

the shortest of them all stood out
the infant, the grandson it must be who just started walking.

looking like

...and thus we travel
and recognised another face as the face of another.

we are far from here,
yet she resembles a friend of mine
he reminds me of a TV actor
I don't remember the name.

This is another way to explain 'familiarity'
If He exists

He must have exhausted the possible permutations
the stock has depleted in His warehouse of expression and mannerism

Lacking variety
not only of faces
not only of tragedies or ideas for another Sunday

but of many incalculable eventualities
and one distant intimacy.

half-circle

impossible, impossibility
where will it be?
will you be at the East of me?
when Southeast was running amok
when Northeast is always repressed.

I do not have enough words that you spoke.
a bottle cap was all that I could find to use as a globe

to help you picture better
the furthest distance one could travel
along the equator,

the actual distance we were and would be,
the half-circle from each other.

Tower Sunday

the tower is closed today.

well, it's a Sunday,

and like those who want rest.

the Sunday for all eyes to

shut like the graffiti eyelids of shop shutters without guilt.

The view of the city wants some rest, likewise.

The panoramic view must be tired

and wants some rest from our gaze,

from people,

from admirable stares or touristic snaps.

It is not speech

but a gesture

I am sure it isn't speech
but the gestures of tongue and lips.

Still

I plan to smoke as much as you do

More or less

It was very much like what has been written - which is to say it was very much like what we have read. The university education, the ambition which failed to commensurate with the circumstances, the grim reality after leaving school. Your refusal to bow - to a time consuming occupation, any philistine would crave for - has resulted having to resort to a low-wage temp. jobs to get by. The mundane task which offers only blisters on your fingers as commission. But how many Bukowskis are there. It doesn't matter if you once aspired to be a poet, a writer, a painter or photographer. It was very much like what they have written. The better use of your hands and observational skills can wait. The aspiration could be easily deferred, but you are really tired at night or distracted. To be diminished and defeated by the years - waiting for your time to come, the time to live your country. It doesn't matter you are of what descent, how easily good books could found here, how many important artists or writers are living in, or was from your city, it was more or less what they have written, what they have mentioned again and again. We are the same person with another name, in another period, of another manner and different physical permutation.

Horizon - Peter Hallward (Badiou: Subject to Truth, p.319)

A horizon is not an objective structure of the world or the universe, but a limit specific to a particular prescription or conceptualization, however indecisive or abstract. Even the mathematical demonstration of an unending sequence of ever larger infinite numbers, while it certainly establishes the banal and numerically limitless dimension of all numbers, is nevertheless obliged to acknowledged a kind of specifically numerical "horizon," that is, an unreachable limit that no numbering operation takes place: this is the limit indicated, as we know, by the impossibility of a single set of all sets. Such an impossible set would precisely be a set without horizon in this sense, that is, a set that excludes anything accessible.

BOMB SCARE AT A LOCAL ART SHOW OPENING

The Straits Times, Prime News, November 7 2009
Reported by Tak San Chang

BOMB SCARE AT A LOCAL ART SHOW OPENING
A bag with bomb-like object found in the art gallery.

A bag containing a metal cylindrical object with timer was found in an undisclosed commercial art gallery located in the MICA Building. The black sling bag was found by the female staff of the gallery on 5 November 2009, at 6.05pm, just before the exhibition opening of a renowned local painter. The female gallery staff recounts her harrowing experience: “I was then really busy with the preparation of the opening as the Guest of Honour will be arriving soon. When I first noticed the bag, I thought it was left at the corner by the event photographer. Then I hear a loud ticking from the bag. When the photographer told me the bag wasn’t his I grew suspicious. I was reminded of the public message about ‘suspicious article’ I hear on the MRT everyday. But I could not believe I am the one to be caught in such a situation… some more not on MRT but in an art gallery. When I opened the bag and saw the bomb I screamed.”

According to the Investigating Officer, Staff Sergeant Tony Lim, the Arms and Explosives Unit has confirmed the object as a homemade analogue device that would not cause serious injuries or fatalities. Lim also highlighted “During the test, we found that huge quantity of black and gold enamel paints were contained in the shell with the other chemicals that would undergo explosive decomposition. It seems this amateurish device was made to splatter and splash paint in an explosive manner than to harm anyone.”

From an expired student ID card found in the bag, the police have identified Samuel Chen, Chinese Singaporean, aged 21, as the owner of the black sling bag. Graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in 2008, Chen is believed to be closely involved with the Arterr Orist, a cell group of the clandestine organization known as Black Baroque Interventionists. An ex-member of the organization, Clement Liang Jielun, aged 21, is currently helping the authorities to track down Chen who has been missing since.

The other items inside the bag include a sketch pad and a note book; books such as The Possessed by Dostoevsky and The Anthology of Black Baroque Poetry and Prose; some coins and miscellaneous receipts; stationary such as pencil pen and penknife and a can of Breda beer. The small sketchpad of figurative drawings and notebook of hardly legibly writings, contain comments on local contemporary art with repeated vehement criticism of the convenience of video art and Abstract Expressionism, the major American art movement from the mid 20th century. “Whenever I go to an opening of seemingly avant-garde art, or see the Abstract Expressionist drippings on canvas that has been repeated again and again for the last 50 years, and the kind of crowd at the opening, I feel nauseous and need to throw up. I think the loan shark runners execute time based paint dripping on my neighbour’s door better, with more intensity.”

In the notebook, besides detail notes, gathered from the internet, on how to make an explosive device, and list of exhibitions to sabotage during the exhibition opening, and local artists he hates – a few names were struck off the list. Strangely, the exhibition where the bomb was found is a figurative painting exhibition of an ex-social realist painter from the Equator Art Society, and was not on his exhibition or hate list.

Watching Time Pass (May, 2008)

...Time Indeed Passes, and We Pass with It. - Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

About three months ago, he began to realise his self-indulgence in procrastination. Upon realisation, he began to trace, as far back as his childhood, the many other time wasting habits he was susceptible to. After mentally drafting out a more or less complete inventory list of these tarrying activities, he somehow managed to identify the 'progenitor'. It must be the many idle afternoons and lazy mornings he spent staring at the mechanical clock on the wall in his bedroom.

Sometimes he spaced out with a blank stare, and became only aware after; sometimes his thoughts drift untamed, analogously from pointless recollection to restless anticipation and ridiculous imagination. But often, it is just the mere counting of the seconds and minutes gone by following the clock’s ticking.

It was during one of these sessions, as a kid, that he realised the irreversibility of time, experienced an overwhelming sense of devastating ruinousness, and thus, full of pessimism, viewed every moment of his growth, since birth, as decay. Despite the circular movement of the clock hands, made especially obvious by the seemingly disciplined and inexhaustible rotation of the second hand, the clockwise movement indicates temporal linearity, of Time as a one-way street. This experience is, in a way, an antipode to the devastation Nietzsche felt when he realised the notion of eternal recurrence. Perhaps it has to do with his mediocrity, or misunderstanding of the idea, but he could not grasp the apprehension of this German philosopher who eventually gone insane. He does not understand why one would forsake the return of the best moments just because it entails the return of the worst.

Time watching is indeed time wasting, even in other more practical circumstances. Two days ago, when he was early for an important appointment (and being early is a rather unusual experience for him) he checked his watch repeatedly... for the time to come. But yet, how meaningless it is to ease one's anxiety by looking forward to the clock striking the appointment time, when it does not affect the actual situation of the impending arrival. The arrival of the appointment time does not equal the arrival of the person... he thought to himself.

This unproductive pursuit does create a sense of guilt if not stupidity, and one perverse way to lessen this guilt or to console an idiot would be to find others with similar fault or indulgence (although he hardly felt any guilt now). Perhaps this is why he was quite consoled to discover this physically inert activity in the protagonist of a story by Raymond Queneau. A form of consolation similar to the assurance of finding other puzzled faces in class when a rather complex equation were being explained by the math teacher in an arid manner: an assurance of either his average mental capacity or mass stupidity.

…All he had left now was the very vacuity of time. Then he tried to see how time passed, an undertaking just as difficult as that of catching yourself falling asleep. Sitting at his cash desk he would watch the big clock above Meussieu Poucier’s shop, and follow the progress of the big hand. He would manage to see it jump once, twice, three times, and then he suddenly found it was a quarter of an hour later and the big hand had taken advantage of this to move without noticing it. Where had he been all that time? Sometimes he had been back in Madagascar, sometimes he had relived an episode from Flash Guy or Mandrake, his favourite heroes, sometimes he had merely re-eaten a meal or re-seen a film, more or less fragmentarily.

At the end of two months of application, he managed to register three jumps of the big hand, but he never got up to four, not remembering this occupation until much later, being then lost in a fun-jungle, or repeating to himself like a scratched record some conversation he had had with Housette, Virole, or one of his other neighbours. He couldn’t manage to make his mind a blank.

