Jan+5th

What is Activism? Other names for activists used throughout history: witches, rebels, communists, revolutionaries, terrorists, dissidents, anarchists, globalophobics… Activism is the desire to bring social and political change. Genealogy of Modern activism: the French Revolution; 1789: topple (to bring down) the French monarchy and instituting the republic. Citizens, human rights declaration. Before: the subjects of the monarch were //slaves//. Bourgeoisie: a group of people with privileges (wealth) that were not part of the aristocracy took over power;
 * Introduction**

What is Visual Culture? Sensible: visibilities and invisibilities; what is made visible? (everything; democracy and transparency) How to see and how to render visible. What is the relationship between visual, literary, artistic production and political or social action? How do they relate or not? à Course about the relationship between social and political change and //sensible// production (literature, mass media, art, film).

What is Politics? A space where our interests are negotiated; they are negotiated by representatives (political parties, politicians) The space of co-existence of antagonistic interests. What is the //political//? The right and the capacity we all have to express and negotiate our interests. It is the capacity to speak for our selves or for others in the political space. Gap: Between power and the people is wider and wider. Where is the political space? Ancient Greece: the //polis//; discuss, express one’s opinion. We could say that the media has taken the role of the political space today –problematic. What is democracy? “Democracy” implies a form of government based on public liberties and a way of individual life based on “free choice.” People are free to chose their own government. The ruler: is “one of the people” (not a monarch or a dictator above the people); This goes along with the reign of the free market. (No state-intervention in production, consumption, etc.) Rights of man: the right to be happy, the right to be a consumer. The right of consumers to any kind of consumption. (all traditional institutions and forms of authority are dissolved by the free market) Democracy: the power of the individual consumer to satisfy her needs and desires. Democratic equality: the equality between seller and buyer.

What does it mean to act within the democratic state? To express our dissent; freedom of speech. Sometimes it becomes necessary to act outside of the democratic state. (terrorism, anarchy) THe oppressed are the slaves; master-slave dialectic The world of masters and slaves The world of fear and anxiety (private/public) Coetzee: “Whereas the slave fears only pain, what the free man fears most is shame… morality: How in the face of this shame to which I am subjected do I behave? How do I save my honour?

What is oppression? What is terrorism? What is resistance?

Questions we will ask: “What to do?” “What are the problems” What is the difference between acting, speaking, seeing, knowing, speaking? Praxis: to speak out; to exercise one’s right to speak truth to power. Poiesis: is to express something minding address and technique. Tecne: “To cause to appear” and to “produce into presence” (representation) Can we speak on behalf of others; solidarize with others… speak for ourselves;

à Some sessions will focus on the problem of the relationship between technique, form and content (Praxis and poiesis); how they have been articulated; other courses on concrete socio-political problems and ways in which they have been made visible and hearable; the media, contemporary art, literature, poetry.

What does it mean to take over power? Examples: the French Revolution (1789), the Mexican Revolution (1910), the Russian Revolution (1917); movements of de-colonization, independence of the nation-states. Movements for rights: nineties anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. What is the revolution? (Divine violence: creation of the state, to begin tabula rasa) To re-instate a new order, a new nation that would function on the basis of different principles than the previous ones. For example: The republic substituted the monarchy; Cuban Revoluton in 1959: to take the power away from the rich… socialist regime based on the sharing of the //common goods// and resources.

Che Guevara conceived revolutionary violence as a “work of love”: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.” Therein resides the core of revolutionary justice, this much misused term: harshness of the measures taken, sustained by love. Does this not recall Christ’s scandalous words from Luke (”if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters - yes even his own life - he cannot be my disciple”(Luke 14:26)) which point in exactly the same direction as another Che’s famous quote? “You may have to be tough, but do not lose your tenderness. You may have to cut the flowers, but it will not stop the Spring.” This Christian stance is the very opposite of the Oriental attitude of non-violence which - as we know from the long history of Buddhist rulers and warriors - can legitimize the worst violence. It is not that the revolutionary violence “really” aims at establishing a non-violent harmony; on the contrary, the authentic revolutionary liberation is much more directly identified with violence - it is violence as such (the violent gesture of discarding, of establishing a difference, of drawing a line of separation) which liberates. Freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance, but the very violent act which disturbs this balance. Is it possible to change the world, things, bring social betterment without taking over power?

