#But then in the face of The Immanent Death Of Free Will

[sophieswundergarten]

It's always bothered me that we don't get to know what happened to that kid who was mistaken for Reynie when he got caught spying on the Executives and Recruiters.

Because, we know very few things about him:

He was a Messenger, and a candidate for an Executive in the future

He was a "special recruit" (Read: kidnapped and brainwashed child)

He was curious, and asking questions got him sent to the Waiting Room at least once

He was likely going to be retrained as a Helper, so he's probably an older teen

He's average looking

What else?? What happened to him??? Is he okay? Did he really end up being one of the Helpers and then Mr. Benedict gave him his memories back?

I've been thinking about him so much.

I've been calling him "Digory Hallows"; "Digory" being a French name meaning "lost one", and "Hallows" an English surname meaning "hollow". Also it just sounds like an MBS character name.

And I have decided that Milligan probably just rescued him in his spare time on the island and forgot to tell the other kids because there was so much going on.

He was moving around the Institute, pretending to be a Helper and trying to blend in, when he saw this kid getting taken away to get his brain swept. He's not super close, so for a minute Milligan also mistakes him for Reynie, and he starts panicking because How on earth did the kid get caught, I thought they were fine? Does this mean the others (Kate) are in trouble too?

So he runs over and takes out the Executives/Ten Men who have a hold of the kid, and part way through he realises from behaviour/lack of recognition/general demeanor that this kid isn't Reynie. But, he's not about to leave something half-finished, and the kid needs help anyway, so he finishes dealing with the situation. He then just kind of looks at this boy who is Clearly Not Reynie, and awkwardly introduces himself as "someone who will help".

The kid doesn't have any good information about the Whisperer, since he didn't have the background that Mr. Benedict gave the team, so after he relays a few details about the building set up and directions, Milligan helps him sneak onto a supply ship and escape. He also tells him to check in with some people they have connections with, so the boy isn't totally alone when he gets to the mainland.

And then the normal sequence of events proceeds and Milligan gets captured, etc., meanwhile Digory goes on to be the most accomplished useless side character ever, and gets a job on the Shortcut! Eventually, he makes his way back to Mr. Benedict and gets whatever memories he may have lost restored, but by then he's seen the world, and he settles down in Stonetown to be a journalist.

He does cross paths with Reynie and the others when he gets back, since Milligan checks in to see how he's doing, and Kate points out how similar the two look. At which point the whole story comes out, and Reynie apologises profusely, but Digory waves him off. He would have been stuck with Curtain for much longer if Milligan hadn't gotten him out, and he probably wouldn't have been able to see how bad things were going until it was too late.

As it is, he's happy with where he ended up. He can put his curiosity to good use and help people now, but he acknowledges that he was in way over his head at the Institute, and he wouldn't have been able to do what the kids did. However, he does help interview the Helpers and other ex-Messengers, and tries to get the information out about all the good Mr. Benedict did as much as he can.

[flesh-is-the-fever]

"Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers (...) But the historical development of the antagonisms, immanent in a given form of production, is the only way in which that form of production can be dissolved and a new form established. “Ne sutor ultra crepidam”* — this nec plus ultra of handicraft wisdom became sheer nonsense, from the moment the watchmaker Watt invented the steam-engine, the barber Arkwright, the throstle, and the working-jeweller, Fulton, the steamship." – Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 15

*Latin: "Do not go to the shoemaker for anything more than shoes" (literally "the shoemaker is not above the shoe")

[politicalhobbyist]

The Doctrine of Fascism

Benito Mussolini 1932

From Michael J. Oakeshott: The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe, pp. 164-8. Copyright 1939 by Cambridge University Press.

Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Duce of fascist Italy from 1922 to 1945, needs no introduction. The following selections are from his article entitled “The Doctrine of Fascism” which appeared in the Italian Encyclopedia of 1932.

THERE IS no concept of the State which is not fundamentally a concept of life: philosophy or intuition, a system of ideas which develops logically or is gathered up into a vision or into a faith, but which is always, at least virtually, an organic conception of the world.

1. Thus fascism could not be understood in many of its practical manifestations as a party organization, as a system of education, as a discipline, if it were not always looked at in the light of its whole way of conceiving life, a spiritualized way. The world seen through Fascism is not this material world which appears on the surface, in which man is an individual separated from all others and standing by himself, and in which he is governed by a natural law that makes him instinctively live a life of selfish and momentary pleasure. The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, binding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instinct for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty a higher life free from the limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies.

...

3. Therefore it is a spiritualized conception, itself the result of the general reaction of modem times against the flabby materialistic positivism of the nineteenth century. Anti-positivistic, but positive: not skeptical, nor agnostic, nor pessimistic, nor passively optimistic, as arc, in general, the doctrines (all negative) that put the centric of life outside man, who with his free will can and must create his own world. Fascism desires an active man, one engaged in activity with all his energies: it desires a man virilely conscious of the difficulties that exist in action and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle, considering that it behooves man to conquer for himself that life truly worthy of him, creating first of all in himself the instrument (physical, moral, intellectual) in order to construct it. Thus for the single individual, thus for the nation, thus for humanity. Hence the high value of culture in all its forms (art, religion, science), and the enormous importance of education. Hence also the essential value of work, with which man conquers nature and creates the human world (economic, political, moral, intellectual).

4. This positive conception of life is clearly an ethical conception. It covers the whole of reality, not merely the human activity which controls it. No action can be divorced from moral judgment; there is nothing in the world which can be deprived of the value which belongs to everything in its relation to moral ends. Life, therefore, as conceived by the Fascist, is serious, austere, religious: the whole of it is poised in a world supported by the moral and responsible forces of the spirit. The Fascist disdains the “comfortable” life.

5. Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a system of government is also, and above all, a system of thought.

6. Fascism is an historical conception in which man is what he is only in so far as he works with the spiritual process in which he finds himself, in the family or social group, in the nation and in the history in which all nations collaborate. From this follows the great value of tradition, in memories, in language, in customs, in the standards of social life. Outside history man is nothing. consequently Fascism is opposed to all the individualistic abstractions of a materialistic nature like those of the eighteenth century; and it is opposed to all Jacobin utopias and innovations. It does not consider that “happiness” is possible upon earth, as it appeared to be in the desire of the economic literature of the eighteenth century, and hence it rejects all teleological theories according to which mankind would reach a definitive stabilized condition at a certain period in history. This implies putting oneself outside history and life, which is a continual change and coming to be. Politically, Fascism wishes to be a realistic doctrine; practically, it aspires to solve only the problems which arise historically of themselves and that of themselves find or suggest their own solution. To act among men, as to act in the natural world, it is necessary to enter into the process of reality and to master the already operating forces.

7. Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man in his historical existence. It is opposed to classical Liberalism, which arose from the necessity of reacting against absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of the real man, and not of that abstract puppet envisaged by individualistic Liberalism, Fascism is for liberty. And for the only liberty which can be a real thing, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value,-outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.

8. Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor groups (political parties, associations, syndicates, classes). Therefore Fascism is opposed to Socialism, which confines the movement of history within the class struggle and ignores the unity of classes established in one economic and moral reality in the State; . . .

9. Individuals form classes according to the similarity of their interests, they form syndicates according to differentiated economic activities within these interests; but they form first, and above all, the State, which is not to be thought of numerically as the sum-total of individuals forming the majority of a nation. And consequently Fascism is opposed to Democracy, which equates the nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of that majority; nevertheless it is the purest form of democracy if the nation is conceived, as it should be, qualitatively and not quantitatively, as the most powerful idea (most powerful because most moral, most coherent, most true) which acts within the nation as the conscience and the will of a few, even of One, which ideal tends to become active within the conscience and the will of all — that is to say, of all those who rightly constitute a nation by reason of nature, history or race, and have set out upon the same line of development and spiritual formation as one conscience and one sole will. Not a race, nor a geographically determined region, but as a community historically perpetuating itself a multitude unified by a single idea, which is the will to existence and to power: consciousness of itself, personality.

10. This higher personality is truly the nation in so far as it is the State. It k not the nation that generates the State, as according to the old naturalistic concept which served as the basis of the political theories of the national States of the nineteenth century. Rather the nation is created by the State, which gives to the people, conscious of its own moral unity, a will and therefore an effective existence. The right of a nation to independence derives not from a literary and ideal consciousness of its own being, still less from a more or less unconscious and inert acceptance of a de facto situation, but from an active consciousness, from a political will in action and ready to demonstrate its own rights: that is to say, from a state already coming into being. The State, in fact, as the universal ethical will, is the creator of right.

1 l. The nation as the State is an ethical reality which exists and lives in so far as it develops. To arrest its development is to kill it. Therefore the State is not only the authority which governs and gives the form of laws and the value of spiritual life to the wills of individuals, but it is also a power that makes its will felt abroad, making it known and respected, in other words demonstrating the fact of its universality in all the necessary directions of its development. It is consequently organization and expansion, at least virtually. Thus it can be likened to the human will which knows no limits to its development and realizes itself in testing its own limitlessness.

12. The Fascist State, the highest and most powerful form of personality, is a force, but a spiritual force, which takes over all the forms of the moral and intellectual life of man. It cannot therefore confine itself simply to the functions of order and supervision as Liberalism desired. It is not simply a mechanism which limits the sphere of the supposed liberties of the individual. It is the form, the inner standard and the discipline of the whole person; it saturates the will as well as the intelligence. Its principle, the central inspiration of the human personality living in the civil community, pierces into the depths and makes its home in the heart of the man of action as well as of the thinker, of the artist as well as of the scientist: it is the soul of the soul.

13. Fascism, in short, is not only the giver of laws and the founder of institutions, but the educator and promoter of spiritual life. It wants to remake, not the forms of human life, but its content, man, character, faith. And to this end it requires discipline and authority that can enter into the spirits of men and there govern unopposed. Its sign, therefore, is the Lictors’ rods, the symbol of unity, of strength and justice.

On Myth

The following statement is embedded in a speech delivered by Mussolini at Naples, October 24, 1912:

WE HAVE created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not necessary that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest.

I preface this with saying, yes I have read Hannah Arendt, yes I have read Adorno, yes I have read the holocaust museum’s list of 12 signs to look for in fascism, yada yada.

My question is for those worried about the watering down of the definition of fascism:

Can you concisely tell me the definition of fascism?

Can you do it without telling me to read books and articles I have already read?

Can you do it without pointing to previously existing parties?

Could you point to it in a new regime if an expert didn’t already tell you it was fascist?

Would the aforementioned fascists agree?

If you cannot do this, what watering down are you exactly worried about?

If you can do it, does it bother you how few people can?

[meansofgrace]

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

David Bentley Hart, “Tsunami and Theodicy”

[elias-rights]

What do you think is the most 'human' part of Jonalias?

Human is a very abstract quality, isn't it? It's a bit ironic that the monsters considered antithetical to humanity are sustained by human fear, I've always thought. The line is explicitly blurred in canon, which we see as early as with Jane Prentiss and her terrified devotion.

But I think I know what you mean. Pain, death, and fear are immanent to the human condition; the desire to transcend these shackles is, therefore, the drive to become inhuman (this must not be equated with being evil; the only reason why Jonah's actions can be considered immoral is that his method for approaching divinity requires the suffering of others, not that there is something intrinsically wrong with not wanting to be human or an inherent moral purity or impurity in humanity). Ironically, this urge, actuated by fear, is in itself very human.

So, I'd say that the closer Jonah becomes to freeing himself of the weight of death the further away he gets from his humanity, and vice versa. Jonah is, in my opinion, a human person trying to carve himself into a god, and the closest he comes to his goal is when the Beholding makes him a part of its apotheosis. He becomes one with the sickening dread that has always haunted him, but it doesn't sink its claws into him; it merely passes through him because it recognises him as one of its own. To escape death, he must embrace it, wield it, and become it.

So I'd say Jonah is mostly human, especially since his motivation is fundamentally human. And he's at his most human in the moments after his agonised bliss is interrupted and he's faced with the reality of his imminent death; whatever criticisms I have of how that scene was written, there's something very poetic about that.

[laceymorganwrites]

WOAH 1.8K??? That's amazing ace congrats aaaaa ok so I think I'm gonna do the lyric thing. Law and 'All I am is a man, I want the world in my hands'? (from sweater weather haha it's one of my favorite lyrics) thank you and ily <3

aaaah Lunes!!! Thank u sm~ (btw is it aight if I call u that?)

gfood song choice, I like it too and honestly...it fits his character very well

Word count: 588

Warnings: swearing maybe, uuuh bad thoughts? insecurities?

Law was tired. Of himself, of others, of silly dreams.

They all went to dust anyway. Life never went as planned and it frustrated him.

He was too young to feel this tired.

But then again he experienced at least ten people´s worth of bad luck and experiences.

His baggage was just about too heavy to carry at this point, but still he did. Because he had no other choice.

Of course he could always accept help, but that meant sharing his thoughts and past and nobody who would hear that would stick around, so it was all useless anyway.

And then there were you.

You who never gave up and always had something to say.

Law liked to pretend you were going on his nerves but you really weren´t.

You were challenging him, you were making him want to be alive.

He didn´t want his story to be over, he wanted yours to start, together.

The world you lived in was dangerous and he was done throwing his life away, instead he wanted to protect you, to show you all the beautiful places in the world and go on adventures with you.

He actually wanted to see new islands now, just because he could, because it was what pirates did.

Being a pirate suddenly meant so much more than coming closer to his already achieved goal and rebelling against the world government.

It meant being free and for the first time in his life he understood what that meant, he could actually feel the impact it had… the impact you had on him.

Because maybe love wasn´t so scientific after all. Maybe love was something to actively be experienced rather than calculated and overthought.

It was hard for Law to live this freely, so… spontaneously.

And yet he never thought it would feel this good.

Meeting new people, something he dreaded, exploring new islands, something that was such a bother to him before, now it was just every day life.

Oh and how he thrived.

Somehow it was much more fulfilling living a happy life to spite his enemies than to die for his dreams.

Especially with you by his side.

He loved living for and with you.

Every day was an adventure, but one he knew he would get out alive from.

Not one where he asked himself how anyone could be so stupid and just ignore all the plans and common sense like his temporary alliance with the Strawhats.

Who would´ve thought that life could be this exciting? Exciting in the most positive way, without his immanent anxiety, without second guessing everything and everyone.

Just plain and simple with you.

“What are you thinking of?” you asked, slowly walking up to him.

“Conquering the world” he smirked, making you chuckle.

“Alright, how about something more realistic?” you remarked, crossing your arms and shaking your head, still laughing.

Law could be quite silly sometimes even though he would deny it to his death.

“All I am is a man, I want the world in my hands” he just stated, making you raise an eyebrow.

“You´re so dramatic…” you sighed.

“How about something a bit more manageable?” you said.

“Oh, but it is the easiest thing I could ever dream of doing” he smirked widely and gently placed his hands on your face, softly caressing your cheeks.