Raymond Queneau, The Sunday of Life (Le Dimanche de la vie), P. 113.

pomegranate

Of palate pleasure and death

not one pomegranate

but six crates of grenade

with greed and power

from the United Fruit Company.

Genres of Reality (2008) for Real Space Conceptual Space (ifa)

It would be simplistic to describe this exhibition as one that merely features photographs or photography. Our understanding of the term ‘photography’ creates an expectation to see photographs as either art, with technical application and formal aesthetic as prime concerns, or as a document of historical value, recognised for its high degree of neutrality and exactness. In the early history of photography, these two diacritical positions were demonstrated by the black and white prints of Alfred Stieglitz and Lewis Hine. Although both were New York-based photographers from the same era, Stieglitz once described his use of photography ‘as a distinctive medium of individual expression’, whereas for Hine, a pioneer of photojournalism, photography was an instrument for research, reportage and reflection of social reality.

Undeniably, the chief medium of these works, from the 1990s, by Susanne Brügger, Thomas Demand and Heidi Specker is photography. Nevertheless, without compromising their aesthetic concerns, the images exemplified the development of contemporary German photography towards application beyond its given framework. Within this expanded field questions and issues regarding reality, space, representation, and the roles of photography arise. In short, real space conceptual space is very much an exhibition of meta-photographs which, in place of theoretical discourse, examines the nature of photography through the practice itself.

The original title of this exhibition, in German, is realer raum bild raum. The word ‘bild’ could be literally translated as view, image, figure, or painting. Therefore, the title can also mean ‘pictorial space’. However, in the context of this exhibition, the usage of realer (which could be translated as real, physical or actual) and bild is neither a juxtaposition of pure binary opposites, untainted by one another, nor a regression to the old debates concerning the authenticity of photographs and high art. The curatorial theme has gone further to destabilise the fixed meanings of the two terms in order to allow an awareness of how reality, which could be written like fiction, is often like composed like a picture.

Of the many virtual and imaginary elements, one crucial point lies in our idea of reality itself. The curator for the exhibition, Ute Eskildsen states, ‘The starting point for the practice of photography is no longer necessarily the existing reality. We should not lament this development, for a glance at the history of photography shows clearly that reality, long assumed to be an essential basis, has always been merely a starting point for the expression of an idea.’ Yet, this claim of negating ‘existing reality’ to allow a shift of emphasis to the ‘expression of an idea’ should not be understood as an absolute negligence of ‘reality’ as a subject matter or artistic concern. This is because any idea which emerged from reality cannot be divorced from reality and this is obvious from the common subject of ‘public’ space (raum) in the works featured. Conversely, it should also be added how these pictures of the external world where the viewers and artists are situated, represent three distinctive stances that suggest how our worldviews (weltanschauung) are deeply ideological. In other words, it is of how our perception of reality, which emerges from reality itself, is an idea of reality but not reality itself.

Thomas Demand
In Thomas Demand’s Detail series, the window-sized C-prints are images of seemingly banal interior spaces that range from a sink with unwashed dishes to an office cubicle with an untidy table to a massage parlour. Upon closer observation, the little details in each image reveal to viewers that these spaces were in fact fabricated from cardboard. Firstly, the realisation of how this is not a representation of reality, but of a pseudoreality, relates one to Rene Magritte’s paintings that are often about such conceptual overlaps. In Demand’s case, this pictorial mis en abyme is manifold with implicit narrative structure. Each image is composed with reference to published photographs from the newspaper or archives. Constructed into three-dimensional objects and spaces from paper, but once again ‘flattened’ when presented as photograph, every picture is a polysemantic, indexical sign, open to multiple readings. For instance, the bathroom in Detail VII recalls a familiar day-to-day scene or a frame from an Alfred Hitcock film. And for viewers in Germany, it would easily be recognised as Demand’s reference to the controversial crime scene of a corpse in the tub photographed by a man who broke into a hotel room. Ironically, the photographer of the original picture, persecuted for his voyeurism, lack of respect for the deceased, and trespassing, was also the person who, few years later, helped provide an important clue to the police investigation with the photograph.


Susanne Brügger
By combining text and symbol with monochromatic archival photographs, Susanne Brügger’s Map Work embodies the discursive structure of scientific disciplines like criminology and anthropology. In these fields, photography plays an integral part in their systems of classification and analysis which discover or, from a more cynical perspective, ‘invent’ facts or truths. Despite adopting their form, her pseudo-scientific project parodies and critiques such discourses that Michel Foucault categorised as the secular ‘regimes of truth’. In this long-running series, her coupling of graphs, charts, maps, diagrams, or old, unidentified portrait photographs with scientific jargons, clichés from the media, or speech conventions in our social interaction, parallels the nostalgic musings of a pataphysician. The dissected aerial views of urban architectural spaces in Map Work XIV – On appropriation: the name of the view, or Gustav for short, highlights the inherent contradictions in how we experience spaces through inhabitation by contrast to their graphic representation. Reflecting the idea of how existence precedes essence, the work expounded how scale systems, when applied in studies such as cartography, geography and architecture aid the conception of distance or length, requires one’s prior experience of the space or site. Moreover, by appropriating such methods of measurement, she undermines the validity and reliability of the system, and reveals its subjective aspects.


Heidi Specker
As a contrast to the bird’s-eye view in Brügger’s pictures, the ink-jet prints of buildings from 1960s to 1970s by Heidi Specker are all bottom-up views of one in the midst of a concrete jungle. In spite of their formal differences in many other aspects, they share a common aim. Throughout her works, Specker demonstrates how the advents of digital photography and image manipulation software have rendered obsolete the notion of photography as a neutral medium. Not that manipulation of the photographic image before the digital revolution was impossible, but now, the extent and ease of executing it have resulted in a quantitative change that offers a qualitative impact. Some might argue these works are not a further development of photography. Instead, with its painterly traits, smudging the boundary between photography and painting, each picture evokes questions concerning painting as a genre defined by its medium, or hints at a return to the practice of painting in pictorial aesthetic. With their subtle colour gradations, simultaneously reminding one of old postcard pictures and watercolour paintings, Marshall McLuhan’s dictum on how ‘the medium is the message’ is therefore
revived.

* * * * *

In the essay On the Invention of the Photographic Meaning, the photographer-writer Allan Sekula mentioned how a Bushwoman, due to her ‘photographic illiteracy’, could not recognise her son in a photograph. This incident demonstrated how a photograph, operating within a symbolic framework, is not universal but to be read within particular logic and cultural context like a language. With the unprecedented popularity of photography as an artistic medium, and in an age of mobile phone cameras, this anecdote could, perhaps, point to those ‘illiterate’ or those unfamiliar to such concepts and applications of photography – with visual languages of stronger ontological implications – how it requires from one the effort and patience of learning a new language to comprehend and appreciate these alternate existences of what Fox Talbot called ‘the pencil of nature’.

“Courageous, untroubled, mocking, and violent — that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.”

Philosophy of Right ( (1821), translated by T. M. Knox, (1952)) p. 13

"When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." Philosophy of Right ( (1821), translated by T. M. Knox, (1952)) p. 13

en connaissance de cause: with full knowledge of the facts

Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo (Latin) "Resolute in execution, gentle in manner".

The Garden of Forking Paths (Original version)

The Garden of Forking Paths

In the midst of this perplexity, I received from Oxford the manuscript you have examined. I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: 'the garden of forking paths' was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'the various futures (not to all)' suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pên, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then, is the explanation of the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can switch roles, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings and repetitions. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend. The scenario could also double itself as in a mirror. If you will resign yourself to my incurable pronunciation, we shall read a few pages."
His face, within the vivid circle of the lamplight, was unquestionably that of an old man, but with something unalterable about it, even immortal. He read with slow precision three versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches to a battle across a lonely mountain; the horror of the rocks and shadows makes the men undervalue their lives and they gain an easy victory. In the second, the same army traverses a palace where a great festival is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the celebration and they win the victory. In the third, the same army strategically raided and completely razed a village the enemy troops laid ambush; the heroic victory necessitates the cruelty of undervaluing the lives of the peasant folks. I listened with proper veneration to these ancient narratives, perhaps less admirable in themselves than the fact that they had been created by my blood and were being restored to me by a man of a remote empire, in the course of a desperate adventure, on a Western isle. I remember the last words, repeated in each version like a secret commandment: Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

The Garden of Forking Paths – Jorge Luis Borges (pp.26-27)

The Garden of Forking Paths – Jorge Luis Borges (pp.26-27) vertsub

[…]Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can switch roles, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings and repetitions. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend. The scenario could also double itself as in a mirror. If you will resign yourself to my incurable pronunciation, we shall read a few pages."

