bucolic

 

aylesbury estate

 “He then left the discussion to mount a one-man protest at the Japanese embassy,” Mr. Halpin said. “Very odd behavior for an undercover.”

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/new-twist-in-british-spys-case-unravels-in-u-s/

• understanding their environment, resources, threats and opportunities,
• anticipating situations and having the knowledge, capabilities, decision making processes and leadership structures to manage those situations, by
• actively engaging with their environment to gather information that can be processed into actionable intelligence, that can be translated into effective operations, and
• continually learning and improving their processes through the application of useful metrics to ensure capabilities are sustained.

live and latest / strike

Althusser had warned (citing Bergson), “One has ‘to wait until the sugar dissolves’”:

On Thursday the 29^th and fifth day of his sicknesse, hopes began a little to diminish; howbeit that morning his headache was somewhat lessened, his breath also, which before was short, being longer, which moved him to put on his cloathes, endeavouring to rise as he had done before; but his head being so giddy that he was not able to stand alone, he was forced to betake him to his bed againe; from henceforth ever keeping to his bed. This evening there appeared a fatall signe, about two hours or more within the night, bearing the colours and shew of a rainbow*, which hung directly crosse and over Saint James’s House. It was first perceived about seven a clocke at night, which I my selfe did see, which divers others looking thereupon with admiration, continuing until past bed-time, being no more seene. This night was unquiet and he rested ill.

* A lunar rainbow, as presaging the death of Princes and the desolation of Kingdoms.

Desert in the desert (the one signaling toward the other), desert of a messianicity without messianism and therefore without doctrine and religious dogma, this arid and horizon-deprived expectation retains nothing of the great messianisms of the Book except the relation to the arrivant who may come—or never come—but of whom, by definition, I must know nothing in advance. Nothing, except that justice, in the most enigmatic sense of the word, is at stake. And, for the same reason, revolution, in that the event and justice are tied to this absolute rip in the foreseeable concatenation of historical time. The rip of eschatology in teleology, from which it must be dissociated here, which is always difficult. It is possible to renounce a certain revolutionary imagery or all revolutionary rhetoric, even to renounce a certain politics of revolution, so to speak, perhaps even renounce every politics of revolution, but it is not possible to renounce revolution without also renouncing the event and justice.
—Jacques Derrida

A demonstration is political not because it takes place in a specific locale and bears upon a particular object but rather because its form is that of a clash between two partitions of the sensible.
—Jacques Rancière

From Philip Armstrong / Recticulations

desertion / occupation

The 2nd of May 1808 in Madrid: the charge of the Mamelukes

History / kill zones


ABC

supply lines

CAB /24/ 139

Report on Revolutionary organizations in the UK / Special Branch / Oct 5^th 1922

Communists were also instructed that in the event of war they were on no account to take up a hostile attitude or one of pacifism, but to carry propaganda in the Army and if necessary, fire in the air.

There has been some propaganda in favour of obstructing the transport of troops and of war material, but the result has, so far, been negligible.

On September 26^th the Poplar Unemployed passed a resolution to picket all ships in the east India dock which were being used for transport of ammunition to the Near East

a considerable piece of something heavy

Get out of prison free / geometric revolution

Whose streets?

Photos - Gordon Dawson

coming in, in all directions

No horses today. Guess they. Were afraid of the marbles #demo2011 #M26

crow

whitehall 26/3

push button and wait

snapshots of the revolution

1919




















In the spring of this year, during the first warm days, wierd, fantastic people crawled out on the streets of Petrograd. Where and how had they lived hitherto? Doubtless in some slum, in old, solitary, crumbling houses, hidden away from life, insulted and rejected by the world. One dominant thought cropped up in my mind every time I saw them: they have forgotten something and are trying to recall it, silently crawling about the town in search of it.
They were dressed in worn-out, tattered clothes, they were dirty and evidently very hungry, but they did not look like beggars and did not ask for alms. Very silently, very carefully, they walked along, watching the ordinary passers-by with suspicion and curiosity. As they stopped before the shop windows, they examined the things exhibited in them with the eyes of folk who are trying to discover - or remember - what use one made of all those things. Motor-cars terrified them, as they terrified country men and women twenty years ago.

Maxim Gorky / Fragments from my Diary / 1924

inter-être

Philip Armstrong's text on waiting for tear gas / Allan Sekula

In photographing the Seattle demonstrations my working idea was to move with the flow of protest, from dawn to 3 a.m. if need be, taking in the lulls, the waiting and the margin of events. The rule of thumb for this sort of anti-journalism: no flash, no telephoto lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence.

Later, working at the light-table, and reading the increasingly stereotypical descriptions of the new face of protest, I realized all the more that a simple descriptive physiognomy was warranted. The alliance on the streets was indeed stranger, more varied and inspired than could be conveyed by the cute alliterative play with “teamsters” and “turtles.

I hoped to describe the attitudes of people waiting, unarmed, sometimes deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and the rubber bullets and the concussion grenades. There were moments of civic solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival.

Again, something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the city streets against the abstraction of global capital. There was a strong feminist dimension to this testimony, and there was also a dimension grounded in the experience of work. It was the men and women who work on the docks, after all, who shut down the flow of metal boxes from Asia, relying on individual knowledge that there is always another body on the other side of the sea doing the same work, that all this global trade is more than a matter of a mouse-click.

One fleeting hallucination could not be photographed. As the blast of stun grenades reverberated amidst the downtown skyscrapers, someone with a boom box thoughtfully provided a musical accompaniment: Jimi Hendrix’s mock-hysterical rendition of the American national anthem. At that moment, Hendrix returned to the streets of Seattle, slyly caricaturing the pumped-up sovereignty of the world’s only superpower.

Sekula, Allan. “[white globe to black].” Five Days that Shook the World. Ed. Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, and Allan Sekula. London: Verso, 2000.

198 methods of non violent action

198 methods of non violent action

Triumph of the French People Over Monarchy, 1793

Jacques Louis David, Triumph of the French People Over Monarchy, 1793

Maarten van Heemskerck - Allegory of the World.

suffrage parade

Description: Inez Boissevain, wearing white cape, seated on white horse at the suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., 1913.





















Queen Elizabeth riding the chariot of Fame.
Sir William Teshe, 1570. BL Sloane MS 1832

poem to shout in the ruins 2