“See? Now I got the whole world in my hands” he smiled.

“Trafalgar D. Water Law! You have no right being this cheesy!” you squealed, feeling your cheeks heat up.

[rockislandadultreads]

Reluctant Allies: Enemies Team Up: a reading list

Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger

Four destinies collide in a unique fantasy world of war and wonders, where empire is won with enchanted steel and magical animal companions fight alongside their masters in battle. A soldier with a curse Tala lost her family to the empress’s army and has spent her life avenging them in battle. But the empress’s crimes don’t haunt her half as much as the crimes Tala has committed against the laws of magic... and her own flesh and blood. A prince with a debt Jimuro has inherited the ashes of an empire. Now that the revolution has brought down his kingdom, he must depend on Tala to bring him home safe. But it was his army who murdered her family. Now Tala will be his redemption—or his downfall. A detective with a grudge Xiulan is an eccentric, pipe-smoking detective who can solve any mystery—but the biggest mystery of all is her true identity. She’s a princess in disguise, and she plans to secure her throne by presenting her father with the ultimate prize: the world’s most wanted prince. A thief with a broken heart Lee is a small-time criminal who lives by only one law: Leave them before they leave you. But when Princess Xiulan asks her to be her partner in crime—and offers her a magical animal companion as a reward—she can’t say no, and soon finds she doesn’t want to leave the princess behind. This band of rogues and royals should all be enemies, but they unite for a common purpose: to defeat an unstoppable killer who defies the laws of magic. In this battle, they will forge unexpected bonds of friendship and love that will change their lives—and begin to change the world.

Deception Cove by Owen Laukkanen

Former US Marine Jess Winslow reenters civilian life a new widow, with little more to her name than a falling-down house, a medical discharge for PTSD, and a loyal dog named Lucy. The only thing she actually cares about is that dog, a black-and-white pit bull mix who helps her cope with the devastating memories of her time in Afghanistan. After fifteen years — nearly half his life — in state prison, Mason Burke owns one set of clothes, a wallet, and a photo of Lucy, the service dog he trained while behind bars. Seeking a fresh start, he sets out for Deception Cove, Washington, where the dog now lives. As soon as Mason knocks on Jess's door, he finds himself in the middle of a standoff between the widow and the deputy county sheriff. When Jess's late husband piloted his final "fishing" expedition, he stole and stashed a valuable package from his drug dealer associates. Now the package is gone, and the sheriff's department has seized Jess's dearest possession — her dog. Unless Jess turns over the missing goods, Lucy will be destroyed. The last thing Mason wants is to be dragged back into the criminal world. The last thing Jess wants is to trust a stranger. But neither of them can leave a friend, the only good thing in either of their lives, in danger. To rescue Lucy, they'll have to forge an uneasy alliance. And to avoid becoming collateral damage in someone else's private war, they have to fight back — and find a way to conquer their doubts and fears.

Kingdom of Exiles by Maxym M. Martineau

Exiled beast charmer Leena Edenfrell is in deep trouble. Empty pockets forced her to sell her beloved magical beasts on the black market—an offense punishable by death—and now there's a price on her head. With the realm's most talented murderer-for-hire nipping at her heels, Leena makes him an offer he can't refuse: powerful mythical creatures in exchange for her life. If only it were that simple. Unbeknownst to Leena, the undying ones are bound by magic to complete their contracts, and Noc cannot risk his brotherhood of assassins...not even to save the woman he can no longer live without.

Winter of Ice and Iron by Rachel Neumeier

In this gorgeous, dark fantasy in the spirit of Jacqueline Carey, a princess and a duke must protect the people of their nations when a terrible threat leaves everyone in danger. With the Mad King of Emmer in the north and the vicious King of Pohorir in the east, Kehara Raehema knows her country is in a vulnerable position. She never expected to give up everything she loves to save her people, but when the Mad King’s fury leaves her land in danger, she has no choice but to try any stratagem that might buy time for her people to prepare for war—no matter the personal cost. Hundreds of miles away, the pitiless Wolf Duke of Pohorir, Innisth Eanete, dreams of breaking his people and his province free of the king he despises. But he has no way to make that happen—until chance unexpectedly leaves Kehara on his doorstep and at his mercy. Yet in a land where immanent spirits inhabit the earth, political disaster is not the greatest peril one can face. Now, as the year rushes toward the dangerous midwinter, Kehera and Innisth find themselves unwilling allies, and their joined strength is all that stands between the peoples of the Four Kingdoms and utter catastrophe.

[loveamongthesailors]

“ Should the Haruspex attempt to autopsy her body on Day 11, he will make the curious discovery that Aglaya does not appear to have any organs. However, looting her body reveals she is carrying a Revolver. “

trawling some highly enjoyable patho wiki content. Congratulations Aglaya Lilich on becoming a Body without Organs, with a gun! you go girl!

“Aglaya contends with God. Those she touches begin to rebel against the established order of things. At the same time, Aglaya is the voice of the law. She sees the universe as a machine. She maintains that the logic of the universe is above everything—polyhedrons be damned. To her, contending with God, too, is a form of restoring justice and natural law. Those she touches begin to realize that there are limits of what’s possible, and they must be accepted with humility.”

Humility

“I should have written nothing[1] at all, but it is far too late for that. Sin and guilt[2] have entered the world[3]— never mind where from, since in any case it would do no good to close that box — and I am no longer striding the crests of my dreams, filling my lungs with air and expelling it again, now instead I am manipulating the keys of a machine[4] striving to thus let my dreams pour and play out across the space of an information-obsessed plane of existence.

There exists no good reason[5] to occupy this space, especially when I have the heights and depths of life wholly available to me at any moment, and yet something compels me, God help me.[6] I have no hope that I will save anyone this way. Not even myself. I know I will not even reach to prevent the wretched[7] from abusing whatever I create. It is a fact that to take something from oneself and put it out into the world is to let it escape and become everything you didn’t want it to be. They say this is so for God the Father as for every human father. I do not believe in either one, but their stories both hold a strange beauty for me.

One can create a monster[8] or a babe; the difference is purely aesthetic. But it is this question of creation. Many simply put it aside, to their own loss. They still create things but they deny they are doing so. They are befallen by atrophy.[9] Others take on the question of creation by accepting the market assurance that whatever makes money must be good because, so the logic goes, people buy things that are good.[10] They become lost to the world of production. Others, in reaction to this, turn toward smaller and smaller circles to keep their creatures safe from the real world. But these spaces are either infected by the social disease or else suffocate for lack of oxygen.

There are some rare exceptions. No one can say where they come from. They destroy all that has come before. They blow into a dying ember. Without them there would be nothing at all.

Now, we have to say that the whole world without them would be an empty[11] dull[12] pale[13] and suffocating lifeless and deathless nothingness, and that they themselves are also a nothingness, but an ecstatic explosion of creative destructive nothingness. So it will be worth keeping in mind that there is a huge and unspeakable gap between the qualities of different sorts of nothingness. Otherwise everything will be overcome by an immense confusion.[14]

The first aspect which ensures that there is something interesting rather than nothing is the explosive energy of the sun. The second is the implosive energy of the earth. These provide for the habitation of a thin membrane where their intercourse takes place. Here there exists a tension between them. Much life forms by rebelling against being crushed into the bowels of the earth and the depths of the sea, whether this rebellion is volcanic, evaporative, or organic. Life must protect itself from being lost in the emptiness of space or scorched in the heat of the sun, and so it also flows, crumbles, burrows, glides, swims, falls and floats downward. This might be all, were it not for something else. Organization, organism, orgasm.[15]”

-Musings on Nothingness (And Some of It’s Varieties)

“Producing, a product: a producing/product identity. It is this identity that   constitutes a third term in the linear series: an enormous undifferentiated object. Everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place—and then the whole process will begin all over again. From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through. Will the machines run so badly, their component pieces fall apart to such a point that they will return to nothingness and thus allow us to return to nothingness?

It would seem, however, that the flows of energy are still too closely connected, the partial objects still too organic, for this to happen. What would be required is a pure fluid in a free state, flowing without interruption, streaming over the surface of a full body. Desiring-machines make us an organism; but at the very heart of this production, within the very production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all. "An incomprehensible, absolutely rigid stasis" in the very midst of process, as a third stage: "No mouth. No tongue. No teeth. No larynx. No esophagus. No belly. No anus."

The automata stop dead and set free the unorganized mass they once served to articulate. The full body without organs is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable. Antonin Artaud discovered this one day, finding himself with no shape or form whatsoever, right there where he was at that moment. The death instinct: that is its name, and death is not without a model. For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine. We shall not inquire how all this fits together so that the machine will run: the  question itself is the result of a process of abstraction.”

-Anti-Oedipus ch. 1, “THE DESIRING MACHINES”

I can't stitch it together… but I can cut the knot.

We're all just… dancing on our strings. 

Whenever I trace the edges of possibility on a map, I find myself reaching for an eraser not soon after… 

Imagine a sphere. See it in your mind's eye. Now lay it out flat. Why is that so easy, when topology is so hard?

We live under the shadow of a higher power… I just despise it.

Only a fool would cut the Gordian knot. It ought to be… vivissected.

The squeal of the gears can't halt the machine.

Why do they insist on torturing me?

There is an immutable and rational order that fate itself has composed. All things run their inevitable courses, down the topology of the universe, toward the mass of this black gravity.

Let's open it. Carefully. And tally the contents.

       The judgment of God, the system of the judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism, because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart so He can be first, and have the organism be first. The organism is already that, the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accu­mulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.

The strata are bonds, pincers. “Tie me up if you wish.“ We are continually stratified. But who is this we that is not me, for the subject no less than the organism belongs to and depends on a stratum? Now we have the answer: the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a significa­tion aid a subject—occur. For the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the BwO; it is the BwO that undergoes it. It is in the BwO that the organs enter into the relations of composition called the organism.

The BwO howls: “They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!“ The judgment of God uproots it from its immanence and makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. It is the BwO that is stratified. It swings between two poles, the surfaces of stratifi­cation into which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgment, and the plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to experimentation.

If the BwO is a limit, if one is forever attaining it, it is because behind each stratum, encasted in it, there is always another stratum. For many a stra­tum, and not only an organism, is necessary to make the judgment of God. A perpetual and violent combat between the plane of consistency, which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the sur­faces of stratification that block it or make it recoil.

- “ Deleuze/Guattari; How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs? “

(every morning i listen to confessional, i don’t give a shit bout the bulk ov it, still i keep it professional. and as penance i tell em to proselytize, say the sun is red, say that i am red, say that all their bases belong to us)

The crack Where is the crack? When did I crack?

Then I’ll stand alone on a planet with Nothing left to remember it And I’ll try, I’ll try, I’ll try to prevent it I’ll try, I’ll try, but I’ll never stop it, no

Muzzle me, muzzle muzzle me Bind my will and break of me And you try, you try, you try to prevent it You’ll try, you’ll try, but you’ll never stop it, no

because, laugh if you like, what has been called microbes     is god, and do you know what the Americans and the Russians use to make their atoms? They make them with the microbes of god.

- I am not raving. I am not mad. I tell you that they have  reinvented microbes in order to impose a new idea of god.

They have found a new way to bring out god and to capture him in his        microbic noxiousness.

This is to nail him though the heart, in the place where men love him best, under the guise of unhealthy sexuality, in that sinister appearance of morbid cruelty that he adopts whenever he is pleased to tetanize and madden humanity as he is doing now.

He utilizes the spirit of purity and of a consciousness that has remained candid like mine to asphyxiate it with all the false appearances that he spreads universally through space and this is why Artaud le Mômo can be taken for a person suffering from hallucinations.

- What do you mean, Mr. Artaud?

- I mean that I have found the way to put an end to this ape once and for all and that although nobody believes in god any more everybody believes more and more in man.

So it is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate.

- How's that?

No matter how one takes you you are mad, ready for the straitjacket.        

- By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy. I say, to remake his anatomy. Man is sick because he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,

For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

To Have Done With the Judgement of God

[ill-will-editions]

WHAT THE VIRUS SAID

First published in Lundimatin, March 16, 2020

Translated by Robert Hurley

“I’ve come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find.”

You’d do well, dear humans, to stop your ridiculous calls for war. Lower the vengeful looks you’re aiming at me. Extinguish the halo of terror in which you’ve enveloped my name. Since the bacterial genesis of the world, we viruses are the true continuum of life on Earth. Without us, you would never have seen the light of day, any more than the first cell would have come to exist.

We are your ancestors, just like the rocks and the seaweed, and much more than the apes. We are wherever you are and also where you aren’t. Too bad for you if you only see in the universe what is to your liking! But above all, quit saying that it is I who am killing you. You will not die from my action upon your tissues but from the lack of care of your fellow humans. If you had not been just as rapacious amongst yourselves as you were with all that lives on this planet, you would still have enough beds, nurses, and respirators to survive the damage I do in your lungs. If you didn’t pack your old people into nursing homes and your able-bodied into concrete hutches, you wouldn’t be in this predicament. If you hadn’t changed the whole expanse of the world, or worlds rather, that just yesterday were still luxuriant, chaotic, infinitely inhabited, into a vast desert for the monoculture of the Same and the More, I wouldn’t have been able to launch myself into the global conquest of your throats. If nearly all of you had not become, over the last century, redundant copies of a single, untenable form of life, you would not be preparing to die like flies abandoned in the water of your sugary civilization. If you had not made your environments so empty, so transparent, so abstract, you can be sure that I wouldn’t be moving at the speed of an aircraft. I only come to carry out the punishment that you have long pronounced against yourselves. Forgive me, but it’s you, after all, who invented the name “Anthropocene”. You have awarded yourselves the whole honor of the disaster; now that it is unfolding, it’s too late to decline it. The most honest among you know this very well: I have no other accomplice than your social organization, your folly of the “grand scale” and its economy, your fanatical belief in systems. Only systems are “vulnerable”. Everything else lives and dies. There’s no “vulnerability” except for what aims at control, at its extension and its improvement. Look at me closely: I am just the flip side of the prevailing Death.

So stop blaming me, accusing me, stalking me. Working yourselves into an anti-viral paralysis. All of that is childish. Let me propose a different perspective: there is an intelligence that is immanent to life. One doesn’t need to be a subject to make use of a memory and a strategy. One doesn’t have to be a sovereign to decide. Bacteria and viruses can also call the shots. See me, therefore, as your savior instead of your gravedigger. You’re free not to believe me, but I have come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find. I have come in order to suspend the operation that held you hostage. I have come in order to demonstrate the aberration that “normality” constitutes. “Delegating to others our nutrition, our protection, our ability to care for our way of life was a madness”…“There is no budgetary limit, health has no price” : see how I redirect the language and spirit of your governing authorities! See how I bring them down for you to their real standing as miserable racketeers, and arrogant to boot! See how they suddenly denounce themselves not just as being superfluous, but as being harmful! For them you’re nothing but supports for the reproduction of their system – that is, less than slaves. Even the plankton are treated better than you.