His face, within the vivid circle of the lamplight, was unquestionably that of an old man, but with something unalterable about it, even immortal. He read with slow precision three versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches to a battle across a lonely mountain; the horror of the rocks and shadows makes the men undervalue their lives and they gain an easy victory. In the second, the same army traverses a palace where a great festival is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the celebration and they win the victory. In the third, the same army strategically raided and completely razed a village the enemy troops laid ambush; the heroic victory necessitates the cruelty of undervaluing the lives of the peasant folks. I listened with proper veneration to these ancient narratives, perhaps less admirable in themselves than the fact that they had been created by my blood and were being restored to me by a man of a remote empire, in the course of a desperate adventure, on a Western isle. I remember the last words, repeated in each version like a secret commandment: Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

The Garden of Forking Paths – Jorge Luis Borges (pp.26-27)

The working copy of the doctored excerpt, The Garden of Forking Paths, 2010, vertical submarine

Plagiarism is necessary...

‘Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps an author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.’ (Lautréamont: 1978 [1868], p. 274)


Lautréamont, Comte de (1978 [1868/1870]) Maldoror and Poems, trans Paul Knight, London, UK: Penguin

Reading Slowly

‘It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading: – in the end I also write slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste – a malicious taste perhaps? – no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every son of man who is 'in a hurry'. [...] My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well! (Nietzsche: 1997 [1887], p.5)’

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1997 [1887]) Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Silence

‘One has to be responsible, as I have always said. One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate.’ (Bolaño: 2003, p.1)

Bolaño, Roberto (2003 [2000]) By Night In Chile, trans Chris Andrews, New York: New Directions

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1944) ‘La République du silence’

‘We were never more free [sic] than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. […] Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment. The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man.[…] (Sartre, ed. Liebling; 1947, p. 498)’

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1944) ‘La République du silence’, published in The Republic of Silence, ed. A.J. Liebling (2003) Simon Publications and Situations, III:Lendermains de guerre (1949) Paris: Gallimard, pp. 11-12

Badiou, Alain (2009 [1982]) ‘The Indissoluble Salt of Truth (November 21, 1977)’, in Theory of Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels, Continuum: London, p.19

Under the name materialism we understand two perfectly contradictory theses. One states that there is the One, the other that the One precedes the Other, and thus that there is the Two.

‘There is the One’ is the monist thesis about being, for which ‘matter’ in reality is only the signifier. Every materialism posits the primitive unicity of being, with the implication that its intimate constitution requires only one name. Matter is this name.

It is only the non derivable nature of the One-of-being that is designated by this signifier of matter. One can illustrate this nominating power with a variety of scientific considerations to make it seem attractive and convincing: mass, electrons, atoms, waves, various particles, and so on.
Thus, if you want to name the name of the One, you instantly obtain the multiple


Badiou, Alain (2009 [1982]) ‘The Indissoluble Salt of Truth (November 21, 1977)’, in Theory of Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels, Continuum: London, p.190

in a middle of a room - E. E. Cummings

in a middle of a room
stands a suicide
sniffing a Paper rose
smiling to a self
"somewhere it is Spring and sometimes
people are in real:imagine
somewhere real flowers,
butI can't imagine real flowers for if Icould,
they would somehow
not Be real"(so he smiles
smiling)"but I will noteverywhere be real to
you in a moment"The is blond
with small hands"& everything is easier
than I had guessed everything would
be;even remembering the way who
looked at whom first,
anyhow dancing(a moon swims out of a cloud
a clock strikes midnight
a finger pulls a trigger
a bird flies into a mirror)

handicaps are the pet of my sympathy

it wasn’t that long ago

Then measure it.

reachable,
about the distance of a blister on the other ankle

Theoretical Practice #27: An Althusserian Prison Break

We were behind barbed wire, watched over by guards and subjected to the vexations of roll-calls, searches, fatigues. We were hungry…

I never seriously thought of escaping… On the other hand, I dreamed up a way of escaping to which I subsequently gave a great deal of thought.

Having noticed that the Germans alerted all the police and troops within a very wide radius once they realised one of us had escaped, which usually resulted in the capture of the daring individual concerned, I decided the surest way of escaping would be to let them believe someone had escaped, wait until the general alert was over which never lasted more than three or four weeks, and then escape after that. What I therefore had to do was disappear from the camp (I must have had a vocation for ‘disappearing’!), and let them think I had gone, before actually have escape, but simply disappear, in other words hide within the camp itself (which was not impossible) and only then vanish into thin air, when all the measures adopted for the alert had been dropped (three weeks later). In essence I had found a way of escaping the camp without actually leaving and of remaining a prisoner in order to escape! Though I perfected my plan, I did not carry it out, but simply pride myself on the fact that I had found ‘the solution’. Having proved that I could do it, there was no need to out it into practice. I have often thought since that the ‘solution’ came from deep within me, combining a fear of danger and the absolute need for security to produce a fictitious act of bravery. If my friend Rancière had known about his ‘episode’ when he reproached me at a much later date for criticising the Communist Party in order to remain within, I believe it would have given him food for thought.

P. 108 The Future Lasts Forever - L. Althusser

The Communist Hypothesis, p.74

2. ‘Pure’ theoretical practice (the sciences) was divorced from ideological education (the humanities) as though they were two different essences, and everyone is required to choose between the two on the basis of their so-called ‘gifts’, which the system took upon itself to detect. The long-term implication of this ‘choice’ was that science itself was made subservient to the vague humanism in which the ‘liberal’ thought languished. As a rule, no one is more blind to the critical powers of science than a scientist. No one is better prepared by the educational apparatus for slavery than an ‘expert’ or agent of a defined specialism.

Alain Badiou

Room 18, Hostellerie de la Mer, Le Fret (Crozon) - Olivier Rolin, Hotel Crystal (pp. 31-33, 2004)

A pleasing lullaby is indeed what we needed, my old master Louis Althusser and I, on the night we spent in room 18 of the Hostellerie de la Mer. It was just a few years after the so-called “68” events. He got it into his head, as he would recall in his posthumous memoirs, to steal an atomic submarine. Through the bathroom transom, one could make out the nearby sodium lights at the Longue Isle base. Did this business seem straightforward to my old master, in his delirium, or had he just decided on a rather complicated way to kill himself? Whatever the case, he had purchased an officer’s uniform in dark blue wool at the Clichy flea market, on which – after referring to the Larousse Encyclopedia of the Twentieth Century – he saw five gold stripes corresponding to the rank of ship’s captain. With the face of a manic-depressive spaniel under his ornamental officer’s cap, he would have been laughable, were it not for the nerve-racking circumstances, as he chain-smoked Gauloises that night, seated on the little bamboo bed beneath the window (he absolutely insisted that I sleep in the double). His plan consisted of simply showing up the next day at the entrance to the base and informing the maritime gendarmerie that he was the new commander of the Redoutable, appointed at a Council of Ministers that same morning (this detail struck him as tremendously cunning, likely to allay any suspicion). I, on the other hand, harbored grave doubts as to the reliability of this scheme, but I had too mush respect for the philosopher who had helped me discover scientific Marxism not to go along with it. I just pointed out to my old master that it was (probably) forbidden to smoke aboard a nuclear submarine. The proletariat is going to change all that, Rolin, he replied from inside a bluish cloud. All the same, I persisted, all the same: he shouldn’t show up at the security checkpoint with a cigarette hanging from his mouth; it just wasn’t very ship captain-like, in my view. We’ll see, we’ll see, was his reply. Then, putting out his Gauloise: all right, let’s get some sleep. And soon that’s what we were doing, rocked by the faint sound of surf, the light clinking of the halyards.

Text handwritten on the back of a “Tourist Map of the Crozon Peninsula”

Olivier Rolin, Hotel Crystal (pp. 31-33, 2004 [2008])

Olivier Rolin, Tigre en papier, trans. William Cloonan (pp.29-30, 2007 [2002])

…, in the same way back then several years seemed a vast stretch of time, and so Gideon possessed in our eyes a formidable seniority, as if he had been anointed by History, and also by “The Theory,” as we used to say. Because he had been a favorite student of the philosopher whose name the public only learned the day he strangled his wife, but you had read his books, which seems to restore Marxism to the dignity of a science. Lives are forests filled with shadows and mysteries, Marie, you tell Thirteen’s daughter; enormous things rot, hideous, nightmarish animals caterwaul in the darkness of each life. All the while you were stupidly wandering what was keeping him from joining The Cause, this mentor who was for you the image of rigor was going nuts, imagining he was hijacking a nuclear submarine or stealing gold from the Banque de France, he was trembling on his knees at the feet of the woman he would wind up killing. On the first days when the red flags were invading Paris streets, at the beginning of that long ago month of May, he was crossing the city in an ambulance from a psychiatric clinic. He never believed that could ever happen, the avenues transformed into poppy fields. And him, haggard, fleeing. What good had been “The Theory?” You had no idea how completely men are woven from darkness, scarred by fear; literature would have taught you that, but you had rejected literature, you only believed in “life,” “life,” and “experience,” clarified by the Theory ,and by Gideon’s analyses and instructions ,which were of a terrifying simplicity. You were intransigent and frightfully ignorant – and it would have done you no good to tell you that.

