Pinboard: bookmarks for jannon tagged 'imagination'

k-punk: 'Everything is impossible now ...' (2009)

"In 'The Hay Wain,' English culture and history become a repeating labyrinth where the rebels are always on the run from the forces of power and privilege. Fleeing Peterloo, Jack Frake eventually stumbles into the Suffolk scene Constable is painting; meanwhile, in 1990, a Poll Tax rioter takes refuge in the National Gallery and 'notices what he has never noticed before on biscuit tins or calendars, or plastic trays on the walls of his aunt's flat in Bradford, those tiny figures bending in the field beyond.' Sharp replaces the dominant pastoral image of the English countryside, not with a deflated quotidian realism, but with a different kind of lyricism, one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavenged spectral rage of murdered working class martyrs. It is not the sunlit English afternoon that is 'timeless,' but the ability of the agents of reaction to escape justice."

1989 1990 2009 a.span.of.twenty.years another.world another.world.is.necessary another.world.is.possible avatar blood change colonialism constable country countryside delicious-export eclipse enclosure escape foreclosure hauntology historiography history images imaginary imagination jameson k-punk martyrs massacre national.gallery.of.art other painting paintings pastoral peterloo picturesque places police politics poll.tax poll.tax.riot rurality space suffolk the.hay.wain the.picturesque theory time times utopia violence
february 2010 by jannon

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k-punk: Post-Apocalypse Now

this would make more sense if I had read any lacan ever: "Capitalist realism keeps attention on the ephemeral plenitude of wealth and social status, containing the nullity of ecological catastrophe as an anamorphic blot at the edge of vision. It has the advantage that such an operation is already routinely at the level of individual psychology in respect of death, whose repression no doubt one of the ‘falsities’ that, according to Nietzsche, is necessary for life. So one tactic is to stop imagining eco-catastrophe and Realise it – which is not to say bring it about, but to act as if it has already happened. . . . The only way to prevent the catastrophe . . . is to project ourselves into the post-apocalyptic situation and think what we would have done to have avoided it. In other words, we must act as if what is in fact the case—the inevitability of catastrophe—is the case. The simulation, the as-if, is necessary in part because the Real . . . can only emerge in the form of a fiction."

acceleration anticapitalism apocalypse art as.if capitalism capitalist.realism catastrophe causality change culture death deleuze delicious-export drive environment environmentalism fiction film future.perfect gattungswesen grammar holbein imagination k-punk lacan machines marxism meltdown movies narrative nick.land philosophy project projection projects realization retroactive.causation retrofuturism singularity species-being terminator the.Real theory time verwirklichung vision what.will.have.become what.will.have.been.done what.will.have.come.into.being
december 2009 by jannon

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ArtReview Blogs | Art news & Exhibitions | Patrick Keiller at the BFI: BCCTV / artreview.com (2007)

"Nothing in particular is happening in the films, just life rolling by. . . . Because we’re unused to seeing such early examples, there’s that sense of amazement – the same feeling you get watching colour films from the 1930s and 40s. It's a shock to realise that these top-hatted Victorians were human beings, getting on with their everyday lives. . . . They are silent of course. You have to imagine the noise just as you have to imagine the stink and the rain. . . . the development of cities is not so much about changes in the built environment, but about something more subjective. It is the people, the way they move and the way we perceive them, that creates the impression of a great gulf. The explicit message is that our cities have been transformed; not so much by he wrecking ball as by changes in the way we behave. There's an implied message about film as well – how it has grown from a very innocent beginning into the all-conquering, magical, deceiving medium that it is today."

20th.century aesthetic archives behavior built.environment change citylife delicious-export documentary documents duration filmic gaze goodbye.20th.century hauntology history imaginary.cities imagination movement objects old.cities ontology patrick.keiller people persistence the.city.of.the.future the.filmic time transformation
september 2009 by jannon

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Mike Davis on Obama and the unlikelihood of a new new deal (Radical Perspectives on the Crisis) (October 2008)

"Obama won't inherit Roosevelt's ultimate situational advantage -- having emergent tools of state intervention and demand management (later to be called "Keynesianism") empowered by an epochal uprising of industrial workers in the world's most productive factories. . . . the New Deal did not arise spontaneously from the goodwill or imagination of the White House. On the contrary, the social contract for the post-1935 Second New Deal was a complex, adaptive response to the greatest working-class movement in our history, in a period when powerful third parties still roamed the political landscape and Marxism exercised extraordinary influence on American intellectual life." Also: "war production . . . became a huge engine for the reemployment of the American work force, the real cure for the depressed job markets of the 1930s. Subsequently, American world power and full employment would align in a way that won the loyalty of several generations of working-class voters." (via danched)

capitalism chasm citizenship colonialism crisis deindustrialization delicious-export economics economy epistemology grand.canyon history imagination keynes leverage marx masses mike.davis military.industrial.complex obama politics power recession roosevelt socialism strategy they.don't.need.us via:danched void war
august 2009 by jannon

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Death to the picturesque! | open Democracy News Analysis

meades on the picturesque as willful denial of the realities of rural work by the fastidious inhabitants of subtopia (aka suburbia). very much in agreement. also furthers my sense that this cultural moment is one that falls for / seems to want an aesthetic of the post-industrial picturesque. (via danched)

architecture city country delicious-export domestic economics england fastidiousness framed imagination landscape meades meat nostalgia pictures picturesque romanticism rural rurality subtopia suburbia transformation uk via:danched view work world
august 2009 by jannon

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