But don’t waste your time reproaching them, pointing out their deficiencies. Accusing them of negligence is still to give them more credit than they deserve. Ask yourselves rather how you could find it so comfortable to let yourselves be governed. Praising the merits of the Chinese option compared to the British option, of the imperial-legist solution as against the Darwinist-liberal method is to understand nothing about the one or the other, the horror of one and the horror of the other. Since Quesnay, the “liberals” have always looked with envy at the Chinese empire ; and they still do. They are Siamese twins. The fact that one of them confines you in its interest and the other in the interest of “society” always amounts to suppressing the only non-nihilist conduct : taking care of oneself, of those one loves and of what one loves in those one doesn’t know. Don’t let those who’ve led you to the abyss claim to be saving you from it: they will prepare for you a more perfect hell, an even deeper grave. Someday when they’ll able, they’ll send the army to patrol the afterlife.

You ought to thank me, rather. Without me, for how much longer would those unquestionable things that are suddenly suspended have gone on being presented as necessary? Globalization, competitive exams, air traffic, budgetary limits, elections, sports spectacles, Disneyland, fitness gyms, most businesses, the National Assembly, school barracking, mass gatherings, most office jobs, all that automatic sociability that is nothing but the reverse of the anxious solitude of the metropolitan monads : all of that was rendered unnecessary, once the state of necessity asserted its presence. Thank me for the truth test of the coming weeks; you’re finally going to inhabit your own life, without the thousand escapes that, good year bad year, hold the untenable together. Without your realizing it, you had never taken up residence in your own existence. You were there among your boxes, and you didn’t know it. Now you will live with your kindreds. You will be at home. You will cease to be in transit towards death. Perhaps you will hate your husband. Maybe your children won’t be able to stand you. Maybe you will feel like blowing up the décor of your everyday life. The truth is that you were no longer in the world, in those metropolises of separation. Your world was no longer livable in any of its guises unless you were constantly fleeing. One had to make do with movement and distractions in the face of the hideousness that had taken hold. And the spectral that reigned between beings. Everything had become so efficient that nothing made any sense any longer. Thank me for all that, and welcome back to earth!

Thanks to me, for an indefinite time you will no longer work, your kids won’t go to school, and yet it will be the opposite of a vacation. Vacations are that space that must be filled up at all costs while waiting for the obligatory return to work. But now what is opening up in front of you, thanks to me, is not a delimited space but a gaping emptiness. I render you idle. There’s no guarantee that yesterday’s non-world will reappear. All of that profitable absurdity may cease. Not being paid oneself, what would be more natural than to stop paying one’s rent? Why would a person unable to work go on depositing their mortgage payments at the bank? Isn’t it suicidal, when you come down to it, to live where you can’t even cultivate a garden? Someone who doesn’t have any money left doesn’t stop eating as a consequence, and who has the iron has the bread. Thank me: I place you in front of the bifurcation that was tacitly structuring your existences: the economy or life. It’s your move, your turn to play. The stakes are historical. Either the governing authorities impose their state of exception on you, or you invent your own. Either you go with the truths that are coming to light, or you put your head on the chopping block. Either you use the time I’m giving you to envision the world of the aftermath in light of what you’ve learned from the collapse that’s underway, or the latter will go extreme. The disaster ends when the economy ends. The economy is the devastation. That was a theory before last month. Now it is a fact. No one can fail to sense what it will take in the way of police, propaganda, surveillance, logistics, and remote working to keep that fact under control.

As you deal with me, don’t succumb to panic or denial. Don’t give in to the biopolitical hysterias. The coming weeks will be terrible, oppressive, cruel. The gates of death will be wide open. I am the most devastating production of the devastation of production. I come to reduce the nihilists to nothingness. The injustice of this world will never be more outrageous. It’s a civilization, not you, that I come to bury. Those who desire to live will have to construct new habits, ones that are suitable for them. Avoiding me will be the occasion for this reinvention, this new art of distances. The art of greeting one another, which some were short-sighted enough to see as the very form of the institution, will soon not obey any etiquette. It will sign beings. Don’t do it “for the others”, for “the population” or for “society”, do it for your people. Take care of your friends and those you love. Rethink along with them, decisively, what a just form of life would be. Organize clusters of right living, expand them, and I won’t be able to do anything against you. I am calling for a massive return, not of discipline, but of attention. Not for the end of insouciance, but the end of all carelessness. What other way remained for me to remind you that salvation is in each gesture? That everything is in the tiniest thing.

I’ve had to face the facts: humanity only asks itself the questions it can no longer keep from asking.

[grandhotelabyss]

Obvious from the offensive quotation above—found on a blog recently popularized on right-wing TV—is the fatal contradiction in the radical feminist’s anti-transgender worldview. Is separation of identity from biology, the reversal of Freud’s infamous equation of anatomy and destiny, not the telos of second-wave feminism, as of the Marxism from which second-wave feminism was derived?—to wit: the destruction of gender identity itself, the refusal to apply gender definition, which was on this view only ever a legitimating ideology of labor exploitation, to the mere biological substrate out of which the free and ideally genderless subject is to be formed. And when the radical feminist accuses the rich of meddling in these matters, such moralism neglects that technological changes make the abolition of gender nearly inevitable. Once we went to live online, “biological sex” didn't stand a chance. The rich are only following this logic, not imposing it out of some strange religious desire. By "strange religious desire” I allude to the controversial thesis that contemporary evolving gender norms, among much else in our culture, represents a return of gnosticism, e.g., The Matrix with its retrospectively understood trans subtext. Writers up and down the status scale and all over the genre map and across the political spectrum[*] have argued that we live in a gnostic world and have been for almost a century, that postmodernism is nothing but late antiquity misspelled. As I think the cyberpunks once argued, gnostic theology was only ever a presentiment of “online.” But unless the radical feminist proposes to go back to church, I don't see what she plans to do about it from within the conceptual horizon of Marxism, which is in itself, as Eric Voeglin long ago taught us, always already gnostic. To secure matter as essence—among other things, to make boy and girl permanently adhere to bodies—requires a transcendent source of matter, rather than gnosticism's alien God scattered like gems through the offal of the demiurge’s botched work; sans a transcendent but, as it were, in-universe God, matter is pure virtuality, which the sovereign soul, the alien God within and therefore immanent to matter, can alter as it wishes. One caution: these moments of idealism and instability tend not to last, so we may all be going back to church eventually, whether we like it or not, and sooner than we think. In my novel Portraits and Ashes, which I wrote the year before the topic of gender identity began to occupy public consciousness, including mine, and which begins and ends in an abandoned church, I portrayed a cult that abolishes its congregants' gender (and not only gender) through surgical intervention and that alters their various personal pronouns to it. I did not have anything like transgender identity in mind, since I understand this identity to be a matter of individual determination, whereas my interest was in collective ecstasies. As the novel’s lexicon and motifs make clear, I was thinking of radical religious movements and their relation to communism—my direct inspiration was probably the Skoptsy, which I learned about from James Meek’s once-hyped and now-forgotten Russian Revolution historical fiction of 2005, The People's Act of Love (I didn’t read Dostoevsky’s Demons until 2014 or so). The Skoptsy were officially claimed for queerness in a 2018 article—that is, six years after I wrote and one year after I published the book. You can tell I wasn't conscious of any such subtext during the composition because when I show leftist academics in the novel heaping high-theory rhetoric on the cult—which I intended as an #Occupy-era spoof of certain upper-class radical mooning over a fancied working class—it didn’t even occur to me to have the professoriate laud them as “queer,” as in this scene, set on a public bus, where a young scholar’s assessment of the phenomenon—in the first quoted paragraph—contrasts with an older man’s judgment in the hearing of my delirious heroine: 

“They’re the revolutionary multitude, all of the excluded, man as species, affect generalized, the persistence of life apart from consciousness, the sublime purity of the conatus against all territorializations. Immanent being without intent or control. They aren’t subjects. They’re post-humanity. What comes after the subject. The reign of love.”

Julia opened her feverish eyes in time to see that the old man had turned from the window and faced her again. He said, very quietly, through thin white lips, his eyes wide and wet, as if addressing only her, “Essenes. Desert Fathers. Bogomils. Albigenses. Fifth Monarchy Men. The rejection of this world.”

All these issues were on the table when I independently published the novel in 2017, if not when I wrote it five years before, but I trusted that my meaning—my sympathetic inquiry into various configurations of spirit and matter—was clear enough to prevent the giving of broad offense. I am no longer quite so certain, but then this conversation is not yet finished or final either. As my older relatives used to say of death, so my literary generation might say of cancellation: You’ve got to go sometime. And if I’m cancelled for having written a great novel, well, the gnostic God knows that I’m certainly in good company!

_____________________

[*] Eric Voeglin, Harold Bloom, Elaine Pagels, Victoria Nelson, Umberto Eco, John Gray, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Toni Morrison, etc.

[edwad]

Based on your response to the comment regarding the use of Althusserian concepts; would you say a revolutionary process necessarily involves conscious elements? And are there other concepts of the state that you prefer over the instrumental view of the state?

i guess my argument would be that, even outside of revolutionary scenarios, the traditional understanding of class tends emphasize consciousness in a peculiar (and moralistic way), which is to treat The Capitalists (bad guys) as extremely aware of what’s actually going on while The Workers (good guys) suffer from “false consciousness” (overstated in the secondary literature, compared to its relative non-existence in the primary sources. engels used the term like, Once). the problem then is about whipping up proletarian consciousness (often assumed to be somehow automatically revolutionary after that has been done) against the deliberate attempts by capital (understood here as a group of people) to obscure the realities of the system. althusser’s work is an elaboration on this view.

marx, however, had a completely different approach, which is to focus on the way that capital (now appropriately understood as an “automatic subject”, as a self-moving substance with its own logic) obscures itself. in the unfolding of capital’s categories, marx shows how the money-form covers the tracks of the law of value’s operation at a higher level of abstraction so that there appears to be a contradiction between the “theories” of value and money, when in reality the paradox is immanent to the system and not a matter of conflicting understandings (the common criticism that marx contradicts himself between value and money, value and price, etc stems from this confusion). 

what this means is that the concepts are generative of multiple understandings of the concepts themselves, and that these appear contradictory so that these conceptions are often developed into one-sided theories of political economy. this is why marxs project takes the form of a genealogical critique of political economy, which requires interrogating the social forms in order to understand why they appear the way that they do, and why they, bearing the function of social mediation, determine our actions in such a way as to produce and reproduce everyday life, i.e. capitalism, thereby naturalizing it. 

this involves an implicit theory of knowledge and necessarily has huge ramifications for how we can understand the development and limitation of class consciousness, because the object under investigation presents itself in a distorted manner. as marx says, 

“Reflection on the forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course directly opposite to their real development. Reflection begins post festum, and therefore with the results of the process of development ready to hand. The forms which stamp products as commodities and which are therefore the preliminary requirements for the circulation of commodities, already possess the fixed quality of natural forms of social life before man seeks to give an account, not of their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but of their content and meaning. Consequently, it was solely the analysis of the prices of commodities which led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and solely the common expression of all commodities in money which led to the establishment of their character as values. It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities - the money form - which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly. If I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen because the latter is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots bring these commodities into a relation with linen, or with gold or silver (and this makes no difference here), as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society appears to them in exactly this absurd form. 

The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective [my emphasis], for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e. commodity production. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production.” [v1: p168-9, penguin ed.]

all of this is to say that the existence of a class unconsciousness does not require a class of evil puppeteers working behind the scenes to obscure the real functioning of the capitalist mode of production; the system generates its own obscuration independently of social actors and, as marx says, involves “a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers” [v1: p135], which also necessarily applies to the capitalists themselves. all of this is why fetishism is so important to marx, and runs throughout the 3 volumes of capital, explicitly reappearing at the end of v3 when marx tackles the trinity formula. it is only after this is explained that marx closes the chapter on “the revenue and its sources” [part 7 in engels’ edition, divided into smaller chapters] with what we now have as a fragment of the final “chapter” of the three volumes of capital: “classes”. 

i dont think this ordering of the sections is an accident, as the elaboration on classes could only come after the clarification of the fetish-forms of the trinity formula, which necessarily complicates the notion of a class of omniscient agents directly overseeing and controlling society, and which also affirms the existence of “the three great classes of modern society based on the capitalist mode of production” [v3: p1025, penguin ed.], contrary to the earlier position developed at the beginning of the communist manifesto where he says that the bourgeois epoch has “simplified class antagonisms”, with the increasing reduction “into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat”, which is generally the starting point for most marxist perspectives on class struggle in capitalism. 

an alternative theorization/critique of the capitalist state (and with it, the theory of knowledge as it relates to the development of consciousness) would deal with the historically specific nature of capitalist social relations, especially the distinct form of impersonal domination where political and economic rule are divorced from one another in a way that differentiates bourgeois society from others, such as feudalism, where the serf stood in relation to the landlord as the former’s direct political-economic ruler. under capitalism, however, your employer at a retail establishment does not hold direct political power over you, just as the state which you must otherwise obey does not directly control whether or not you may quit your job in retail and move to some other industry. this is the sense in which the onslaught of capital involves the dual constitution of the “free laborer” and “legal subject”, with the former involving the historical “freeing” of labor from the land (and the corresponding freedom to starve to death if one does not submit to wage-labor), while our equivalence as legal subjects in labor contracts is dealt with by marx in a single sentence: “Between equal rights, force decides.” [v1, p344] 

obviously, if we were politically and economically ruled by capitalists in a direct way like that which characterizes feudalism, and which is suggested by the instrumentalist conception of the state, this separation would not need to exist (although the conspiracy theorist’s rendering of the theory would be that this separation is an intentionally illusory one meant to make us feel as if we are free, even though this is, as i already suggested, something generated by the system itself regardless of any class malevolence). any critique of the state worth paying attention to must be able to grapple with all of this, and i think the best starting point would be the work of legal scholars like pashukanis and the german state derivation debates beginning in the 1970s, as well as some more recent elaborations by those associated with the “open marxist” tradition (holloway, clarke, bonefeld, etc). 

[ranjxtul]

Fire and Reign: Necromancy

Finally, we have witches au chapter four! I am so sorry for the delay here, and for the length. It’s a bit shorter than usual, but the next chapter will be action packed! I don’t think there are TWs for this chapter, so enjoy loves

Ao3 Link https://archiveofourown.org/works/19249039/chapters/47313391

“Find anything else since we last talked?” Called Aragon as she made her way into the greenhouse with a mug of coffee in her hand, eyes still bleary from sleep.

A sleep deprived, but alert Catherine Parr glanced up to her godmother worriedly, it was abnormal for her to be up this early. She glanced at the clock. It was only eight. Usually Aragon awoke around an hour later, looking much less frazzled. Stray curls stuck out at angles and she still wore her pajamas.