Against capitalism. What is capitalism? An economic system or a system of command and deployment of power? Neo-liberalism as a state apparatus has as a fundamental mission to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation. Creation of wealth and improved well-being of the population. Market, production are “freed” from institutional restraints (trade unions) Before: politics of re-distribution; control over the free-mobility of capital, public expenditure (in the form of subsidies) and welfare state WITH capital accumulation. Neo-liberalism: deregulation of the economy;

Examples:

à In “social democracies” the government has already instituted mechanisms that seek to bring social change and betterment; for example? What is the state? What is the state’s relationship to corporations? à The state: is a form of social relations, of organization, a way of doing things. à What is the relationship between the state and capitalism? à What is a socialist state? (Common good) à Neo-liberalism: Unmediated economic intervention; mention the lobby in downtown Toronto and Detroit. à What is capitalism? An other form of social organization; profit, sign value takes over exchange value; accumulation of capital. à Capitalism as a system: Inscribes you within the process of production; imposes an image on you, a series of needs and desires, debt… in the regime of capitalism we exist as consumers; everything around us: to compel us to consume. Self-determination; the “alternative”; attempts have been made to exist outside of the capitalist-state system. Examples: Squats, communes, self-sufficiency and barter. Alternative productive activity within capitalism. Social determination of production and distribution from the bottom up (grass roots) as opposed as from the above or from the center. à We (Canada) live in a social democracy: “What is there to be done?” Where is the oppression? Left and right; liberals and republicans à A worthy world; criticality; problematization, to ask questions.

The myth of competitivity AND failure; failure due to lack of competitivity; “If conditions among the lower classes deterorated this was because they failed, usually for personal and cultural reasons, to enghance their own human capital (through dedication to education, the acquisition of the protestant work ethic, submission to work discipline and flexibility, etc.) “Only the fittest will survive” Privatization and commodification of public goods; -opening new fields for accumulation that were off-limits before like: water, telecommunications, transportation, social housing, education, health care, pensions, universities, research laboratories, prisons, army. Strategies: deliberate creation of unemployment to produce a pool of low wage surplus labor convenient for further accumulation; (creation of crises)

Neo-liberalism and human rights: correspond to each other as the two movements that are deeply implicated in each other; neo-liberal insistence upon the individual as the foundational and essentialist element in political-economic life does open the door to extensive individual rights activism. Legal action as opposed to solidarity; the state or other organisms are responsible for the other as opposed to the self (send your parents to an asylum)

Advocacy groups and NGOs:

Alain Joxe, “The Empire of Disorder,” (//Hatred of Capitalism//) Today: no revolutions are being fought; “divine violence” has become ethnic cleansing (Joxe)

Forms of activism contemplating the catastrophe: “human-shields”, international observers, journalists, human rights workers. In Gaza: all journalists were kicked out about 5 months ago; activists came in by boat and are reporting from there; witnessing the massacres and accompanying doctors and ambulances everywhere. Foreigners were given the option to leave before Israel invaded the strip but they chose to stay. www.palsolidarity.com Definition of activist: Vocal advocates for justice and peace, opposing publicly and overtly the forces of violence and oppression. Rachel Corrie: got killed while trying to stop one of the daily house demolitions by the Israeli Defense Force in Gaza, in 2003. She was 23. The house of a doctor; a bulldozer; a figure that was killed by the force of violence and oppression which she opposed non-violently. Risk their lives (sacrifice): The risk of being punished, isolated, injured or killed. à What is to “preach to the converted”? “To fall out of step with one’s tribe” alienation, dissidence; unpatriotic.

Fear: as that which binds people, a community. (Fear is public); anxiety is private; fear isolates. Fear for the other, for the unknown, for danger; //do not talk to strangers//. Risk

à To take a camera, go and film: palsolidarity.com; to “witness” as a form of activist intervention. Contemplating a dead body; showing a dead body; diffusing images of a dead body. Journalists as professional witnesses. Activists as alternative journalists. (Gaza slide-show)

à Bearing witness: Mild intervention, non-consequential. When we contemplate a dead body: it recedes (pulls back) from us. What is the difference of a dead body from World War 2 and the killings in Gaza?