Olivier Rolin, Tigre en papier, trans. William Cloonan (pp.29-30, 2007 [2002])

Black Baroque Interventionists

BLACK BAROQUE INTERVENTIONISTS

Black Baroque Interventionists is neither an organised movement, nor collective. Their approach is neither serious nor frivolous. They despise all hypocritical declarations of good and evil. The textbook dichotomy of optimism and pessimism, or beauty and ugliness, is absurd to all BBI members who had amputated their sentiments. Their experiments are not to be understood as science, their gestures not to be taken as art, their activities are never political, and their words have hardly anything to do with the notion named 'love'. To them, the necessity of such differentiation is as useless as the petit-bourgeois distinction between tiring labour and boring leisure.

Operating within a decentred structure, and sharing a common hatred of statistics, Black Baroque Interventionists could not establish an exact figure of those who are currently involved. To them, history and memory are overrated - none of the members remember the year they emerged. The practice of leaving no traces during their operations has resulted in the impossibility of presenting a chronology of their activities. Except for a few names shamelessly sold to the public by an affiliated art collective based in Singapore (which Black Baroque Interventionists has recently declared as an act of treason) none of the members are identifiable. According to a joint statement issued in Jan 2010, in the form of a cassette recording, 'We are not identical even to ourselves […] to hell with identity and personality! But we could be your politicians smiling on TV, the CEOs of every MNC and the cleaners of all the toilets in this filthy world! We are everyone and no one. […] All members affirm their participation by the relentless self-denial of their involvement in the group.'

In the Jan 2010 statement, Black Baroque Interventionists, as prime advocates of local anaesthetics, summarises their agenda with this quotation found in the jotter book of a member who went missing during an operation:

'Non-imperial [...]* must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.'

*Illegible inkblot

Wang Hui, ‘An Asia that isn’t the East’, Le Monde Diplomatique, 27 February 2005

The idea is simultaneously colonialist and anti-colonialist, conservative and revolutionary, nationalist and internationalist; it originated in Europe and shaped the self-interpretation of Europe; it is closely related to the matter of the nation-state and overlaps with the vision of empire; it is a geographic category established in geopolitical relations.

Michel Foucualt: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer

A specific object linking Manet, Bataille and Foucault is none other than the mirror, ‘place without place’, which the latter situates, very significantly between utopia and hererotopia, and defines as a composite of both: ‘It is from the mirror that I find myself absent from the place where I am,’ he writes, ‘as long as I see myself there.’ Such is the discrete yet decisive role of painting in the theoretical work of Foucault: absolute hererotopia, a one-way mirror in which the mastery of man is effaced in his real life, it constitutes a sufficiently deep rupture in western discourse to have inflected the theoretical elaboration of Michel Foucault on space and time, serving as a grid for our modes of thinking and behaviour. This rupture produces a long silence; it is from this silence that the archaeologist is made.

– Nicolas Bourriaud in ‘Michel Foucualt: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer’, Manet and the Object of Painting, Tate: London, p. 19

Another Russian Tale – Roberto Bolaño

The Russian who knew German asked him what he was doing there, what his job was and his rank. The Andalusian tried to explain, in German, but it was no use. The Russians opened his mouth, and with a pair of pincers, which the Germans had used on other body parts, they started pulling and squeezing his tongue. The pain made his eyes water, and he said, or rather shouted, the word coño, cunt. The pincers in his mouth distorted the expletive which came out, in his howling voice, as Kunst.

The Russian who knew German looked at him in puzzlement. The Andalusian was yelling Kunst, Kunst and crying with pain. In German, the word Kunst means art, and that was what the bilingual soldier was hearing, and he said, This son of a bitch must be an artist or something. The guys who were torturing the Andalusian removed the pincers along with a little piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the revelation. The word art. Art, which soothes the savage beast. And so, like soothed beasts, the Russians took a breather and waited for some kind of signal while the rookie bled from the mouth and swallowed his blood liberally mixed with saliva, and choked. The word coño transformed into the word Kunst, had saved his life. When he came out of the rectangular building, it was dusk, but the light stabbed at his eyes like midday sun.

(trans. Chris Andrew)

The Dialectic of Presence and Absence

To illustrate the dialectic of presence and absence, he [Zizek] recounts the story of a guide conducting some visitors round an East European art gallery nad halting before a painting entitled 'Lenin in Warsaw'. There is no sign of Lenin in the picture; instead, it depicts Lenin's wife in bed with a handsome young member of the Central Committee. 'But where is Lenin?' inquire the bemused visitors, to which the guide gravely replies: 'Lenin is in Warsaw.' Terry Eagleton on Zizek (Figures of Dissent, p. 204)

Hotdog - Eagleton parodying Zizek (Figures of Dissent, p. 204)

The following captures something of his [Zizek] characteristic intellectual style: 'At first glance it would seem that the sausage in the hot dog wedges apart the two pieces of roll. But the roll itself is nothing but a "space" which the sausage creates around it, the phantasmal "frame" or support of the sausage without which it would vanish to nothing. On the other hand, the sausage itself can be seen as no more than an embodied gap between two pieces of bread, the mere pretext or occasion which prevents them from ever uniting.

Polemics ‘A Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’ – Alain Badiou, p.139

Lenin had already remarked that during times when critical and revolutionary political activity is very weak, what the sorry arrogance of imperialism produces is a mixture of mysticism and pornography. That’s exactly what we are getting today in the form of formal romantic vitalism. We have universal sex, and we have oriental wisdom. A Tibetan pornography: that would fulfill the wish of this century, which is putting off inventing its birth.

Robert Desnos, “Description d’une révolte prochaine" (image by Georges Rochegrasse)

Having coming from the shadowy East, the men who had been civilized continued the same westward march as Attila, Tamburlaine and so many other famous men. Any man who can be described as “civilized” was once a barbarian. They were, in other words, the bastard sons of the adventurers of the night, or those the enemy (the Romans, the Greeks) had corrupted. Driven away from the shores of the Pacific and the slopes of the Himalayas, and unfaithful to their mission, they now found themselves facing those who drove them out in the not so distant times of invasions. Sons of Kalmouk, grandsons of the Huns, if you just stripped off the robes borrowed from a wardrobe in Athens or Thebes, the breastplates collected in Sparta and Rome, you would look as your fathers looked on their little horses. And you Normans who work the land, who fish for sardines and who drink cider, just get back on those flimsy boats that traced a long wake beyond the Arctic Circle before they reached those damp fields and these woods that teem with game. Mob, recognize your master! You thought you could flee it, flee that Orient that drove you away by vesting you with the right to destroy what you could not preserve, and now that you traveled around the world, you find it snapping at you heels again. I beg you, do not imitate a dog trying to catch its own tail: you will be running after the West forever. Stop. Say something to explain your mission to us, great oriental army, you who have now become The Westerners.

Robert Desnos, “Description d’une révolte prochaine,” La Révolution surréaliste, no.3. April 1925, p.25; reprinted in La Révolution surréaliste(1924-1929) (Paris, 1975 [facsimile edition])

Society Must Be Defended pp. 198-9 Michel Foucault

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice “Language to Infinity” – Michel Foucault, p.55

Perhaps there exists in speech an essential affinity between death, endless striving, and the self-representation of language. Perhaps the figure of a mirror to infinity erected against the black wall of death is fundamental for any language from the moment it determines to leave a trace of its passage. Not only since the invention of writing has language pretended to pursue itself to infinity; but neither is it because of its fear of death that is decided one day to assume a body in the form of visible and permanent signs. Rather, somewhat before the invention of writing, a change had occur to open the space in which writing could flow and establish itself, a change symbolized for us in its most original form by Homer, that forms one of the most decisive ontological events of language: mirrored reflection upon death and construction, from this reflection, of a virtual space where speech discovers the endless resourcefulness of its own image and where, it can represent itself as already existing behind itself, already active beyond itself, to infinity. The possibility of a work of language find its original fold in this duplication.

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice “Language to Infinity” – Michel Foucault, p.55

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice “Preface to Transgression” – Michel Foucault, pp. 44-

“When at the height of anguish, I gently solicit a strange absurdity, an eye opens at the summit, in the middle of my skull.” – Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

This is because the eye, a small white globe that encloses it darkness, traces a limiting circle that only sight can cross. And the darkness within, the somber core of the eye, pours out into the world like a fountain which sees, that is, which lights up the world; but the eye also gathers up all the light of the world in the iris, that small black spot, where it is transformed into the bright night of image. The eye is mirror and lamp: it discharges its light into the world around it, while in a movement that is not necessarily contradictory, it precipitates this same light into the transparency of its well. Its globe has the expansive quality of a marvelous seed – like an egg imploding towards the center of night and extreme light, which it is and which it has just creased to be. It is the figure of being in the act of transgressing its own limit.