Catherine frowned then, at the question asked. In reality, she hadn’t been able to uncover anything new, even with the help of the American Supreme. “You’re up earlier than usual,” she nodded, completely avoiding the subject as a whole.  

“Didn’t want to sleep in,” Aragon shrugged, quickly dispelling any further discussion on the topic. Parr nodded, knowing when she didn’t want to broach a topic.

“What about Henry? I need to know if we have anything new,”  An unspoken, ‘I have to do something,’ stayed in her head. Aragon tried again. Since Anne’s sighting the previous night, she’d practically been on hyperdrive. Sleep had been fitful and erratic because all she could do was contemplate possible avenues, and who his next victim might be.

Realistically, it could be anyone in London. The lack of knowledge concerning witches and the secrecy put blinders on most people, including young witches themselves. As a result, Henry’s scope of possible victims had much greater magnitude than she would have liked.

Finding witches and protecting them would be ideal; however, Catherine knew the semantics of that plan were much more complex in practice. Finding young witches was about as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack, unless of course you were finding their mangled corpses, she thought bitterly to herself.

Parr observed the other woman, the clipped question’s brittle tone bounced off of her. She could only imagine what it would be like to be in the Supreme’s shoes. As a child, she’d dreamt about the idea of being the Supreme and being trusted to lead, but as she’d grown to understand what the job entailed, she realized she didn’t want that. She wanted to care for her coven, but her decisions couldn’t be the difference between life or death. She understood Catherine’s stress, and if she was honest, everyone in the house now felt it.

Shockwaves of the harsh reality that Henry was ready to kill, hadn’t settled easily among any of the queens. All of them had known in a certain capacity it was true, but there was something about the casual encounter that reminded everyone of the immanence in the situation.

“No,” Parr finally answered. “I’ve done just about everything I can, and contacted the Supremes in Spain, France, and Germany. They never linked the killings even. It seems like whoever’s employing him was moving him around or giving him spot kills there, but of course I have no evidence to back that up. It’s purely assumption, and he’s smart. He doesn’t leave a paper trail or physical evidence. If we knew a last name it could be helpful, but even then I'm not sure we’d have anything concrete,” she admitted with a regretful shrug.

“So we’re stuck?” Aragon asked, her mouth falling into a thin line as she wracked her brain for anything helpful. Nothing. Then it hit her, his victims were the key. “Do you think that he’s killed everyone here in the same location? Or at least remotely so,” she added.

Parr tilted her head, “Probably, he seems consistent in London.”

“Great. That’s all I needed to know,” Aragon nodded, a small smile replacing the frustration, a bit self satisfied with her own idea. “I’ll talk to you later, love, but I think I might have an idea of something we can do.”

Catherine raised an eyebrow in shock but nodded, “See you later then.” Aragon turned to exit the greenhouse and return to her office. First things first, she had to do some research of her own, then she needed to speak to the council.

She wasn’t sure she had the proper books in her office, Most likely, she’d have to search the attic.. Necromancy as a whole was risky business, and when done wrong, things could go south in the blink of an eye. Of course Aragon was competent enough to perform the type of magic properly, but not without proper research. The last Supreme, her mother, coincidentally, had always had a bit of an interest in the darker aspects of magic and the more ‘forbidden’ things.

For example, Catherine vividly remembered her mother practicing descensum frequently. She’d later explained she’d only done so in an attempt to understand hell and understand who and what lived down there. Aragon herself had never had much of an interest as a result.

She understood the consequences of failing descensum. One would be trapped in hell and their body would disintegrate. No matter if they beat their personal hell, if they didn’t bring themselves back in time they’d be gone. She hated that her mother ran that risk so often, and for what? As far as Aragon was concerned there were no practical purposes, as understanding hell was futile.

Catherine’s own experience with descensum had been as she’d expected: hellish. Her hell consisted of the coven disowning her and her being thrown to the streets only to have Henry and his manipulative, vindictive ways waiting for her outside the doors. No one thought she’d make it back in time, and truthfully she’d only just made it back before dawn, panting and panicked she’d bolted up. How did anyone get used to beating their hell and how did anyone do it regularly? The concept baffled her.  

Her mother had fittingly also been interested in learning about necromancy, which granted was a lot less dangerous than casually practicing descensum. It couldn’t directly destroy the caster, but any number of bad outcomes could occur without understanding how to properly control such magic and without knowing exactly whom one was contacting. At one point, Catherine had a mild interest in the basics, but quickly strayed away from it once she began to understand the negative consequences: it could put those she cared about in danger.

Now it seemed she’d have to return to her old interest and ignore the overly analytical and cautious voices in her head that told her necromancy was a bad idea. Upon a small browsing of her office shelves, unsurprisingly, she found nothing of use. With a short sigh of impatience, she turned to traipse her way up the stairs to the attic.

Upon pushing the door open, she observed Jane’s workspace. Books sat strewn on the table’s surface and pages of notes sat stacked in one corner. Her stones sat atop one open book and a separate sheet of notes sat beside the stones. Part of Aragon felt inclined to see what Jane had been working on, but she stopped, reminding herself that Jane would let her know when the time was right.

Instead, she made her way toward the dust covered boxes containing her mother’s old books. She went through two boxes before she found what she needed: books on the foundations and extended applications of necromancy. Now that she had the books she could hopefully find what she needed. And once the adequate research was done she could call the council and see if they approved of her plan. Back to her office to read, it seemed.

By the time she finished relaying the cornerstones of her reading and in detail her plan, Anna and Jane each had their own looks of shock and intrigue on their face.

“Do you think that’ll work?” Asked Jane.

“The magic or the plan?” Anne countered the blonde as if Jane’s question hadn’t been directed at Catherine. She was caught up in the semantics and possible dangers of what Aragon her proposed to even question effectiveness yet.

Jane glanced at the short haired woman beside her, “I was addressing both actually. Messing with necromancy can be dangerous, and in practice this plan is basically built on assumptions.”

Aragon cut in, “I know the dangers, but we’re at a practical roadblock on learning anything else. We haven’t been able to ID any of his victims easily, and I’ve had Cathy doing some research for me. She’s also been unable to find anything else. If my hunch is right, then this could get us somewhere,” she insisted.

“But if something were to go horribly wrong, for example, you could contact the wrong spirit, and set something free or be unable to contain it. There’s also physical safety to take into account when you think of this. What if someone happened upon you?”

“I’m planning to take Anne with me. You know she’s not easily scared off by a task, and should something happen she knows how to fight,” Catherine raised a brow. She understood Anna and Jane’s concern, she needed to do something. “As for what we talk to, I should be able to contain it. I’m no novice,” she added with a hint of mirth in an attempt to lighten the mood.

The other two women shared a weary look, ultimately Aragon did have a final say in what she did. They hadn’t had to have been called in, which meant she most likely wanted their support and help ironing out details of the plan. “So, when do you want to leave?” Jane asked after a moment’s silence. She could feel waves of urgency and underlying anxiety radiating off the Supreme potently.

“I’d like to go tonight. The sooner the better, and around ten. There’s no need to cause more disruption than normal,” she shrugged, a bit relieved the two relented in the doubts at least verbally. When she listened to their thoughts, she could hear the doubts screaming loudly. That was a confidence boost for sure.

“I’d suggest later. If your location’s right, you could have a chance of running into him if he’s found a victim,” Jane pointed out tilting her head.

“Go after midnight,” Anna suggested directly after Jane spoke.

The other two were right, an earlier time was a gamble. Well, in reality, this whole trip was a gamble. She only nodded though, “Brilliant idea.”

The girls were absolutely correct. This could be fatal, useless, too much of a risk or all of the above. Catherine did her best to suppress the whirling thoughts of what that failure could be though. She had to do something about Henry, and in her mind, knowing the enemy was the first step to beating the enemy.

If they could gain the upperhand by learning more information about Henry Tudor before he gained more intel on them, they’d have the upperhand. So far, nonmagic routes hadn’t gleaned enough information. If she wasn’t desperate, she wouldn’t push less ‘safe’ options for informational purposes.

Truth be told, she was still shaken from the night before, and she was waiting on news from Maria that there’d been another victim. Realizing she’d spaced out for a moment, she shook her head in an attempt to play it off, “I’m going to find Anne. Make sure when we’re gone to hold down the fort, yeah?” she joked with a quiet laugh.

“Yes ma’am,” Anna jested back, accompanied by a nod and smile from Jane. With one final nod, Aragon slipped out of her office to search for Anne. The brunette would most likely be in her room or roaming about the house, considering it was nearing dinner. Luck seemed to be on Catherine’s side when she peeked into Anne’s room to see the other with a book open on her bed.

“Anne?” Catherine called quietly, so as not to startle Anne from her reading.

The brunette glanced up, her eyes wide for a second, until she recognized Catherine in the doorway. “Hm?” she hummed in response closing the book and pulling herself up.

“Mind if I come in first of all?”

“Be my guest,” Anne shrugged with a vague gesture to the room. With a nod, Aragon stepped into the messy room, maneuvering small piles of clothes or the several fallen objects on the floor. “What’s up?” Anne asked as Aragon made her way to sit down at the desk chair.

“I need a favor,” Aragon started with a deep breath.

“Oh?” Anne leaned forward curiously.

Simultaneously, in a pub in the city, two men sat at a corner booth. One had an angular jaw and sandy stubble dotting that same jaw. His grim face, contained smile lines only shown in malice. His accomplice sat across from him. This man’s features were polar the first man’s. His dark hair, dark eyes, and complimenting five o’clock shadow contrasted the light blonde man’s features. The similarities though, sat in the stone cold hollow eyes and in the understated intimidation of his muscular stature.

“You know,” the dark headed man started, “You can’t just keep waiting for them to do something. This wasn’t supposed to take as long as it has. I mean, three years? That’s excessive, even if they’re being wise Henry.”

The newly named Henry shook his head, “They’ll stop being careful soon enough, and that’s when I’ll catch them.”

“You were supposed to get in and take them out,” the second man persisted.

“I know, Thomas, but they were smarter than I anticipated!” his nostrils flared in a flash of irritation. “That’s completely on me though, I will admit. I shouldn’t have underestimated them.”

“At least we know what we know, and we have our inside contact, well if that’s what you call her,” Thomas shrugged, appraising his own words.

“She’s served her purpose, and continues to. She keeps up my wards and gives me information and I don’t kill her,” he shrugged in return as if what he said were the simplest agreement ever.

“Speaking of which, has she turned up anything new?” Thomas asked in curiosity.

“Katherine Howard,  the one about a week ago is alive. Anne got her out of there apparently.”

The other man’s eyes lit up in recognition, “Howard?”

Henry narrowed his eyes, “Yeah, you know her?”

Quickly, realizing his sudden interest hadn’t been inconspicuous, Thomas forced himself to sit back, “Heard the name before.”

An obvious lie, but Henry didn’t care to push it. Instead he pushed forward, “Last night was an easy one. She was young, sixteen, and out too late for her own good. If only the others were as easy. God, it still baffles me that Catherine is the leader, and that Anne is alive. Of course now it all makes sense, knowing Jane’s a healer. If only I’d gotten that much out of her that night. I was so close to nipping the problem in the bud with her,” he shook his head, thinking of the drunken night Jane had begun to divulge the London coven’s secrets when he’d been with her.

“And now you have baggage now. What’ll you do with the son once you deal with everyone else?” Thomas asked.

“Eh, haven’t really thought about it. There are merits to getting rid of him with his mother or keeping him. We’ll see how everything pans out, then I’ll deal with it all.” In one statement, Henry Tudor had revealed truly how little he cared for life. He cared for manipulation, ease, and power above all else.

While Thomas definitely was unbothered by murder, the idea of murdering a baby didn’t settle well with him. The kid hadn’t had much of a chance to live. It must have shown on his face because Henry’s face hardened, “You got a problem with that?” he asked carefully, his brow raised.

Forcing his expression back to neutral, Culpeper shook his head. He had more interest in Katherine Howard, even if murdering an infant didn’t sit well. He wouldn’t have a part of it bothered him so much. All he cared about was seeing Katherine again.

“Good. Can you go take care of the body from last night sometime tonight?” Henry continued.

“Always sending me to do your dirty work, eh?” Thomas scoffed. “Yeah, sure.”  

[taangmula]

This is a scene about a man kissing another man.

The other night, I told a man “I’m thinking about what would happen if I leaned in and kissed you”. He was taken aback at first. Got quiet. He mumbled something about how he’d thought of it before, but it doesn’t work for him. Then, he looked at me and said “I could kill you”.

In this scene, I think I can see what that kiss would have meant to him. It would have been painful, terrifying, more than he could handle. What it means to be kissed, to be marked with queerness is pain. It’s loss. 

It’ll hurt more than you’ve ever been burned, and you’ll have a scar

Queerness, in a sort of idealized sense, means transgression.

You have to consider the possibility that god does not like you. He never wanted you! In all probability he hates you!

If God is the Father, neither do our lowercase fathers care much for us. Neither the rules of our gods or fathers apply any more, and now we’re out there, beyond good and evil.

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we are free to do anything

The church hates us, our families disown us, and the world wants to kill us. Our choice is to stay with the pain, to acknowledge the melancholy quality of our lives, the immanence of our death.

Congratulations. You’re one step closer to hitting the bottom

Well, bend over then, and let’s have at it.

The reality that I faced, though, was one that wasn’t this. The person I was talking to was likely not queer, and I was not strong in the way that Tyler was, didn’t have the connection and the shared experience. He didn’t have the desire to push past the pain (which is fine). He felt threatened by it, burned by it, and struck back. 

[thehauntologicalsociety]

The body is under threat in the city—The cinema is under threat in the city—The digital city is antipathetic to both ...

1.

In early 2016 I was standing in the ballroom of the Duke of Cornwall Hotel in Plymouth (UK), chatting with a kilted Dee Heddon, co-founder with Misha Myers of The Walking Library (see Heddon & Myers 2014), and waiting for a performance of a scabrous Pearl Williams routine by Roberta Mock, author of a key account of walking arts (2009, 7-23). Conversation drifted to films and Dee wondered what kind of resource for wandering a passion for movies might offer.

It was an appropriate space for Dee’s question. The ballroom is on the ground floor of the hotel, which rises to an impressive tower topped by a single room. It was to this room that Roberta’s partner, Paul, and I had gained access on a ‘vertigo walk’ some years previously. We had walked from Paul’s childhood home town of Saltash on the other side of the Hamoaze, a stretch of the River Tamar, into Plymouth. This involved us crossing high above the river gorge on the 1961 road bridge. Although he had crossed this bridge many hundreds of times by car and bus, Paul, susceptible to vertigo like myself, had never walked it before.

