ALAN MOORE with Kathy Battista

[NOTE: The interview with Alan Moore was originally published in The Brooklyn Rail (click link below), on the occasion of the publication of his new book (click image above)]

[LINK]

[EXCERPT]:

I thought that creative people in the U.S., especially academics, became excessively timid under eight years of Bush. They could no longer insist on anything. What I always tried to say to folks was “get crusty.” Insist on what you want, because what creative people want is what other folks need. In that sense, I believe in the vanguard idea. Now, with the Occupy movement, people are again in motion toward their dreams. That is so encouraging! So now I think I have less to say to Americans and more to listen to.

Commune plus one

By James Panero

On Occupy Wall Street & the legacy of the Paris Commune.

November 2011, for the New Criterion

[LINK]

They were madmen, but they had in them that little flame which never dies.
—Pierre-Auguste Renoir

[EXCERPT]

Occupy Wall Street is but the latest revival of a spectacle that has been performed many times before—not necessarily in the Arab Spring, which saw regimes toppled through political means, but in certain incarnations of idealistic vision that emerged out of a seventy-two-day experiment in Paris nearly a century and a half ago. Before there were the Tompkins Square Park riots, the student takeovers of 1968, or Occupy Wall Street, there was the Paris Commune of 1871.

The Arts of Occupation

By Yates McKee

The Arts of Occupation appeared in The Nation on December 11, 2011.

[EXCERPT]

A certain suspicion regarding art as a specialized realm is encoded into the DNA of OWS, partly reflecting the influence of the Situationist International (SI). A group of experimental writers, urbanists and filmmakers whose work played an important role in instigating the Parisian uprising of May 1968, the SI called for artists to abandon their vocations as individual creators of luxury objects in favor of collectivized praxis. Drawing on the legacies of Dada and Surrealist collage, the Situationist principle of detournement called for the hijacking of capitalist images, objects and spaces in order to turn them against their intended meaning or function.

Common notions, part 1: workers-inquiry, co-research, consciousness-raising

[From European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies]

[Link HERE]

[Excerpt]:

Throughout contemporary history, it is possible to trace a persistent distrust, on the part of movements for social transformation, towards certain forms of knowledge production and distribution. On the one hand, a distrust towards those sciences that aid a better organisation of command and exploitation, as well as distrust towards the mechanisms of capture of minor knowledges (underground, fermented in uneasiness and insubordinations, fed by processes of autonomous social co-operation or rebelliousness1) on the part of those agencies in charge of guaranteeing governmentality. On the other hand, in many cases, there has been distrust towards those supposedly “revolutionary” ideological and iconic forms of knowledge and a distrust of possible intellectualist and idealist mutations of knowledges that initially were born at the heart of the movements themselves. This distrust has lead to impotence in some occasions. In those processes of struggle and self-organisation that have been the most vivid and dynamic, there has been an incentive to produce their own knowledges, languages and images, through procedures of articulation between theory and praxis, starting from a concrete reality, proceeding from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract. The goal is that of creating an appropriate and operative theoretical horizon, very close to the surface of the ‘lived’, where the simplicity and concreteness of elements from which it has emerged, achieve meaning and potential.