The eye, in a philosophy of reflection, derives from its capacity to observe the power of becoming always more interior to itself. Lying behind each eye that sees, there exists a more tenuous one, an eye so discreet and yet so agile that that its all-powerful glance can be said to eat away at the flesh of the white globe; behind this particular eye, there exists another and, then, still others, each progressively more subtle until we arrive at an eye whose entire substance is nothing but the transparency of vision. This inner movement is finally resolved in a nonmaterial center where the intangible forms of truth are created and combined, in this heart of things which is the sovereign subject. Bataille reverses this entire direction: sight, crossing the globular limit of the eye, constitutes the eye in its instantaneous being; sight carries it away in this luminous stream (an outpouring fountain, streaming tears and, shortly blood), hurls the eye outside of itself, conducts it to the limit where it bursts out in the immediately extinguished flash of its being. Only a small white ball, veined with blood, is left behind, only exorbitated eye to which all sight is now denied.

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice “Preface to Transgression” – Michel Foucault, pp. 44-45

Tangency

Silent siren
and muted flash,

Wind was pompous
and made the leaves
louder
than his breath.

when he was proud of his strength, every December
Drunk like a man,
Drunk like a car,
Both would overturn everything that gets in the way
and itself.

Clarity,
than the affair
between another curve and line:
the window grille
reflected on the dusty grey TV screen.

What’s the simple word to be written?
on another even layer of dust

We weren’t barefooted,
I didn’t grasp the notion of sand –
We were surely not 6.21pm at the beach.

We would love to prostitute our imagination
Let the red light in

for memory or sensation
of sand between our toes
without soul.

Alain Badiou – Metapolitics (2006: pp. 4-5)

Resistant Philosophers

Alain Badiou – Metapolitics (2006: pp. 75 – 77)

In the Leninist conception of politics, the necessity of formal discipline is grounded only in the situation’s historical irregularities, and on the infinite diversity of singular tasks.

That being said, if party discipline is genuinely political (as opposed to being the network of interests responsible for socialising a State bureaucracy) does it, strictly speaking, constitute a bond? I seriously doubt it, and this doubt is, for me, the product of experience. For the real substance of political discipline is quite simple the discipline of processes. If you have to be on time for an early morning meeting with two factory workers, it is not because the internalised superego of the organisation assigns you to this task, nor because the social, or even convivial, power of the bond renders you susceptible to the perverse charm of tedious obligations. It is because, if you don’t, you lose the thread of the process through which generic singularities partake of your own experience. And if you are obliged not to indulge in frivolous gossip about your political practices while attending a dinner party, this is not because of some ineffable, masochistic relation that ties you to your organisation. It is because the normal social bond that encourages you to be effusive muddies the clarity of unbinding which, at the furthest remove from irresponsible commentary, you work away at with the same professional precision as a scientific researcher (just as this researcher will not deem this dinner party the most appropriate place to detail the mathematico-experimental dimensions of his problem).

A genuinely political organisation, or a collective system of conditions for bringing politics into being, is the least bound place of all. Everyone on the ground is essentially alone in the place of all. Everyone on the ground is essentially alone in the immediate solution of problems, and their meetings, or proceedings, have as their natural content protocols of delegation and inquest whose discussion is no more convivial or superegotistical than that of two scientists involved in debating a very complex question.

Anyone who considers the agreement on truth resulting from such debates intrinsically in terms of terror will prefer the mildness of the bond and the cushion of scepticism. One shouldn’t blame politics for what ism in actual fact, the result of a personal preference for the bound outpouring of the ego. By contrast, true instances of politics tend to manifest this faint coldness that involves precision.

On December 24, 2004, Maoists in China Get Three Year Prison Sentences for Leafleting

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0105commentary.htm

On December 24, 2004, Maoists in China Get Three Year Prison Sentences for Leafleting

A Report on the Case of the Zhengzhou Four

When liberal writers Liu Xiaobo and Yu Jie were recently (and briefly) detained by Chinese police, there was a world wide chorus of denunciation. The liberal writers' endorsement of the U.S. aggression in Iraq made them even more heroic in the eyes of the Murdoch-dominated press. Not surprisingly, there has been no coverage whatsoever of a more egregious case of crackdown on dissent—because it is dissent from the left. On December 21, 2004, four Maoists were tried in Zhengzhou for having handed out leaflets that denounced the restoration of capitalism in China and called for a return to the “socialist road.” The leaflets had been distributed in a public park in the City of Zhengzhou on the occasion of the 28th anniversary of the death of Chairman Mao Zedong. Two of the defendants, Zhang Zhengyao, 56, and Zhang Ruquan, 69, were both found guilty of libel, and each given a three-year prison sentence on December 24, 2004. The case has since generated a lot of expressions of solidarity in leftist circles within China. Postings to a leading leftist website in China in the last few days have set out an abridged translation of the incriminating leaflet, the commemorative piece titled “Mao Zedong forever our leader,” plus a commentary whose author went to Zhengzhou to show solidarity on the day of the trial on December 21. These pieces have been translated by our comrades at the China Study Group, who have asked that we post them here at the MR website. We are glad to do so, believing that a strong case can be made that the story of the left opposition inside China is the most important and least covered in the world.

A Brief Account of the Case

In recent years, on the anniversary of Mao's passing on September 9, many people in Zhengzhou would gather before Mao's statue in the Zijinshan Square, to pay tribute to Mao's memory by laying wreaths or reciting poems. Each year there would be a massive police presence, which inevitably would lead to incidents of confrontation and arrest.

This year a crowd again gathered on September 9; the event was relatively peaceful, as no police was dispatched to forcefully disperse the crowd. A local resident, Mr. Zhang Zhengyao, however, was taken into custody by plainclothes agents around 10:00 am, apparently because he was distributing leaflets whose contents were judged inflammatory or subversive in nature. What Zhang handed out were copies of a commemorative piece, titled Mao Forever Our Leader, specifically written for this occasion. On September 10, 1:00 A.M., Zhengzhou City Police took Zhang Zhengyao in handcuffs back to his apartment to conduct a search; they took away his computer, the remaining copies of the commemorative piece and other documents. Three other persons were implicated in connection with this case: Mr. Wang Zhanqing has been detained for allegedly arranging the printing of the leaflets through an acquaintance in a printer's shop; Zhang Ruquan and Ms. Ge Liying, wife of Zhang Zhengyao, were placed under surveillance; Zhang allegedly had penned the commemorative piece at the request of Zhang Zhengyao, and Ms. Ge was said to have posted it on an internet Maoist website, Mao Zedong Flag.

The incident went pretty much unnoticed, even among China's left circles. Zhengzhou has acquired a reputation as a hotbed of radical Maoism. It has seen some of the most militant labor protests and repeated clashes with police over Mao anniversary in recent years. Many activists there had experienced brief detentions, many more than once. This incident and related arrests were not considered a big deal, especially since Hu Jintao was believed to be more tolerant to dissent coming from the left. The authorities, however, decided to deal with them this time by the 'force of Law'. A trial was originally scheduled for December 14, the date later changed to December 21; initial charges state subversion against them had been dropped; instead, they are being charged with a lesser crime: deliberately spreading falsehoods to damage other's reputation, and undermining social order and national interests.

The news began to spread on left-leaning websites about the pending trial; many sites, when reporting on the case, also published the entire text of the commemorative piece. It is now becoming a sort of cause celebre on China's radical left. On December 21, the scheduled trial did take place, albeit in a closed session, and not open to public, as originally announced. Many people actually went on that day, some from other parts of China, to attend the trial as an expression of solidarity, but were unable to get in. Only two defendants, Zhang Zhengyao and Zhang Ruquan were tried that day; both were found guilty, and each given three years on Dec. 24. The other two’’s trial date is yet to be set.

An abridged translation of the leaflet

Mao Zedong Forever Our Leader!
—A statement in commemoration of the 28th anniversary of the Passing of Mao Zedong
28 years have elapsed, since Chairman Mao left us.

In the past 28 years, the reactionary forces headed by capitalist roaders within our Party have usurped the state and Party powers and divided up state assets among themselves. Meanwhile, they have been spewing deep-seated hatred and venom against Mao Zedong and his socialist legacy. They have done their utmost to attack and slander Mao Zedong, by the use of such tactics as concocting Party resolutions, issuing official documents or reports, and publishing articles and editorials in official news media; moreover, in there attempt to smear Mao Zedong, they have resorted to such low blows as "Democracy Wall" posters, rumors and innuendos, personal memoirs and interviews with foreign journalists.

But the great majority of Chinese people, accounting for more than 95% of the population, and in particular workers and the peasants will always stand by the side of Mao Zedong. Under Mao Zedong's leadership, to serve the people wholeheartedly was set out as the fundamental precept guiding the work of the Party, the government and the army. He had repeatedly urged all Party members and all the cadres always to take the mass line and stand on the side of 95% of the people; he emphatically stated that: “To take the mass line is a fundamental principle of Marxism.” Through out his life, he had fought for the liberation of the people, until his last breath.