Having successfully negotiated the bridge, we sought out all the highest points in the city that we could access. The manager of the Duke of Cornwall led us up winding stairs and opened the room in the tower for us. A telescope stood at a window; above the bed (and this was after 9/11) hung a framed photograph of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. I might have thought of ‘Wolfen’ (1981), or the anachronistic underwater shot of the twin towers in Tim Burton’s 2001 ‘Planet of the Apes’, or ‘Man on Wire’ (2008) even, but the opening scene of Fulci’s ‘Zombi 2’/Zombie Flesh Eaters’ (1979) was how I immediately cross-referenced through film what I was feeling on coming into the room; to be precise, the moment when the music reaches its climax not for the monster, but for the Manhattan skyline. Flying in the face of Ivan Chtcheglov’s assertion that “[W]e are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun”, in Fulci’s movie solar rays spill from behind the twin towers, just as they have from behind the zombie cadaver. The two monoliths cancel each other out and the movie almost stalls before it can begin; landscape and body equally ruinous.

2.

I want to propose that by systematically drawing on such associations – of the ambience, shape or narrative of particular places with memories of movies – the effectiveness of a certain kind of political and critical walking can be enhanced. Ironically, this walking springs from the dérive of the Lettrists/situationists who, subsequent to their exploratory walking, developed a theory of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’, a deeply negative attitude to the predominance of the visual, and produced anti-art and anti-cinema works like ‘Hurlements En Favour De Sade’  (1952) in which the screen throughout is blank, either dazzling white or dark. While what follows skirts a narrow adherence to the asceticism of later situationist theory, drawing upon the Lettrist/situationist experimentation with art processes recovered in more recent publications such as McKenzie Wark’s trilogy (2008, 2011, 2103), it also implements the orthodox situationist technique of détournement, hacking up and depredating the movies drawn upon and redeploying their images, themes and narratives in ways that are often aggressively at odds with their makers’ intentions.  

3.

The body is under threat in the city. The cinema is under threat in the city. The digital city is antipathetic to both. The cinema offers the urban walker a chance to return as an immanent and imaginative body to the city.

Stephen Barber, in considering the turbulent confluence of body, performance, film and digital screens, makes this damning assessment of the contemporary city: “[T]he city’s surface, as a scoured and excoriated environment.... precludes and voids the eruption of performance acts.... forming an exposed medium that is already maximally occupied with such visual Spectacles as digital image-screens transmitting corporate animations, along with saturated icons, insignia and hoardings.... surface has no space for the corporeal infiltration of performance, unless that performance is commissioned.... to fully serve corporate agendas” (2104, 89). Barber’s portrait of urban surface is extreme, but it explains the absurd policing of image-making and the suppression of the most innocuous of non-retail behaviours by mall security guards, the tendency, akin to conspiracy, among consumers to mistake advertising logos for ornament and the strange brutalist sculptural contraptions placed to inconvenience rough sleepers.

When the screen was digitised, the Society of the Spectacle became architectural. A new intensity to the integration of the Spectacle (Debord 1998, 8), beyond and subsuming free market and authoritarian manipulation, now commits it to an invasive, algorithmic pursuit of the preferences of the online majority. An authoritarian redesign of the city, complementing the ‘nudge units’ of its happiness industry, is under way; engineered to encourage the preferences that the Spectacle prefers. This new city space wraps free market around free interiority; then, by scandal-dramaturgy and pseudo-spirituality, it demands a confessional revealing of all things to the Spectacle’s algorithms.

Against such tides, I want to propose a means of ambulant, contemplative and corporeal resistance, drawing upon the anachronisms of the cinema screen, on an unsentimental deployment of our memories of movies, and on our walking bodies. I want to propose that we, walking artists, pedestrians, anyone who will listen, should perform our walking; as a matter not of life and death, but as part of the struggle between vivacity and morbidity; in resistance to a society that seeks to exploit not just our labour, but our entire lives. We should “perform” our walking because in this mode it is “integrally concerned with survival.... not necessarily its [performance’s] own survival as a medium.... but always of the body, and of the inhabitable spaces of corporeality in the digital world” (Barber, 2014, 211). Such talk of survival signals just how antagonist circumstances are for the immersive walker, repeatedly prodded for digital access or visual seduction. The luxury, once, of distinguishing between the heightened and super-sensitised walk of the derive or flânerie or whatever we want to call it and the humdrum everyday shopping trip or walk to the call centre has increasingly withered; the new city centre surface is an intense, demanding and closely woven battleground. Where, before, an exulting in finding the accidental poetry of damaged signs, long-abandoned esoteric communications or dust from Mars all constituted a little taking back of the surplus joy and ecstasy extracted from their production on the part of the sensitised walker, the digital city changes that relation. Now we are not only consumers, but the unpaid producers of what we pay to consume – our reflections on or images of the pleasures of our latest ‘drift’ are turned through the alchemy of social media into instantly scalable and exploitable product – and the deficit is already so wide that being able to perform a heightened journey through the city is no longer about bonus additions to the pleasures of everyday life, but about the survival of our subjectivities and of the meaningfulness of our agency.

I am not suggesting that cinema is a unique resource; nor that the films cited below could not be replaced by better ones, nor that a subjective choice of films by any walker is not more important than an argument over the objective worth of any one film over another. There may be similar resources to be found in obscure branches of religious iconography, in literature or philosophy, in gaming or in folk traditions. What makes film such a valuable resource is its availability in multiple forms, its formal self-entanglements, its susceptibility to a spectatorial-edit and the historical architecture of its projection: that large, off-white and flawed screen. Carrying a memory of that fragile means of crude reflection, mediating the plethora of images in your hoard of movie memories, constitutes a ‘screenplay’ by which to act the streets and perform your own trajectory through them; preserving by enacting your memories and subjectivity, without revealing anything to either security guard or digital algorithm; walking discreetly with morphing hallucinations, learning to look through multiple eyes and settling, eventually, on long shots and gentle pans.

To make my argument for a cine-dérive, I will reference a number of movies and a few key concepts: unitary urbanism, actuality, ‘anywhere’, doubleness, the released or floating eye, separation, landscapity, effacement and totality.                              

4.

In 2008 at the Vue in Exeter I attended a midnight showing of ‘The Mist’, directed by Frank Darabont and based upon a Stephen King story. Those of us present were considered questionable enough to be repeatedly monitored by an anxious cinema manager; standing to the side of the screen. The movie’s paranoid narrative was thus enhanced. Halfway through the screening, the imagery of the genre movie was loosened; at a moment when the screen itself suddenly re-appeared from behind the movie as a blank.  

The eponymous miasma of ‘The Mist’ makes its appearance early on in the movie and hangs around until just before the final credits. It seems to watch the movie’s characters; just as, that night, the manager was watching us. At one point the camera drifts, as if it is the viewpoint of the mist itself, across a glass storefront behind which fugitives from the mist’s deadly inhabitants are sheltering. A miasma looking through transparency! When a handful of the survivors briefly leave the store, the moment occurs: the characters (in search of medicine in a neighbouring building) disappear into the mist. For a few seconds there is only whiteness on the screen; indeed, there is nothing on the screen! The screen itself emerges from behind the colour reflections of the projection, reaching through the image directly to the cinema-goer. Of course, this effect does not occur for anyone watching a streamed or dvd version, but in the cinema, at the moment of stripping away, the film enters itself, becomes its own subject, the confined melodrama of the besieged store falls away: cars, road signs and even a freeway appear like sketched line drawings, almost not there at all. A beast of extraordinary scale appears and looms, indifferent, a mass of extraneous claws; a gigantic Spectacle just passing through.

There is something Deleuzian about this screen landscape, a kind of ‘anywhere, anytime’ where “a collection of locations and positions which coexist independently of the temporal…. moves from one part to the other, independently of the connections and orientations which the vanished characters and situations gave to them” (Deleuze, 2005: 123). This space – or rather the making of this space from representations of place (the cinema’s counter-digital alchemy) – subverts, within an un-subversive film, cinema’s privileging of “the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world” (Mulvey, 1993: 114-115), effacing what Delueze calls “landscapity”, the characterisation of the landscape as face-like, replacing it with a barely tangible, elusive, ideal and unscalable space that resists reproduction. From this negation emerges a screen that is more like a translucent membrane or a cloud of dust than a reflecting and re-presenting mirror.  

5.

Landscape is rarely filmed without the representation of human form, character or mind. This is partly a residue of the romanticist practice of ‘pathetic fallacy’ and of the correlationist tendency in phenomenology; the idea that objects have influence, not as a result of the properties inherent in them, but as a result of those imagined for them. In an ‘experimental’ film like Nina Danino’s ‘Temenos’ (1998), consisting almost exclusively of long shots of sites associated with apparitions of the Virgin Mary, or critical films like Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson’ trilogy (1994, 1997, 2010), of which Iain Sinclair writes “(M)ovement becomes a function of voice” (25), or a mainstream mystery-movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’ (2008) in which landscape and climate are granted autonomous agency, it is still the human discourses about these landscapes – through consecration, narration or fear – that predominate. The vibrancy of objects, as vividly expressed by neo-vitalists or Object-Oriented Ontologists, only very occasionally permeates cinema.    

A rare exception is the brief fūkeiron (landscape theory) movement in Japan. Its seminal movie, ‘AKA Serial Killer’ (Ryakushô renzoku shasatsuma, 1969), the work of a number of filmmakers including Adachi and Matsuda Masao, consists entirely of a series of fixed shots, with (mostly lateral) pans, of locations in Japanese cities: pedestrians come and go, trains arrive and leave, alleyways and jazz clubs are deserted. An intermittent voiceover describes the rationale for these shots: they follow the life trajectory of teenager Nagayama Norio who in 1968 murdered four people in a chaotic crime spree. The sequence of shots tracks Nagayama’s rootless wandering across Japan after leaving his rural home.

The movie rejects not only the sensationalism of the Japanese media coverage of Nagayama’s case, but also the ‘rapid fire’ editing and frantic scenes characteristic of contemporary militant Japanese counter-cultural documentaries. ‘AKA Serial Killer’ was filmed at a time of violent student uprisings, with which the film makers were in general sympathy, and it is against images of the violent clashes between thousands of riot police and armed and helmeted students that the film was expected to be ‘read’. By adopting a method similar to the ‘actuality’ films of the very early pre-dramatic cinema, Adachi and Matsuda seek to shift an attention already attuned to violence to find it within the repetitions, circulations and orderings of un-dramatic urban goings-on; in the “mechanisms of control and governance built into the everyday environment.... which operates through subtle, noncoercive, and economic forms of policing and managing the urban population”. What the movie shows is “[W]hat remains in place after the departure of the student protestors and riot police.... the ubiquitous presence of the state” (Furuhata, 118, 138).  

The calm, but critical viewing that ‘AKA Serial Killer’ solicits, by playing a simple, sparse and spectral documentary narrative across the relentless flows of homogenous, economic cities, encourages the viewer (and dériviste) to learn to be static in the city, to be in a state of ‘static drift’, to allow the streets to pan slowly by, to ignore the blurs of what passes close up and focus on what is ‘background’ and that is, for once, the main performer. This calm and stable viewpoint pre-empts the cool and indifferent gaze of the fixed video surveillance cameras that makes geographical and dreadful the blighted town of Santa Mira in ‘Halloween III’ (1982), and haunts the characters of Michael Haneke’s ‘Hidden’/’Caché’ (2005) with a shared memory of violence.  

Matsuda Masao remarks that when the film makers were considering Nagayama’s story “we became conscious of the landscape as the antagonistic ‘power’ itself”. Inverting Walter Benjamin’s description of an early Parisian photographer representing landscapes as if they were the deserted scenes of crimes, they “filmed crime scenes just like landscape [photographs]” (Furuhata, 135, 134); thus making viewers detectives in the city, but turning around (détourning) the usual function of a detective and redeploying their forensic skills to examining a suspect state’s undemonstrative coercion. By shifting focus from the state’s human agents (riot police, etc.) the portrayal of the state is rendered hyper-materialist; not a human ordering of neutral and inert materials but the order of certain materials imposed (or adopted) on the humans – “to grasp oil as a lube is to grasp earth as a body of different narrations being moved forward by oil” (Negarestani, 19) – by which the state becomes landscape.

By drawing on a memory of such restrained filming of ‘backgrounds’ as agents, a critical walking becomes more possible. The walker becomes the camera, not simply walking in response to the terrain, but with a particular, cinematic discipline of looking; in this case, one that detaches itself from the narrative-of-the-walk that is often generated by exploratory and hyper-sensitised walking. For radical walkers, this means that rather than seeking out spaces and relations where social violence becomes explicit, spectacular and reproductive, they can watch for the behaviours of materials that organise violence in an undemonstrative way, where relations can be disrupted or diverted by the gentler means of installation, sabotage, détournement and re-telling.        

In Nagisa Ôshima’s ‘The Man Who Left His Will On Film’ (1970), fūkeiron filmmaking is criticised by student radicals as “morally and politically bankrupt.... wast[ing] film by shooting mundane settings that could be filmed ‘anywhere, anytime’” (Furuhata, 131). It is exactly that ‘anywhere, anytime’ (Wrights & Sites, 110) that is the radical contradiction of the urban landscape portrayed in ‘AKA Serial Killer’; the violence of homogenisation and the circulation of goods creates a slipperiness and connectedness that can be turned to particularities that resist the flow of the state’s ordering and distribute different contagions, constructing situations at odds with the violence of the mundane.    

6.

Landscapes in movies very different to ‘AKA Serial Killer’ achieve a similar naive ‘actuality’, a non-dramatic coolness, that makes them susceptible to, even welcoming of, their appropriation as part of a walker’s memory hoard: the deserts of Werner Herzog’s ‘Fata Morgana’ (1971), the eventless landscapes of Chantal Akerman’s ‘News From Home’ (1976), ‘the Zone’ in Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ (1979), the fragments of a ruined English park in ‘The Pleasure Garden’ (1952), the swimming pools of the Connecticut suburban rich in ‘The Swimmer’ (1968) or the route in ‘Yellowbrickroad’ (2010): “you think that the trail will understand you, and that’s the worst part, it does”.

By assembling a memory-library of movie sequences or images, the walker can slip between different modes of looking in the same walk, spontaneously and in response to a changing terrain (triggering a different movie memory) or in a planned way that attempts to triangulate a terrain through a range of different lookings and the (potentially) different kinds of information that they detect. ‘Useful’ sequences, suitable for retaining in such a memory-library, are not necessarily restricted to serious, political or art movies. In the past I have drawn on, even at times favoured, fantasy and genre movies, enjoying how work derided as ‘hack’, ‘commercial’, ‘too violent’ or ‘artless’ sometimes peels, embroiders and embrocates the spaces I walk. The point of the memory’s leverage on the real landscape may be some visual similarity, or an association of ambiences, or even where the terrain or events in it have been shaped in response to movies.

