obverse reverse

Drama, Fields and Metaphors / Victor Turner / 1974 / london / Cornell

1. breach of the regular norm-governed social relations
2. crisis, during which there is a tendency for the breach to widen
3. redressive action, the performance of public ritual
4. reintegration of the disturbed social group

thresholds between stable phases of social process

separation, marginal period, reincorporation

power manifest in spectacle, ceremony, pageantry

court ritual / court politics

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

LE COMBAT À LA BARRIÈRE

Jacques Callot (1592 - 1635) The Combat at the Barrier. 1627.

… Karl Freund, who [Godard tells us] invented in advance the lighting effects of Nuremberg… and which they themselves derived from Goya, Callot or Rembrandt and his 'terrible black and white'
Ranciere - The Future of the Image - Sentence, Image, History p54

three solitudes


Walter Benjamin: “When Fourier looked for an example of travail non salarié mais passionné, he found none that was more obvious than the building of barricades.”