From their direct experience, the Chinese people realized that Mao Zedong and they themselves were intimately bound together, in good times and bad, in victory and defeat: with Mao Zedong as their leader, Chinese people were the masters of the country, and enjoyed inviolable democratic rights. They lived a happy life, confident, optimistic and reassured of ever better days ahead. But after Mao Zedong passed away, the working class in China was knocked down overnight by the bourgeoisie; they are no longer the masters of their own country. In this society of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” money means power and social status The wealth polarization has driven working people into abject poverty; as a result, they have lost their social status and all the rights they had enjoyed previously. They are no longer dignified socialist laborers; instead, they are forced to sell their labor power as commodities for survival: they have become tools that can be bought freely by the capitalists.

Part of the working people work for so-called state-owned enterprises, but the term 'state-owned' actually means capitalist-owned because the entire state is owned by the capitalist class. The laborers are no longer working for themselves; they are working to create surplus value for the capitalist class. Another part of working people have in effect become slaves for large and small capitalists. They suffer from even more crueler exploitation and oppression. In addition, hundreds of millions of workers and peasants have been constantly subjected to layoffs, and forced migration, living from hand to mouth, always on the march, looking for jobs, and struggling for mere survival. Labor has become the only means for the survival of themselves and their families. Work is no longer a guaranteed right. As a result of the commercialization of education, health care, cultural activities, sports and legal recourse, they have been in effect deprived of the right to send their children to school, access to health care, the right to pension and other rights associated with old age, the right to participate in cultural, recreational and sports activities; and even the right to legal protection. Moreover, as a result of the waste of resources and environmental pollution caused directly by the rapacious development pursued by the capitalist class, the working people have even lost their right to healthy food, clean water and fresh air. Poverty has brought them untold suffering!

A line has thus been clearly drawn. Mao Zedong is the leader of the Chinese working class; he is the leader of over 95% of the Chinese people. The imperialist revisionists and bourgeoisie and all the reactionary forces within and outside of China oppose Mao Zedong and hate him, while the people love him. The longer he has left this world, the more vehemently his enemies oppose him, the more profoundly, unshakably, sincerely and passionately do people love him. It is indeed laughable for those who oppose Mao Zedong and stand against the people to pronounce a verdict on Mao Zedong, which of course is categorically rejected by the people. The “Mao Zedong fever” that has occurred repeatedly in China over these years have eloquently refuted the two official “resolutions” purporting to pronounce a verdict on Mao Zedong. They are unacceptable to the Chinese people and to the people of the world.

Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and the like call themselves the core, or chief architect of China's reforms, or the proud author of the “Theory of the Three Represents” a close look at their performances and deeds will lead to the conclusion that they only represent the interests of imperialism, and the interests of the bourgeoisie. The historical practice and stark social realities of the past 28 years have opened our eyes and raised our class consciousness; the bourgeois elements within our Party is the head and the backbone of the Chinese bourgeois class. These are extremely selfish persons, stubbornly pursuing the capitalist road. They are much more sinister, ruthless, greedy, and devious than an average capitalist outside the Party.

Just take a look at what has transpired in a relatively short period of twenty plus years: the large and small capitalist-roaders in the Party and their family members have all become millionaires and even billionaires; who can deny that all their talks about socialism, and the “Three Represents”, are outright lies. What they really want is capitalism, because only capitalism will bring them the greatest benefit. They are the enemies of socialism and the people.
We, however, must not forget that the CCP after all is a Party that had been founded and led by Mao Zedong, and one with a long revolutionary tradition. It is a Party that had carried resolute struggle against Kruschev's revisionism, and had been tempered by the Cultural Revolution. And consequently, just as there are capitalist-roaders in the Party, there are certainly socialist-roaders in the Party as well, particularly at the grassroots level. Among the rank and file Party members and low-level cadres, the overwhelming majority are resentful of revisionist leaders within the party. They wish to see the Party change its current line and to revert to the socialist road. Some of them cannot tolerate it any more. They have stepped out to openly challenge the current leadership, but more people still find it safe for themselves or for their families not to speak their minds. We are convinced, along with the deepening of the revisionist clique's push for privatization, the class contradictions in China are bound to become more acute; and the masses will certainly intensify their struggle on ever wider scales. When development of contradictions and mass struggles nationwide reach a climax, the people within the Party, the government and the army who have understood the true nature of revisionism will wage a resolute struggle against it, and will rejoin the proletarian class ranks to hold high the banner of Mao Zedong and to resume the fight for socialism in China.

As long as classes and the class struggle still exist in our world, Mao Zedong will remain alive, forever the leader of the oppressed and exploited classes. As the entire history of China's revolution has repeatedly shown, as long as the revolutionary people follow steadfastly the guidance of Mao Zedong, their struggle will surely advance from victories to victories.

The struggle of the people is the unexhaustible source of our confidence and power.

What Kind of Signal Is This?
A commentary on the trial of Maoists in Zhengzhou (This report is posted on the website of the book-store/political-salon Utopia. Penned by Shao Jingyan)

Today was an unusually cold day for the City of Zhengzhou, it snowed heavily, contrary to weather forecast. But despite the daunting weather conditions, many people have come to the city of Zhengzhou, from all over the country, in a spontaneous response to the news of the trial of Maoists in Zhengzhou.

They come here, without orchestration or an agreed plan, but rather, out of the deepest sense of loyalty to a socialist republic, and most profound respect and love for their deceased leader and teacher, Chairman Mao Zedong, united by a common concern for justice, and a perception that what is at stake with this case is the fate of the socialist republic and of the people. They know that the outcome of this trial will speak volume about the attitude held by the authorities of the city of Zhengzhou toward the banner and legacy of Mao Zedong. This case is a public litmus test of for the Zhengzhou authorities: Are they sincerely following the instructions of our party center regarding the imperative need to "hold high at all times the great banner of Mao Zedong Thought"? The defendants in this case, Mr. Zhang Zhengyao, and other workers, have been arrested for no crime whatsoever other than an act in honor of the memory of Chairman Mao.

As their trial began today, the informed people all over the world will be watching. Supporters in a position to do so have traveled to Zhengzhou to express solidarity. Many older workers in Zhengzhou braced the heavy snow to go to the court if only just to see these Maoist defendants in person. The trial held today, Dec. 21, only days from the 111th anniversary of Mao's birthday on Dec. 26, was supposed to be a public proceeding, but the intermediate court of Zhengzhou city without advanced notice had decided to hold it in close session. The charge was also changed from 'subverting state power' to 'libel'.

People kept waiting and waiting outside of the court in a state of suspended animation; finally, the lawyer came to give a brief account. In particular, the people learned, Mr. Zhang Ruquan had made a rousing statement, resolutely refuting the charge made against him and declaring, in conclusion, “I feel immensely proud of myself for being arrested for honoring the memory of Mao Zedong.” When Zhang Zhengyao was put into a police vehicle, to be whisked away, the crowd chanted aloud: “Justice will be done” “Truth will prevail!” “Solidarity!” The police car was gone. But people still lingered on, voicing their indignation: Who are the real criminals that are daily breaking the laws with impunity? Who is it on earth that are trampling the constitution underfoot? Why are they afraid of people paying tribute to Mao's memory? One person said angrily: these evil, corrupt officials are lording over us and having a ball for now, but sooner or later people will get even with them! On September 9, an old worker was arrested before Mao's statue for an act in commemoration of the 28th anniversary of Mao's passing; On Dec. 21, a few days before Mao's 111th birthday anniversary, he and others were tried in secrecy. What kind of signal is this?

"50. Summer" from Antwerp, p.69 - Roberto Bolaño

There’s a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it’s miserable and it comes on at night. In the weave of a mysterious language whose words signify without exception that the foreigner “isn’t well.” And somehow I would like her to know that the foreigner is “struggling,” “in strange lands,” “without much chance of writing epic poetry,” “without much chance of anything.” The sickness takes me to strange and frozen bathrooms where the plumbing works according to an unexpected mechanism. Bathrooms, dreams, long hair flying out the window to the sea. The sickness is a wake. (The author appears shirtless, in black glasses, posing with a dog and a backpack in summer somewhere.) “The summer somewhere,” sentences lacking in tranquility, though the image they refract is motionless, like a coffin in the lens of a still camera. The writer is a dirty man, with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his short hair wet with sweat, hauling barrels of garbage. He’s also a waiter who watches himself filming as he walks along a deserted beach, on his way back to the hotel… “The wind whips grains of sand”… “Without much chance”… The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer’s jacket is also black.

Jacques Rancière

‘The art of the total imitator, on the other hand, implicates all members of a society by putting in question their very simplicity, i.e. their adherence to their respective functions.’
(Rancière: 2003 [1983], p.11)

Potatoes - Piotr Sommer

My son won’t write a poem about a coconut.
I’m running out of words myself.
Still, if he wanted to paint a picture
with the texture of ripe orange,
then by all means: let him get hold of a golden lemon,
and in a wink a warm wind
the colour of the setting sun will clothe it in a dress.
Imagination, mother of our life,
waft us more and more with improbable landscapes!