I have often drawn on movies that divulge certain patterns at odds with their movie’s intentions, which then fold back on their image systems in accidental critiques; for example, the psychopath test in ‘The Parallax View’ (1974) which implicates both conspiracy and whistleblower, or the discovery/destruction of the underground murals in ‘Roma’ (1972) that throws in doubt the efficacy of Fellini’s luxuriating imagery. As means to the magical-in-the-ordinary, such excerpts can be reliable allies for a radical walker, standing in for utopias in the face of “our incapacity to imagine the future” (Jameson, 1984, 247). They are useful kit for filling newly found holey space; for making interventions against inbuilt systems of dismantlement.

All this could have been applied at any time since moving pictures became one of the forms of mass media; however, what I am proposing here is that, for the first time since then, the ‘grounds’ have changed, the same for psychogeographers and radical walkers as for everyone else. What is newly at stake in the digital city is our subjectivity; not in the sense of our individuality, but of our interiority out of public view. It will be harder to be playful; from now on the cine-dériviste may find her archive is bombarded with uninvited totalities along with the brief sequences she has personally snatched from the genre pool which, if she discloses them, will form the basis for the algorithms’ future bombardments.

With that proviso in mind, I turn to Joe Chappelle’s monster-horror ‘Phantoms’ (1998). In its opening sequence two sisters are negotiating space in a car-bound dialogue; by talking out one family melodrama they make room for another, metaphysical, one. The camera, also released, moves outside the car to establish the limits of a Colorado town and when it returns to the car it now looks out, lingering on the frontages of suburban houses in a pre-digital town as if they were the faces of human characters; the ghosts of the soap-opera narrative we never get to see.

Distinct from the movie male who constitutes “a figure in a landscape” (Mulvey, 1981, 210), in ‘Phantoms’ the doubleness of the central female characters is a quality both of and dividing the two women. This provokes a negation-reflection within the material of the landscape; the houses assume the iconic face in close-up, an oppressive ‘landscapity’, face-like features of the landscape that exist in a perpetual moment (mediatised, stale, self-reflecting and immaterial), less and less able to “adroitly negotiate[s] and enforce[s] its own mass within the image” (Barber, 2002, 20). This becomes more explicit, through another doubleness, in Tom Holland’s Stephen King TV movie adaptation ‘The Langoliers’ (1995), where a young girl intuits and a male ‘mystery writer’ explains their fellow characters’ predicament, awaking on an airborne plane to find that all the crew and most of the passengers have disappeared and that they are travelling in a space stuck a few moments before the present in an inert past: “what is happening to [us] is happening to no one else”. Such radical separateness is characteristic of dramatic film in general; but this is a very average movie which, by making the structural conditions of its own discourse the subject of itself, becomes collectable in parts, particularly its geography of the very recent past. This includes a deserted and echo-less airport, the untimely fading of daylight, and the wholly unpopulated world below their flight. This is a terrain that aches with loss, like the landscape of a Makoto Shinkai animation; it effaces “landscapity” and generates objects and ‘grounds’ that are blank, screen-like, collapsible and radically isolated. Despite its clumsiness, ‘The Langoliers’ makes explicit the feint of many movies: revealing that its action has been happening, in a real illusion, just a few moments back in its own past, but now, in its final reel, is returning to where it always was and will always be. It reproduces Marc Augé’s non-places – airport terminals, institutional boardrooms, airliner interiors – as spaces of political repetition, of a perpetual present and the eradication of the deep, historical past, for the reproduction of present relations; a double effacing in a “contemporary social system… (which has) begun to.... live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions’ (Jameson, 1997, 205).

‘The Langoliers’ evokes a society that has begun to cohabit with the images and representations of itself, recycling the present as a repeatable moment, already just a short while in its past, represented as soon as lived. Its tendency to auto-destruction ushers in a “sheer description” (Jameson, 1988: 95) without visage; and, for a while at least, all that remains in ‘The Langoliers’ is an airborne dérive without a destination, a plane in flight above a world without airports whose surface is being visibly eaten up by its own past.

To plunder such images and such a precarious trajectory, often from “the proliferating corporate zones of Europe’s multiplex complexes, [where] the would-be spectator finds everything except the traces of film” (Barber, 2002, 158) – from the groundless flights of fantasies and super heroes – and from tinier and tinier often handheld screens, is to sometimes float precariously in search of any central urban surface onto which to cling. However, by walking with a memory of ‘The Langoliers’, or of similar landscape-effacing movies, from ‘The Truman Show’ (1998) to ‘The Final Girls’ (2015), it becomes possible to map contradictions within the economy of the Spectacle: specifically, the small folds and hiatuses that are opened up by its relentless pursuit of our subjectivities, within which we can hide our subjective life from that pursuit. Similarly, at a bigger scale, the combination of the fragmentation and appropriation of appearance and the gentrification of Spectacle-resistant areas is now pushing psychogeographers, and all those in search of an ambient city, to the margins, in the literal sense of suburbia and the edgelands. From the inner city of ‘Lights Out For The Territory’ [1997] the trajectories shift to the outer limits of ‘London Orbital’ [2003]), or in the case of Fife Geography Collective’s superb collection of dérive accounts ‘From Hill to Sea’ (2016) the journey is even further afield. This suggests that radical walkers now require a kind of binocular vision (one familiar from these movies which reveal that theirs is a doubled world) in order to simultaneously navigate across to physical margins while seeking havens for interiority within the detail and texture of their immediate terrain.        

7.

In 1938, H. G. Wells proposed a ‘World Brain’, a library with branches in every community across the globe, stocked with a core canon of books chosen by international committees, “knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest and a common medium of expression into a more and more conscious co-operating unity” (23).  Some have claimed that this was the ‘first Internet’. However, the ‘web’ has been far more of a diversifying and fragmenting force than intended by Wells. Cinema, limited by costs, its collaborative technology, the experiential primacy of projection and a monopolised industrial structure, can still offer a ‘World Terrain’ of sorts; an accessible and exchangeable (look at the explosion of fan and lay critical writing!) canon of landscape images that is striated by exclusions, translations and the wounding centralisations of focus and rapid-fire puncta.  

The constitution of such a canon of landscapes is always far from purely aesthetic. To pluck one counter-example, arbitrarily: in 1950s England, local authorities lobbied to be placed “on a waiting list for the honour of having their buildings and monuments modelled for film destruction” in a wave of sci-fi and horror movies that re-enacted, fantastically, the precarity of the Blitz for an audience barely old enough to remember it (Conrich, 88). Nor are these landscapes in any way neutral or universal; the integrity of the body of the viewer is as much in play in them as the fabric of their fictions. These are mostly male and often violent landscapes. Innumerable movies propose ways for how the viewer/walker might take themselves apart in order to take the movies apart; from the use of double exposures in early cinema, influenced by ‘spirit photography’, through the surgery of ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’ (1960), the eruptive and steely objectification of the ‘Tetsuo’ movies (1989, 1992, 2009) and the jouissant mutilations of ‘Hellraiser’ (1987), the bodies of those keen, or forced, to experience materiality are regularly dispersed to the landscape, their corporeal materials escaping from their container, to combine trangressively and ‘miscegenously’ with inorganic vibrancies. All these are fictions that the walker can archive and re-deploy in order that their own gaps entangle with the ‘voids’ – “empty corridors that penetrate the consolidated city, appearing with the extraneous character of a nomadic city living inside the sedentary city” (Careri, 188) – of the material landscapes.

In Higuchinsky’s ‘Uzumaki’ (2000) the nomadic eye is released; previously opened with a razor in ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (1929), with scissors in ‘Spellbound’ (1945), and dilated by hypnotism in ‘Herz Aus Glas’/’Heart of Glass’ (1976). In ‘Uzumaki’, it peers vividly through a broken windscreen, popped from its socket, until, by a sudden, stuttering, stabbing  zoom, as if the camera is exaggeratedly reaching out for information like the sensory organs in James J. Gibson’s theory of perceptual systems (1983), it dominates the screen.

Metaphorically released from its organism in this way, the eye is free to roam, moving between a satellite-seeing, where space, viewed from above, is defined by trajectories, and a zooming descent into super-detail through “layered surfaces that successively cover over one another” including an “outer wrapping (that) is none other than the human mind and its products” (Ingold, 1993: 37). The model for the dériviste’s hybridisation of these lookings (“to see the world from multiple viewpoints at any one time” [Smith, 113]) is right there in the modern movie camera’s capacities to pan and zoom – sometimes simultaneously, as famously in ‘Vertigo’ (1958) and ‘Jaws’ (1975) – and then by cranes and drones to fly out of situations or plunge down into them; so nurse Ana Clark’s accelerating trajectory through the rabid Milwaukee suburbs in Zack Snyder’s remake of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (2004), with concentrated domestic melodramas flooding onto gardens and roadsides, is abruptly released and flung upwards on the bloom of an explosion to a malevolent bird’s eye view reminiscent of the gulls’ in ‘The Birds (1963), or of the scene in David Lynch’s ‘Inland Empire’ (2006) when the camera moves out from the socially abject and emotionally intense death of Sue Blue to reveal a sound stage and its fabricated scenery.

When ‘Uzumaki’ (like ‘The Langoliers’) introduces a force from the past – a mirror found under the water of a nearby lake – corporeal fragmentation increases, eyes swivel in their sockets, mutilations (as in ‘Dark City’ [1998]) and hairstyles become subject to the vortex of the eye; “wanting to be seen” contorts a girl gang, a father obsessively videos snails, and corpses twist like corkscrews, until finally the eye is ejected from its body, wounding the movie through its shattered screen. ‘Uzumaki’ is infused with these exploratory spirals of seeing; it constitutes a kind of ‘unitary cinema’ (counterpart to the situationists’ ‘unitary urbanism’) – subjecting each and every part (snails, washing driers, hairstyles, streets, clouds, bodies) to the sensory pattern of the whole – doing for the movies what the situationists longed to do, reparatively, for the city: overcome separation. This is the contradiction – the emergence of a stilled, synchronic pattern from a forward-lurching linearity – by which the violence of the dramatic cinema, editing bodies when not diegetically dismembering them, can be cooled, returned to the calmer ‘actuality’ of pre-dramatic cinema, restoring a slow and meandering flow to life; for example, in the painfully and beautifully extended shots of a Béla Tarr movie, or in the intense weavings of bodies and cameras in Miklos Janscó’s. First by separation, the floating free or deregulation of the senses through cinema’s technology, and then seeking to restore itself to a transformative connectivity by an anachronistic pedestrian pace and a historic cinematic reserve. The cinematic memory archive here serves as a parallel to what the radical walker seeks to achieve by placing a pedestrian and anachronistic torque upon a hyper-accelerated society, while deploying her senses, enhanced (in the sense of imitating techniques like zoom and pan) by an equally anachronistic, estranging and disruptive analogue cinema technology.    

8.

The need for radical walkers and walking artists to navigate certain contradictions in the streets – between the hyper-acceleration of information and architecture’s solid frame, between the overwhelming of the sensorium by the onrushing data of the ‘drift’ and a cool organisation of it for future use – partly explains the continuing influence of situationist theory and practice among ambulatory activists. The vitality of the dérive in experimentally and experientially joining ambience to ambience, resistant space to resistant space, is still resonant.  

Situationist critique identified separation as the means by which the Spectacle subordinates social activity to itself; “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Debord, 1995, 12), a relationship of separation by representation and reflection. This separateness is both the ends (patriarchal, statist and bourgeois dominance over everything else) and the justification (the heroic individual male figure in the landscape) of the totality of social relations, the ruling and ruled ‘grounds’ for being/becoming. However, there is no restitution in a simple re-unification. The “unitary urbanism” counterposed by the situationists to the totalised separateness of the Spectacle is not a restoration to just any available connection of things, but an interrogation of those connections, a feint that allows separateness to be re-separated, individualised, to be further floated free, to be made an outcast from outcasts before it can return, unrecognisable and hungry to connect in novel ways. The origins of “unitary urbanism” lie in ‘hypergraphics’, a ‘Lettrist’ post-writing method for communicating in multiple vocabularies; not so much a unification as an assemblage of multiplicities, creating (as yet meaningless) gaps and voids, new levels of a-communication and materiality, unhuman and unthinkable, to which the terrain can return as an agent, and the pedestrian as a poet/sculptor/paramedic/dramaturg, collapsing functions. Just as in ‘Uzumaki’, the world of the urban locale is dismantled in order to make explicit, and relatable to, its subjection to unhuman patterns.  

The Spectacle, however, also has a similar predilection for such dismantling ‘leaps to faith’; reproducing itself as both the logic and product of its separateness, repeatedly escaping its subordination to any totality other than its own. This, though, comes at a cost, for it too is “developing for itself” (Debord, 1995: 16) and is endangered by its self-referential ends and means, always having to start from scratch and wipe the slate clean, increasingly reliant on natural disasters, wars and economic crises; and vulnerable to a future totality – democratic or fascistic or unimaginable – that can ‘get in’, after a future disaster, before it does.

9.

None of this can be successfully opposed by confronting the Spectacle with what is ‘real’ or by a simple stripping away to what is ‘true’ (something powerfully demonstrated by the Trump and Brexit campaigns in 2016); this is what John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ (1988) shows, but does not know. The film exposes its city as a blanket illusion, revealing (through the eyes of its proletarian hero, John Nada, equipped with special sunglasses) the ‘real’ city of 1980s America, a landscape of monochrome, geometrical buildings, and homogenous main drags lined with hoardings transmitting subliminal slogans: SLEEP, CONSUME, OBEY. There is, however, a debilitating contradiction in Carpenter’s conceit. If the monochrome revelation effected by John Nada’s dark glasses is the true city (controlled by Reaganite, free-marketeer aliens), disguised electronically as what we take for real, colourful life, then why, when Nada has destroyed the masking system does the monochrome city not appear to everyone? Why, instead, are the aliens exposed in our colourful world of illusion, rather than us discovering ourselves in their real world of subjection?

‘They Live’, like other ‘trash’ 1980s movies – such as ‘CHUD’ (1984) and ‘The Stuff’ (1985) – that indicted corruption, profit and property, and celebrated acts of resistance (a kind of movie revived by the recent ‘The Purge: Anarchy’ [2014]), addresses the Spectacle as a pattern of corporate and entrepreneurial misrepresentation. It fails to grasp (it shows, but does not explain) that in the Society of the Spectacle appearances are all you get; “reality erupts with the Spectacle, and the Spectacle is real” (Debord, 1995, 14) and the promise of a truth ‘behind it all’ (the ‘grail’ of conspiracy theory) is the greatest deception, and that we, like so much else in the Spectacle, produce that deception ourselves. The crime of the Spectacle is not that it erects a screen between us and the truth, but that it distributes everything, including us, to screens.