Not only to denounce, but to say no, to say, enough. It takes “moral courage”; it is “honor” (above, Coetzee)

à What does it mean to resist? The content of the resistance determines its merit, its moral necessity. Resistance to a criminal war. Resistance to the occupation of one’s or other’s land. à Refuseniks said no; resistance, civil disobedience. à Athens 2008; Paris 2005; Contradictions Thoreau's going to prison in 1846 for refusing to pay the poll tax in protest against the American war on Mexico hardly stopped the war. A movement in the late 1980s to shut down the Nevada Test Site, a key location for the nuclear arms race, failed in its goal; the operations of the test site were unaffected by the protests. But it led directly to the formation of a movement of protesters in faraway Alma Ata, who eventually succeeded in shutting down the main Soviet test site in Kazakhstan, citing the Nevada antinuclear activists as their inspiration and expressing solidarity with the Native Americans on whose land the Nevada Test Site had been located.

Groups fighting for the rights of the dispossessed or the oppressed.

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community. To lead liberation movements (Che Guevara, Marcos, Ghandi)

Emile Zola’s letter “J’accuse” (I denounce) from 1898 Alfred Dreyfus: an army officer that was brought to trial under false accusations. An open letter to the French president in a newspaper; denounces anti-Semitism; false accusation of spying. Zola was brought to trial and sentenced but he fled to England. Anarchist acts: Courbet: Paris Commune in 1871 proposed that they dismantle the Vendome column in Paris –symbolizes Napoleon’s colonialist expansion –who is on top of the column. They dismantled it and Courbet was made responsible with the expenses of rebuilding it.

To speak truth to power, to make people aware; à To protest, to reveal To reveal and scandal; revelation of wrongdoing: it does not lead to anything definitive. Scandal as a commercial or sensationalist fact. To be “informed” as a way to be expiated from guilt. (forgiven)

Activism, visuality, the visual; images of war: What is the difference between “Hell”? from //Notre musique//? And this: http://pa.photoshelter.com/c/apollo/gallery-slideshow/G0000rh2OcPb0PKM/?start=

What is responsibility for others, Am I responsible for my neighbor? (Why should I when the government through diplomacy and NGOs does the job to preserve human rights?)

The derealization of the other: “Precarious Life”; a way in which through various mechanisms, the West and North America present others in the global regime of sensibilities as underdeveloped, incapable of organizing themselves politically, as being responsible for their own incapacity to overcome poverty, corruption and fanaticism. The “evil” other.

à Oppressed, us, precarious life: well-intended, nice people form rich countries.

How do people organize? How are voices organized? A critical mass… opposition. What is emancipation? The people, citizens, crowds, masses, multitude. Bare life or precarious life;

Move toward Geopolitics: Is Geo-politics possible? How to create interconnections in the global world, restoring a sense of universality and intelligibility? No distinction in the global world between journalism and visual practice (art pieces from photographs of horrors, documentaries, anti-war protests); visual practice as the supplement of journalism. à aesthetics was often implemented in the past as a means of producing political consciousness. But today, the universality of the protest for human rights or people’s autonomy appears to be absorbed by another universality: the universality of the commodity, or rather a certain idea of the universality of the commodity. Indifference: the indifference of what falls into the garbage can. What falls into the garbage in turn can be identified with the equivalence of the commodity, which in turn can be identified with the democratic equivalence of anybody with anybodies in the name of which shells are thrown against those who refuse it but set to work, in attacking it, another equivalence; __the equivalence between war and spectacle__ . What is bio-power?

à What is “emancipation” (overcome political, economic, gender, racial constraints imposed)

To speak truth to power: truth is something everyone knows; and power does not listen. Denounce, show, to know about injustice: create consensus. Consensus governs. (What the majority thinks, sees, the majority of opinion; it is agreement) What is consensus? What “consensus” means is the agreement between sense and sense: I mean it is the agreement on what we can perceive and of the meaning of what we can perceive. As a way of government consensus says: there can be different interests, values and aspirations but there is only one reality that we can experience and there is only one sense that we can give to that reality. The relationship between the visual, artistic production, and social or political change is about putting in the unique common world of the consensual logics several worlds, conflicting worlds. To create disagreement, antagonism.