The Subject of Art, Alain Badiou

My Father was accustomed to say, "we must begin by the beginning." So, I must begin this lecture about the subject of art by its beginning. But, what is this beginning? I think we have to begin with the oldest question—the question of being, the question of being as being, of being qua being. What is being? What are we saying when we say something is, something of art is…? Something of art is a joy forever, for example. What are we saying? I begin by a fundamental distinction between three levels of the signification of being.First, when I say something is, I just say something is a pure multiplicity. 'Something is' and 'something is a multiplicity' is the same sentence. So, it's a level of being qua being. Being as such is pure multiplicity. And the thinking of a pure multiplicity is finally mathematics.The second level is when we are saying something exists. It is the question of existence as a distinct question of the question of being as such. When we are saying something exists we are not speaking of a pure multiplicity. We are speaking of something which is here, which is in a world. So existence is being in a world, being here or, if you want, appearing, really appearing in a concrete situation. That is ‘something exists.'And finally, the third level is when we are saying that something happens. When something happens we are not only saying that it is a multiplicity—a pure multiplicity, and we are not only saying that it is something in a world—something which exists here and now. 'Something happens' is something like a cut in the continuum of the world, something which is new, something also which disappears—which appears, but also which disappears. Because happening is when appearing is the same thing as disappearing. And so we have to understand the relation between the three levels, the relation between being qua being (pure multiplicity), existence (multiplicity but in a world, here and now), and happening or event. And so we can see that in a concrete situation we have, finally, two terms: first, a world, a world situation—something where all things exist; and after that, an event, sometimes, an event—which is something which happens for this world, not in this world, but for this world. And I call a subject 'a relation between an event and the world.' Subject is exactly what happens when as the consequence of an event in a world we have a creation, a new process, the event of something. And so we have something like that. It's something like in a protest… The point is that the relation, the subjective relation between an event and the world cannot be a direct relation. Why? Because an event disappears on one side, and on the other side we never have a relation with the totality of the world. So when I say that the subject is a relation between an event and the world we have to understand that as an indirect relation between something of the event and something of the world. The relation, finally, is between a trace and the body. I call trace 'what subsists in the world when the event disappears.' It's something of the event, but not the event as such; it is the trace, a mark, a symptom. And on the other side, the support of the subject—the reality of the subject in the world—I call 'a new body.' So we can say that the subject is always a new relation between a trace and a body. It is the construction in a world, of a new body, and jurisdiction—the commitment of a trace; and the process of the relationship between the trace and the body is, properly, the new subject.So when you have to speak of the subject of art you have to speak about a lot of things. First, what is a world of art? What is a world for artistic creation? It's not the world in general. It is a specific world for the artistic creation… ah! the police. So this is the first question. The second question is—what is an artistic event? What is the new singularity in the development of the art world? Third, what is a trace? What is the trace of an event in the art field? And after all that—what is the construction of the new art body?But before all that, I want to clarify by some examples the question of the subject as a relation between trace of an event and construction of the body in a concrete world. And I want to refer to our situation today—to our world today—because I think that there are today two subjective paradigms. I can propose that the concrete situation of our world today is something like a war between two subjective paradigms, two norms of what is a subject. The first one is a strictly materialist and monist philosophy of the subject. And what is, finally, a monist philosophy of the subject? It is the affirmation that there is no distinction, no real distinction between the subject and the body. If you want, in the first paradigm, I show… (drawing figure). The first paradigm… the subject is something which is finally identified to the body as such. So the subjective creation as a sort of paradigm is only experimentation of the limits of the body. The subject is something like an experience of its proper limits, an experience of finitude, an experience of the limits of the concrete unity of the body. But finally, what is a limit of the body, a limit of the living body? The strongest limit of the living body is death. So we can say that in the form of the subjective paradigm the subject is experimentation of death as final limit of the body. And I think, for example, that there is something like that in the extremist form of body art. Body art is experimentation, direct experimentation of the limits of the body as exposition of itself. But, in fact, the absolute limit of something like body art is experimentation of death as such; and the real and final experimentation in the field of body art can be to commit suicide in public. And it's a philosophical determination, because a long time ago Heidegger said that finally Dasein or subject is a subject for death. I can name, in general, the subjective paradigm which is experimentation of the limits of the body something like enjoyment because enjoyment is the name of experimentation of death in life, experimentation of the big thing (das Ding) as death in life itself. So we can say that the first paradigm of subjectivity in our world is the paradigm of subjectivity as enjoyment. But in enjoyment we have to hear the French jouissance—that is exactly the same word. And the definition of enjoyment is experimentation of death in life with experimentation of the limits of the body. And naturally enjoyment is beyond pleasure. Pleasure is something like experimentation of life in life, but enjoyment is beyond pleasure because it's experimentation of the limit of the body as death. So we can say that the sort of subjectivity, the paradigm of subjectivity is a subject for enjoyment. And I think it is the Western paradigm today; it is, in fact, our paradigm—subject for enjoyment and the experimentation of the limits of the body.The second one, the second paradigm is an idealistic, theological, metaphysical philosophy of the subject. The subject can be completely separated from its body. In the first paradigm the subject is finally the body itself. In the second paradigm, the subject is completely separated from its body; it is against the subject as subject for enjoyment, the revival of a profound desire of separation, the desire of existence of the subject as separated of its body. The goal is to find—in life, in action—the point where the body is only the instrument of the new separation. And you see, it is not experimentation of death in life as in enjoyment, but it's assumption of a new subjective life by the mean of death itself. So we can say that that sort of subjective paradigm is experience of life in death, which is opposed to the experience of death in life. And we can name sacrifice that sort of subjective experience of life in death. And the contemporary world is a war between enjoyment and sacrifice. And the war against terrorism is, finally the war between enjoyment and sacrifice. But in this war there is something in common. There is something in common between the two paradigms. What is common to enjoyment and to sacrifice, finally, what is common is the power of death, the power of death as experimentation of the limits of the body on one side but experimentation of death as the means for a new life on the other side. So with the war between enjoyment and sacrifice, we have finally confronted the power of death. And there is no real place for artistic creation in that sort of war—I am convinced of this point—neither on the side of the power of death as enjoyment neither on the side of the power of death as sacrifice. There is no real opening for new artistic creation. So we have to find a third possibility, a third paradigm. We have to propose something as a new subjective paradigm which is outside the power of death—which is neither enjoyment (that is pleasure beyond pleasure and limits of the body) nor satisfaction in the sacrifice (that is enjoyment in another world, of pleasure beyond suffering). We can say that—neither pleasure beyond pleasure nor pleasure beyond suffering, neither enjoyment nor sacrifice. In a much more theoretical framework we can say something like that. We have three possibilities of relation between a subject and its body. Three possibilities. And so, we have three possibilities for a subjective paradigm. The first one—reducibility. Reducibility. The subject can be reduced to its body. We can say that we have, in that case, an immanent identity of the subject, immanent identity because there is no separation at all, but complete identification between the process of the subject and the becoming of its body. In that case the norm—the final norm is enjoyment, the experimentation of death in life. The second is separability. Separability… The subject can be separated completely from its body. There is, in that case, transcendent difference, transcendent difference because the subject experiments itself in the transcendent world and not in the sacrifice of its proper world. The third possibility that I propose is something like immanent difference, not immanent identity, not transcendent difference, but immanent difference. In that case, the subject is not reducible to its body, so there is something like an independent subjective process. There really is a creation, which is not reducible to the experimentation of the limits of the body. But it's impossible that there exists some separation between the subject and its body. So there is neither separation nor reducibility. And that is the situation of the subject when we can understand it as a process of creation, a process of production, a process, which really organizes the relation between the trace of an event and the construction of a new body in the world. And so we have to find something which is not in the field of the contemporary war between enjoyment and sacrifice. And I think the question of the subject of art is today this question—to find something like a new subjective paradigm, which is outside the contemporary war between enjoyment and sacrifice. And we have a lot of problems to organize in this new paradigm—a new paradigm, which has to understand completely how a new body can be oriented by a subjective process without separation and without identification. So we have to maintain the distance between the trace of an event and the construction of the body.I show you once more my revendication which is, you can understand now, is a revendification of a new subjective paradigm. Give me a new subjective paradigm. And so you can see that if the subject is completely an identity with the body there is no real difference between the trace and the body. And so, finally, the subject is completely in the world. If you have a complete separation between the subject and the body, the subject is completely on the side of the trace, and so it is completely dependent on the event as an absolute event, an event which is outside the world. So on one side, the subject is completely in the world and it is an experimentation of the limit of the world, and on the other side, it is completely outside the world and so it is on the side of something like an absolute event, and so something as god, like god. Can you understand? So in the two subjective paradigms of the contemporary war we find the subjective process as a complete immanent situation and in distinction with the world, or complete separation and in distinction with the radical absolute event. We can see in the two paradigms that we cannot have something like a real process of production