Like much occult psychogeography and radical binary narratives of illusion/truth, the problem of ‘They Live’ is not its escapism, but its failure to take its fantasy seriously enough. For the hoard of a cine-dériviste, a totalised whimsy is of little help, but a rigorous realist fantasy (as Carpenter’s movie at first promises to be) can be; yet there are few examples. Where, we might ask, is the situationist ‘Turner Diaries’? Perhaps ‘V For Vendetta’ (2005) is the closest, generating the most popular image of contemporary resistance. But without rigour and realism in fantasy, far better, then, to chisel off something like the pre-credits sequence from ‘Predator 2’ (1990), where the camera races over tree tops, monkeys screech, setting up for a return to the jungle setting of the original ‘Predator’ (1987), only for the camera to rise up and reveal a Los Angeles skyline beyond its fringe of palm trees. Such transitions in the archive are reminders not only of just how quickly the landscape can shift, but that we are always in more than one place at any one time.

The dériviste effaces the Spectacle by reading the codes of the Spectacle and then re-encoding its surfaces with subjective codes of her own; not according to a repetition of survival behaviours or a quest for revelation, but by what she can encode, with pleasure and the coolness that ‘actuality’ brings to looking. When subjected to a separated, calmed and cooled eye, the abject canon of movies fragments, its particles serving not as keys to solving the codes in urban space, but as miasmic screens for dissolving and traducing their meanings and ‘realism’ in the letters and sounds of a new language: “external action and character interaction are suspended.... almost to zero…we peer into an opaque landscape via a slowly tracking survey without clues to help us decipher it… We share effectively in the intensive movements onscreen as we input speculative mental activity in place of dramatic action” (Powell, 2007, 138).  

When I look at almost any hilly rural scene, or see a cliff or gorge, I pleasurably fear that the slow, unfeasible, whirring Kenwood Chef-like dalek spaceship from ‘Daleks – Invasion Earth 2050’ (1966) will emerge, in all its kinkiness, from behind the green landscape. I grasp the fabricated nature of the English rural scene; its grasses, hedges, cattle and copses as artificial as Linoleum, the fruit of generations of genetic and environmental manipulation, England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ turned paper-thin. Even my sardonic Nan could not mediate the sheer horror of life (at least to my 11 year old self) conjured by the creak of metal and the Bernard Herrman soundtrack for a bronze mega-soldier, ‘Talos’, astride the beach in ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (1963). It is not any fear of death I feel, on my beach, but a fear of the life in inert, inorganic and constructed things; hard and statuesque one moment, hot and streaming the next: the “anorganic metal-body trauma-howl of the earth” (Land, 498).

I am still in mental dialogue with these image-trajectories on my walks, as I find sand blowing against a thousand pink ink cartridge cases on the beach or skirt the floods encircling electricity pylons; I have not found the ends of their trails yet: “you think that the trail will understand you, and that’s the worst part, it does”.

10.

The films, above, beginning with those chosen for their exemplary qualities, are shifting more firmly towards my personal preoccupations; inevitably, but necessarily. For the hoard of sequences, camera positions and soundtracks, to have any resonance with the dérive, must spring from strong personal memories of screening and spectatorship, in tune with a key principle of mythogeography: that the walker is as much the mutable site of the walk as their route (Smith, 115).  

In brief, my personal hoard might contain some of the following:

The anachronistic ‘actuality’ of suburbia – “[T]he city’s peripheral terrains remain under the visual sway of cinema rather than that of the digital image” (Barber, 2002, 182) – crossing class divides in ‘One Hour Photo’ (2002).  

The potency of the landscape to produce a sur-reality, an over-reality, like the Kenwood Chef ufo hovering into view across the hills or the swooping and levitating shots in Gaspar Noé’s ‘Enter The Void’ (2009).

A city-totality or a transport network defined by the absence of a single person (and how that reverses the prioritisation of commodities over people): ‘Spooloos’/’The Vanishing’ (1988), ‘Ne le dis à personne’/’Tell No One’ (2006), ‘En la Cuidad de Sylvia’/‘In the City of Sylvia’ (2007).

Fabulous bodies capable of exceeding corporate agendas within a skin’s soggy container: the shadow folk in Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’ (1932), the supine rather than upright, slithering rather than walking, beings of Żulawksi’s ‘Possession’ (1981) and Benson and Moorhead’s ‘Spring’ (2014); and bodies subjected to those corporate agendas, like the mother and daughter’s walking a hillside road and gazed upon in Cattet and Forzani’s détournement of a giallo, ‘Amer’ (2009).

Monuments and monolithic buildings, seen as if through the eyes of Larry Cohen’s ‘Q The Winged Serpent’ (1982), such as the warehouse in ‘Nosfertu’ (1922), the Seattle Space Needle in ‘The Parallax View’ (1974) or the Transamerica Pyramid in the 1978 remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, are monstrous and not “iconic”.

A Fortean historicist-uncanny, like that of the village in Ilya Khrzhanovskiy ‘4’ (2004), anywhere that strangeness is historic rather than supernatural.

‘Tenten’/’Adrift in Tokyo’ (2007): a healing reminder that even the permanent dérive must, and should, end sometime.  

11.

When Jean-Michel Mension called, unannounced, on Guy Debord at his room in Rue Racine he was surprised to find him “in the role of a gent in a dressing gown” (47) For Debord, and many of the other situationists, to ‘drift’ the city was a disruption of their everyday lives. For Mension, and the other youthful ‘delinquents’ in the situationists’ circle, it was simply one part of a life of rebellion: “[T]he first true dérives were in no way distinct from what we did in the ordinary way” (101). Mension’s “milieu of destruction” (Debord, 2004, 15) was idealised by Ivan Chtcheglov in the idea of permanent dérives, a subjection in the form psychological distress to what Constant built into his situationist models of a new city: permanent rush and transformation, more accelerationist than ‘unified’.

Under the conditions of the nascent digital city – even in these very earliest days of the ‘internet of things’ (which by its title alone expresses something of the Spectacle’s overwhelming ambitions, comparable to Google’s plans for immortality, to digitize matter) – a future ambulation will need to walk both sides of a binary of permanence and disruption. Disruption of the everyday, as a portal to the ambient, occulted imaginary or taking back surplus pleasure, as a means to edit and reassemble the codes of the city, will continue to serve walkers as a tactic, but not as a strategy. Fighting separation with further separations may work up to a point, but beyond that lies all kinds of New Babylons additional to those visualized by Constant, all of them fulfilling what “dérive experiences lead to proposing… the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression” (Debord, 2006, 62). Caught between Stalinism and Nazism, twentieth century critical modernism backed rapidly away from “an embrace of totality in aesthetics.... [as] it led to an embrace of totality in political communities” (Levine, 5); but we live now under different conditions, in the peculiar circumstances of a global totality rested on the anti-totality principles of neo-liberalism and prosecuted by a plethora of invasive, algorithmic ‘Skynets’. In the situation of our subjectivity in peril, jump cuts between atmospheres, ‘catapults’ and cutting a ‘V’ through the city are challenged to disrupt their own disruptions, to ‘leap’ the borders of their own separations; the epic walks, sensitized and often social, of Monique Besten, Anthony Schrag, Thomas Bram Arnold, Elspeth Owen, Esther Pilkington, Mads Floor Andersen and others seem to point to a permanent drift, and to a daily serious adventure through variegated zones of ambience as predicted by Ivan Chtcheglov (6). To that flow I am adding the suggestion of a cinematically-bathed daily practice as a provisional-totalising of ambulatory tactics on the way towards a strategy for more than surviving the apocalypse, based upon the revival of the subjective: an intense hyper-sensitization in the streets once “lived and suffered through the eye” but now for the whole body of senses.

What the static camera and gentle pans of ‘AKA Serial Killer’ and the landscape-privileged sequences from movies as different as ‘Stalker’ and ‘The Langoliers’ offers such a whole-body dériviste is an ‘actuality cinema’ default consciousness, a pre-dramatic sensitivity and a pre-romantic realism; a shift away from occult adventures and romanticism (by passing through them and beyond them) to a cooler re-exploring of landscape and a return of the primacy of terrain to psychogeography.

This bathing of the terrain with cinema images, and letting the terrain bathe back “imbu[ing] the film image with an imposed dimension.... negotiat[ing] and enforc[ing] its own mass within the image (Barber, 2002, 20), will enwrap the walker in a controlled intensity, within which they can order and direct their suffering and separated mind/body/eye: a discreet and subjective psycho-cinematography for an invasive digital city where, “alongside its powerful web of media screens, [it] is assembled from the delicate visual and emotional projections of its inhabitants” (Barber, 2002, 156).      

Phil Smith is a performance-maker, writer and ambulatory researcher, specialising in performances related to walking, site-specificity, mythogeographies and counter-tourism. A core member of site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites; and a co-author of the company’s various ‘mis-guides’. He writes and performs ‘mis-guided tours’, and creates inter-disciplinary performance. He is an Associate Professor (Reader) at the University of Plymouth.

Bibliography

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Barber, Stephen. (2014). Performance Projections: film and the body in action. London: Reaktion Books.

Careri, Francesco. (2002). Walkscapes. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili.  

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Debord, Guy. (1995). The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zero Books.  

Debord, Guy. (1998). Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso.

Debord, Guy. (2004). Panegyric Volumes 1 & 2. Translated by James Brook & John McHale.  London: Verso.

Debord, Guy. (2006). “Theory of the Dérive”. In Situationist International Anthology. Edited and translated by Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.  

Deleuze, Gilles. (2005). Cinema 1: the movement-image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Continuum.

Furuhata, Yuriko. (2013).  Cinema of Actuality: Japanese avant-garde filmmaking in the season of image politics. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Gibson, James J.. (1983). Senses as Perceptual Systems. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Gombin, Richard. (1975). The Origins of Modern Leftism. Translated by Michael K. Perl. London: Penguin.

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[frmartinshomiliesandreflections]

13th May >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections / Homilies on John 15:1-8 for Wednesday, Fifth Week of Easter: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches’.

Wednesday, Fifth Week of Easter

Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

John 15:1-8

I am the vine, you are the branches

Jesus said to his disciples:

‘I am the true vine,

and my Father is the vinedresser.

Every branch in me that bears no fruit

he cuts away,

and every branch that does bear fruit

he prunes to make it bear even more.

You are pruned already,

by means of the word that I have spoken to you.

Make your home in me, as I make mine in you.

As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself,

but must remain part of the vine,

neither can you unless you remain in me.

I am the vine,

you are the branches.

Whoever remains in me, with me in him,

bears fruit in plenty;

for cut off from me you can do nothing.

Anyone who does not remain in me

is like a branch that has been thrown away – he withers;

these branches are collected and thrown on the fire,

and they are burnt.

If you remain in me

and my words remain in you,

you may ask what you will

and you shall get it.

It is to the glory of my Father that you should bear much fruit,

and then you will be my disciples.’

Gospel (USA)

John 15:1-8

Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit.

Jesus said to his disciples: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and everyone that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit. You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you. Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw them into a fire and they will be burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you. By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”

Reflections (6)

(i) Wednesday, Fifth Week of Easter

There is always a temptation to put limits on God, to say, in effect, that God cannot do this or that unless this or that happens. We find such a scenario in today’s first reading. Some Jewish Christians from Jerusalem came down to the church in Antioch and told converts to the faith from paganism, Gentile Christians, ‘Unless you have yourselves circumcised in the tradition of Moses, you cannot be saved’. They were saying in effect, ‘Much as God would like to include you among those who will inherit eternal life, he is powerless unless you have yourselves circumcised’. We don’t have to go back as far as the Acts of the Apostles to find such a mind-set. In living memory, we have allowed ourselves to think that we cannot find favour with God unless we follow certain rules or rituals or long standing customs. However, God cannot be boxed in like that. Today’s gospel reading is taken from the gospel of John and earlier in that gospel Jesus says to Nicodemus, ‘the Spirit blows where it chooses’. Because God is all loving towards us, God is completely free in our regard in a way we can never understand. God’s love towards us has been fully revealed in Jesus. In one of his letters, Paul speaks about ‘the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge’. Because our relationship with the Lord is one of love, there is nothing mechanical about that relationship, whereby if we do one thing, he becomes free to do something else. There is nothing less mechanical than the image of the vine and the branches that Jesus offers us in today’s gospel reading. It is a vibrant, living, dynamic, image. If Jesus is the vine and we are the branches, it is difficult to know where the vine ends and the branches begin. Jesus invites us to make our home in him, as he makes his home in us. He desires an intimate relationship with us, a relationship of love. It is an empowering relationship, just as the vine empowers the branches to bear fruit. As we grow in our relationship, our friendship, with the Lord, something of his love that surpasses knowledge will become visible in our own lives.

And/Or

(ii) Wednesday, Fifth Week of Easter

This morning’s gospel reading is again taken from John’s account of what Jesus said to his disciples on the night before he died. Jesus is taking his leave of his disciples but, before doing so, he wants to assure them that beyond his death and resurrection he will remain in communion with them. The image of the vine and the branches expresses the depth of his communion with his disciples, with all of us. The Lord wants to be in communion with all of us, but for that to happen we must remain in him by allowing his words to remain in us, by allowing his words to shape our lives. We can slip out of our communion with him; we can cut ourselves off from the Lord. However, his invitation is always there to return to him and to remain with him or in him. It is in returning to him, in remaining in him, in allowing his words to remain in us, that our lives bear rich fruit, what Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit. According to the last verse of our gospel reading, it is lives rich in the fruit of the Spirit that give glory to God. According to Saint Irenaeus, it is the human person fully alive - alive with the fruit of the Spirit - that gives glory to God.

 And/Or

(iii) Wednesday, Fifth Week of Easter

Those who have roses will know that they need to be pruned if you are to get the best out of them. What is true of roses is true of most plants; pruning brings on new life. Jesus refers to that procedure of pruning in today’s gospel reading. He suggests that in various ways God prunes our lives to make them even more fruitful than they presently are. There are some things we may need to shed if we are to become all that God is calling us to be. Some experiences of letting go, which can be very painful at the time, can help us to grow in our relationship with God and with others. Yet, during those painful experiences of pruning in our lives, the Lord is in communion with us. In the words of the gospel reading, he makes his home in us, he remains in us. We don’t have to face into that experience of being pruned on our own, or in the strength of our own resources alone. The Lord who makes his home in us will sustain us in those times, and will lead us through the painful experience of pruning into a new and more fruitful life. However, for that to happen we need to remain in him as he remains in us; we need to keep in communion with him, as he is in communion with us.

 And/Or

(iv) Wednesday, Fifth Week of Easter

The words of Jesus we have just heard from the gospel of John are spoken in the course of the Last Supper. Jesus has been speaking about his immanent departure, his leaving this world and going to the Father. It is in that context of speaking about his going away from his disciples that Jesus also speaks about his presence to his disciples, the new communion between Jesus and his disciples that his departure will make possible. One image of the new quality of communion between Jesus and his disciples, between Jesus and us, is the image of the vine. Jesus says ‘I am the vine, you are the branches’. Jesus has taken the initiative to create that communion, by his journey to the Father and his sending of the Spirit. We are not asked to create that communion; that has been done for us. Our calling is to preserve the communion the Lord has created or, in the words of the gospel reading, to remain in him. We are to remain in the communion the Lord has created and is always creating. We do that by our prayerful communion with him and by our efforts to love one another as he has loved us, to be in communion with each other as he is in communion with us.