without experimentation of the limits, finally, of death in the life of the world, or you have something like transcendency and religious determination. So the question of the subject of art is really to maintain the distinction between the body on one side and the trace of the event on the other side. And so we have, I think, to solve something like five problems. So it's a criterium of size that I give to you to solve five problems.First one, first problem—if really the subjective process as a process of creation is in the field of a distance (but an un-separated distance) between the trace and the body we have to interpret the event as an affirmative one and not as a purely disappearing or transcendent thing. If really the trace of the event is in the constitution of the subject, but not reducible to the body, we have to understand that an event, a real event is something affirmative. And it's a complex question because certainly there is a sort of disappearing of the event, and event is a split, a break of the law of the world. So what is the relation in a real event between the negative dimension—rupture, break, split, as you want—and the affirmative necessity if really an event is not absolute and real event? So we have to think of an event, and for example, of an artistic event, as something like an affirmative split. It's the first problem.The second problem is the very nature of the trace—the trace of an event if an event is something like an affirmative split. What is a trace? And it is a very complex distinction because a trace has to be in the world. The event is not exactly in the world, but the trace has to be in the world. And so, what is the trace? What is the real trace, which is in the world but which is in relation with the event as affirmative split? It's the second big problem.The third problem is—what is the constitution of the new body? Because naturally we have in the case of the subjective process something like the new body. Only a new body is in the possible disposition to have something new in the creation in relation to the trace of the event. The trace of the event is not reducible to the body, but the body is not reducible to the world. Once more, once more. (showing figure) You can see that if the subjective process is really in the distance of the trace and the body, we have to interpret the construction of the body as the new body because if the body is not the new body it is completely in the world and it's not in relation, in complete relation to the trace of the event as an affirmative split in direction of the world. So the third problem is—what is a new body in the world? What is a new composition of multiplicities? What is really something, which is the support of the subjective process, the support of a trace? That is the third problem.The fourth problem is the question of consequences. We have a new body. We have a relation to the trace of an event, so we have something which is materialist creation, the process of materialist creation of something new. What are the consequences of all that and how can we be in the discipline of the consequences? Because naturally, if there is something new in the subjective process we have to accept the incorporation in the new body and so the discipline of the consequences, of the practical consequences of the new body.And the final problem is to find something like an immanent infinity because if the subjective process is something like a new creation in the world we have an infinity of consequences. We cannot have an experimentation of the limits, precisely. We are not in the first paradigm which is experimentation of the limits. In fact, there are no limits. There are potentially—virtually (to speak as Deleuze)—we have virtually an infinity of consequences. But this infinity is not a transcendent one; it's an immanent infinity. It is the infinity of the body itself in relation to the trace. So we have to understand what is an immanent infinity and not a transcendent infinity. So our five problems are: event as an affirmative split. What is exactly the trace of an event? What does the constitution in the world of the new body mean? How can we accept the discipline of consequences? And what is an immanent infinity? And that is the questions we have to solve to say something about the artistic subject.So I have to solve the five problems. Or I have to say something about the possibility of solving the five problems, but in the artistic field, not in general—not in general since the problem is absolute… It concerns all types of subjective processes. But what is the question in the artistic field? (drawing diagram)…First, we have to say what is an artistic world. What is a world of art? Something like that is our first question, our preliminary question. I propose to say that a world is an artistic one, a situation of art, a world of art when it proposes to us a relation between chaotic disposition of sensibility and what is acceptable as a form. So an artistic situation, in general, is always something like relation between a chaotic disposition of sensibility in general (what is in the physical, what is in the audible, and in general) and what is a form. So it's a relation (an artistic world) between sensibility and form. And it's finally a proposition between the split of sensibility, between what is formalism—what can be formalized of the sensibility—and what cannot. So, it's something like that. (drawing diagram) 'S' is sensibility, 'F' is form, so the general formula for an artistic world is sensibility in the disposition of relation between what is a form and what is not a form. So something like that, very simple. So when we have something like an experimentation of relation of that type between sensibility and form we have something like general artistic situation. It's a completely abstract definition, but you can see the nature of the definition. So, if you want, the state of affairs in the artistic world is always a relation between something like our experimentation of chaotic sensibility in general, and the distinction, which is a moving distinction, between form and inform, or something like that. And so we experiment with an artistic situation when we experiment with something which is in the relation between sensibility, form, and inform. But if this is true, what is an artistic event? What is the general formula for an artistic event? We can say that, generally speaking, an artistic event, a real artistic event is a change in the formula of the world. So it's a fundamental transformation of that sort of formula. So it's something like the becoming formal of something which was not. It's the emergence of a new possibility of formalization, or if you want, it's an acceptance like form of something which was inform. It's the becoming form of something which was not a form. And so it's a new current in the chaotic sensibility. It's a new disposition of the immanent relation between chaotic sensibility and formalization. And we can have something like that, which is, if you want, the event—the artistic event as an affirmative split. (drawing figure) This time, 'S' is always sensibility, 'F' is form and 'F1' is the new disponibilité of the formalization. And so you have something like that when you have an artistic event. Sensibility is organized in a new way because something which was inform—that is, a symbol of negation, we have negation (drawing) yeah?—something which was inform, or no formalization is accepted as a new form. So we have here the becoming of inform in something which is formalism and the split is with the new negation of form, which is the negation of F1. So that is exactly the general form of an artistic event as an affirmative split. Why is it an affirmative split? It's a split because we always have relation between affirmative form and negative one. What is formalist—what is accepted as a form and what is not accepted as a form. So it's a split in the chaotic sensibility between form and inform, but it's a new determination of the split, affirmative split, because something which was in negation is in affirmation. Something which was not a form becomes something like a form. So we are really in an artistic event. Something (showing diagram)… so we can see the affirmative idea of the split is when something which was in the negation, part of the formalist impossibility, becomes affirmative possibility. So we can say that in the field of artistic creation the affirmative split is finally something like a new disposition between what is a form and what is not. And the becoming in a positive form of something which was not a form is the affirmative dimension of an artistic event.What is a body? What is the construction of a new body? A new body in the artistic field is something like a real concrete creation—a work of art, performances, all that you want—but which are in relation with the trace of the event. The trace of the event is something like that—the declaration always that something really is a form, that something new of the dignity of the work of art—and that is the trace. The trace is something like a manifesto, if you want, something like a new declaration, something which says, "this was not a form and it's really now a form." That is the declaration, so the trace of the event. And a new body is something like a work of art, which is in relation with that sort of trace. And often in the field of artistic creation is a new school, a new tendency. There is, generally speaking, some names—names of a school, names of a tendency, names of a new fashion as a dimension of artistic creation—and that is a new body. It's a new body, which is in the world, in the artistic world, in the new artistic world. It's the creation of something new in the artistic world in correlation to the trace. And we understand what is the discipline of consequences in the artistic field—discipline of consequences is a new subjective process, is something like really a new experimentation, a new experimentation of the forms, a new experimentation of the relation between the forms and chaotic sensibility. And so it's the same of the new school, of the new tendency, of the new forms of creation, of artistic creation.And the very interesting problem is the final problem: what is, in all that, the immanent infinity? What is the creation, in an artistic subjective field, of a new existence of infinite? I think in the artistic field the immanent infinity is finally something like the infinity of the form itself. And what is infinity of the form itself? It's the possibility that the new form—the new possibility of the form—is in relation, in direct relation with the chaotic sensibility. And a new form is always a new access, a new manner, a new entry, a new access in the chaotic of sensibility. And so we can say that in the artistic field the creation of forms is really the movement of immanent infinity, is really an access of the infinity of the world as such. And so we are really in the development of a new tendency, so, of a new body in the artistic field, something like a new development of immanent infinity. It's not only something else; it's a new manner of thinking of the infinite itself. And it is why it is very important today to have something like new artistic experimentation because I think that the political question today is very obscure. I was saying that our problem is to find something which is not in the field of the war between enjoyment and sacrifice, to find something which is really a third subjective paradigm. I think that is the specific responsibility of artistic creation—this search—because often when political determination are obscure artistic determinations clarify the situation. And so as a philosopher, I can say to you (and I think a number of you have a relation to the artistic world, the artistic field) there really is today a specific responsibility of artistic creation, which is to help humanity to find the new subjective paradigm. So the subject of art is not only the creation of a new process in its proper field, but it's also a question of war and peace, because if we don't find the new paradigm—the new subjective paradigm—the war will be endless. And if we want peace—real peace—we have to find the possibility that subjectivity is really in infinite creation, infinite development, and not in the terrible choice between one form of the power of death (experimentation of the limits of pleasure) and another form of the power of death (which is sacrifice for an idea, for an abstract idea). That is I think, the contemporary responsibility of artistic creation. Thank you.