 And/Or

(v) Wednesday, Fifth Week of Easter

Several times in John’s gospel Jesus makes a solemn statement about himself beginning with the two little words, ‘I am...’ In this morning’s gospel reading ‘I am the vine’. This, however, is the only occasion when having declared ‘I am...’ Jesus immediately goes on to declare to his disciples, ‘you are...’ Having said, ‘I am the vine’, Jesus says to his disciples, ‘you are the branches’. Jesus is the whole vine and we, his disciples, are the branches on that vine. By means of this image Jesus was expressing very graphically the bond that he seeks to create between himself and ourselves. He wants to make his home in us and the wants us to make our home in him. He speaks of a deep communion between himself and ourselves, one that bears rich fruit, the fruit of his loving presence to others. The fruit is secondary to the communion, as Jesus says you cannot bear fruit unless you remain in me. The Lord has taken the initiative to bring about this deep communion between him and us; he has laid down his life for us and poured the Spirit into our hearts. We have to reciprocate, by befriending him as he has befriended us, by allowing his words to remain in us, making a home for his words in our hearts.

 And/Or

(vi) Wednesday, Fifth Week of Easter

The children from the local primary schools will be making their Confirmation in the parish in a few weeks time. As part of their instruction for the Sacrament, they will have been told about the fruits of the Holy Spirit. It is Saint Paul in his letter to the Galatians who gives us the fruits, or what he terms the ‘fruit’, of the Holy Spirit, ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’. Paul was articulating there the fundamental attitudes of heart that the Holy Spirit works to form within us. He is saying that if we open ourselves to the gift of the Spirit we have received, our life will show forth this rich fruit. In the gospel reading this morning, Jesus also speaks about fruit in connection with the image of the vine. At the end of the gospel reading he declares that it is to the glory of God his Father that we should bear much fruit. A little beyond this reading Jesus identifies this fruit with love, the kind of love that Jesus gave expression to in his own life, what Paul identifies as the fruit of the Spirit. Jesus declares in our reading that if we are to bear this fruit we must remain in him as branches in the vine. Paul identifies the Spirit as the source of this fruit; Jesus identifies himself as its source. It is our union with the Lord through the Spirit that empowers us to live in a way that reflects how the Lord lived. We cannot live this way on the basis of our own resources alone. We need to be in union with the Lord and his Spirit.

Fr. Martin Hogan, Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin, D03 AO62, Ireland.

Email: sjtbclontarf@eircom.net or  revmartinhogan@gmail.com

Parish Website: www.stjohnsclontarf.ie  Please join us via our webcam.

Twitter: @SJtBClontarfRC.

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Essay by Michael Almereyda, Filmmaker

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out. —Martin Scorsese

We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

In Cameraperson (2016), Kirsten Johnson has made a buoyant film about the weight of the world.

She lays out her process in a paragraph presented up front. What we’re about to see, she explains, has been patched together from material she has shot as a cinematographer for films directed by other people, in the course of a career spanning twenty-five years. “I ask you to see it as my memoir,” Johnson insists.

A memoir, yes, but one that is scant on autobiographical facts. You have to turn elsewhere to learn that Johnson studied painting and literature in the late 1980s at Brown University, where she had a political awakening, stirred by the anti-apartheid movement roiling the campus. Upon graduation, making an uncommon move, she transplanted herself to Senegal and interned there on a film written by the great Ousmane Sembène. In 1991, she was the first American to enroll at La Fémis, the French national film school, where she entered the camera department and discovered a vocation. She landed early cinematography jobs in France and Brazil.

Evolving from this global trajectory, Cameraperson is a nonchronological collage of raw and repurposed footage: forty-four distinct episodes (by my count) made up of sounds and images gathered for (but generally not appearing in) twenty-four separate projects. Most of the episodes are bridged by breaks of black frames, during which anticipatory sounds prepare for oncoming images. Locations are identified by title cards, and eleven people are given names and job descriptions, ranging from “Jacques Derrida / French philosopher”—a quick cameo, as the famous man impishly holds forth on a Manhattan street—to “Aisha Bukar / nurse, midwife,” a more substantial, recurring presence, granting us access to a natal unit in a Nigerian hospital, where the film arrives at one of its most harrowing sequences. We get scraps from high-profile documentaries—Laura Poitras’s The Oath and Citizenfour, on which Johnson served as a principal shooter, and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, for which she received an “additional camera operator” credit—but most of the movies cannibalized here are not especially well-known, and Johnson accomplishes her most probing portraiture by focusing on people encountered as strangers. Her inclusion, at regular intervals, of her own home-video footage confirms an impression of inspired and intimate rummaging. (This is a memoir that blurs the line between professional and private experience.) Ultimately, like a lavish quilt, or a bird’s nest, the film subsumes its source material on the way to becoming a complete and organic new thing.

More often than not, Johnson’s work takes her to places stamped by violence, death, and destruction, sites of collective grief and dread. Even if the worst of the mayhem has occurred in the past, she’s there to absorb and collect the residue, talking to survivors, bearing witness. Johnson supplies a few grace notes, musical interludes, flashes of scenic splendor, but for a film made by a cinematographer, there are bracingly few images that are merely pretty or picturesque. People are plainly what Johnson cares about most, and in this film she candidly prizes and examines her ability to use her camera to get close to whoever is in the frame. “Gettin’ close to everybody,” she murmurs, disarmingly, to an initially wary man in a Brooklyn boxing gym. The man smiles and relaxes, as if Johnson has cast a spell. She coaxes equivalent looks of complicity and acceptance from a boy in Kabul whose left eye has been blinded in a bomb blast; from an elegantly wizened Muslim woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina who, with a tight, tart smile, denies that the Serbs’ campaign of mass rape ever affected her family; and from her own mother, diminished by Alzheimer’s, regarding Johnson—and Johnson’s camera—with a mix of tenderness and fright.

The film has been crafted with self-reflexive knowingness. Shots that feature fumbling and reframing are integrated the way a confident painter builds a picture around bare canvas, loose brushwork, spattered drips. And there’s a steady pressing of a central nerve, a nagging question implicit in the most searching documentaries as well as the most trivial: At what point does the camera’s scrutiny become exploitative, invasive, voyeuristic, damaging? The question hovers throughout the film, despite Johnson’s evident gift for putting people at ease, respecting the pressure and pain of true confession. In sequence after sequence, she invites and captures intimacy, even or especially when her subjects don’t want their faces shown. (In these cases, Johnson’s camera follows their uneasy hands, and we see Scorsese’s axiom at work; what’s not in the frame adds eloquence to what is.)

As a self-portrait, Cameraperson is intriguingly elliptical, oblique. Early on, we see Johnson’s striding shadow, her camera rising from her shoulder like a jagged branch, an extension of her body, but in the course of the film she appears full-on only briefly, near the end. She doesn’t spell out a credo, or spill any outright confessions of her own. (In an overconfiding age, this may account for a good deal of the film’s power.) But Johnson’s overheard voice—a quick, open, guileless voice, quintessentially American—is there from the start, behind the lens, giggling and almost giddy. When her camera catches lightning slicing down from a wash of blue-gray Missouri clouds, she gasps, then stays steady and silent enough to take in the emptiness—a crash of thunder, its echo, a defiantly serene bird—then Johnson sneezes, twice, jostling the frame, undercutting any self-important claim to authority as the film’s title comes up.

Soon after, in Sarajevo, speaking offhandedly to an unseen collaborator, the cameraperson sketches her MO, talking like a teenager: “I always try to have some kind of relationship with people, like I’ll look them in the eye like ‘You see me shooting you, don’t you?’”

She shows us her twin toddlers in her Manhattan home (without giving a glimpse of a significant other) and spends time with her parents, inevitable augurs of mortality. Johnson’s father, on a casual walk, cheerfully displays a dead bird to the grandkids, while images of Johnson’s mother give way to shots of a container holding her ashes. (For the latter, Johnson keeps rearranging objects in the frame, adjusting the composition, as if trying to come to terms with the unadjustable limit of her mother’s life.)

In interviews, Johnson has expressed guilt and self-reproach about photographing her afflicted mother against her wishes. Yet, as she must know, some of her film’s most poignant moments emerge from this betrayal. How could Johnson resist recording her mother’s stunned face, trying to hold on to an identity slipping away before her eyes? Circling back to Scorsese, we can recognize that Johnson is confronting a larger fact: human presences are always fragile, fleeting, on their way to being out of the frame.

*****

You can entangle across time. You can entangle into the future, into the past. You can entangle through space. That’s what quantum entanglement means. It means that there’s another underlying layer of nature that we haven’t discovered yet. —Dr. Eric W. Davis, in Cameraperson

At some point in the editing process, Johnson seems to have taken her cue from the astrophysicist quoted above, riffing on the notion that we’re all entangled; time and space can’t always be taken literally; recorded reality can be reorganized to comply with memory and imagination. By this logic, less scientific than intuitive, people and places in Johnson’s memoir become entangled in occasional shared chapters, tethered by free-associational edits. The harsh wind in Wyoming, flashing through tall grass on the Johnson family ranch, makes Johnson’s mother stagger, wince, and seem to dwindle into a Giacometti figurine. With the grace of a cut, the same wind sweeps through a yellow hillside in Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the rural village where a Muslim family has returned to their farm while contending with memories of genocide and war.

Similar associative links and leaps flicker throughout the film, but, halfway in, there’s a sequence that’s starkly explicit in its insistence on interconnectedness. Johnson serves up a series of landscapes where historic atrocities have occurred, now mute and tranquil crime scenes, mundane places conjoined by invisible carnage and, for the most part, a shared look of dreary ordinariness. The sequence includes sites of mass execution, torture, and rape, plus forensic shots of the drab interior of a pickup truck identified as the vehicle that dragged James Byrd Jr. to his death in the otherwise unremarkable town of Jasper, Texas. In this stretch, Johnson expresses a sustained note of anguish, like a war correspondent admitting to a case of secondhand PTSD, but she’s stoic about it, and, as her film offers a range of locations and perspectives, she’s irrepressibly alert to the bigger picture—a picture that includes antic dancing in Uganda, a woman embracing a fierce and humiliated young boxer after a lost match in Brooklyn, the flow of life around a roadside market in Liberia. It’s fair to say the “wonderful” God hailed by nine-year-old Kirsten in a preserved handwritten poem—“Your love never ends! / And my love to you will never end!”—has been displaced, in the grown cameraperson’s mind and eye, by a pantheistic understanding of the world, a sense of immanence and mystery that competes with evidence of unrelenting bad news. And so Johnson counterbalances bitter and abject scenes with proofs of compassion, consolation, even joy. And it’s no fluke that many of the film’s brighter moments involve children.

*****

Down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios . . . Long live life as it is! —Dziga Vertov

Cameraperson has been showered with sympathetic and insightful reviews, and hailed as a film without precedent. It doesn’t diminish Johnson’s work—its integrity, freshness, and force—to recognize that antecedents do exist. Dziga Vertov, the pioneering Soviet director of newsreels and kaleidoscopic documentary features, would not be spinning in his grave to consider his legacy extended and fulfilled in Johnson’s audacious and self-aware doc/essay/travelogue/memoir. Indeed, Cameraperson would make a provocative double bill with Vertov’s equally unclassifiable Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a dazzling chronicle of urban life channeled dusk to dawn through the lens of an itinerant cameraman, a tale told without intertitles or narration. (Vertov’s spectacular “day” was in fact filmed in four cities over a period of three years.) Man with a Movie Camera’s propulsive editing and hyper-aestheticized photography don’t jibe with Johnson’s levelheaded approach, but her anchoring ambition is aligned with Vertov’s: to record and elevate common experience, to uphold film as a reflection of reality rather than an escape from it, and, further, to create movies that open idealistically outward, providing a means for people to see their lives valued, honored, and in effect returned to them, even as they become part of a larger collective story.

In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), we can find another singular, self-defining, soaring hybrid “documentary” experiment, a collage of fragmentary episodes candidly jigsawed together from a cinematographer’s accumulated outtakes. Marker uses magisterial narration to explicate his images, to question them, to expand their reach, constructing a philosophical inquiry into the nature of seeing, memory, time, consciousness; but strip away the voice-over and you can still take in Marker’s generous regard for the people he encounters, respect for their vulnerability, their otherness, their unique place within a vast human family.

All the same, Vertov and Marker, assigning their authentic, unstaged images to fictional cameramen, avoid the level of personal risk embraced by Johnson, who unabashedly (if incompletely) reveals her history, her unmistakable self, as the source of every frame. By the time we catch sight of her in Cameraperson, we can be forgiven for presuming to know her. She aims the camera at herself, standing beside her unsteady mother, sharing the older woman’s worried smile, and her eyes look haunted. The image emerges within a flashback, an editorial surprise, and it suggests that Johnson would agree with a primary Marker aphorism: “Being a photographer means not only to look but to sustain the gaze of others.” The gaze of others, we can see, carries a corresponding weight.

*****

I said to the wanting-creature inside me: What is this river you want to cross? —Kabir

Voyeurism is related to cinema as lust is related to love. You can separate them—you can try to separate them—but to what end? The urge to look, to see and share private experience—whether displays of intimacy, acts of violence, the urgent facts of another person’s pain—is seldom pure and simple. How do we, filmmakers and film viewers, transcend voyeurism? How can a filmmaker’s craft and conscience elevate images from voyeurism to revelation?

Cameraperson reaches a kind of climax back in Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the place Johnson visits most within the braided strands of the film’s structure. She documents her return five years after her initial journey, with music from the resulting 2011 film, an episode of the PBS series Women, War & Peace, brimming over into Cameraperson, the movie we’re watching while the gathered family watches themselves on a laptop screen. Johnson, of course, records this rapt audience, their charged attention, then the rich homemade meal that follows, coffee, a cigarette. The Möbius-strip circuit of giving and taking and giving back—the process of seeing, sharing, and accepting—brings Cameraperson to an ideal summit of reconciliation, peace, hope for the future. “We hope someday she can come back with her son and daughter,” a woman tells Johnson’s translator, “to see how peasants live.” Exactly the response Vertov was hectically hungering for.

One of the film’s most arresting and resonant images, for this viewer, occurs earlier in Foča, when an unnamed Muslim woman lifts a bowl high above her head, confidently spilling berries into another bowl held below her waist. The free-falling fruit makes an ecstatic blur, and the next cut shows the berries as they’ve landed and settled, as if artfully prearranged: a ready-made bouquet of whorled color—red, black, white, yellow—an instant metaphor for plenitude and renewal, raw experience transformed into poetry.

“Wow,” says the woman behind the camera. “It’s like magic.”

Yes—wow—it is.

Michael Almereyda’s documentary films include This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World, Paradise, and the forthcoming Escapes.

I have copied this essay from the site linked above.