"All things will be changed!"
When it comes to the notion of an "apocalypse now", then the promise of of emancipation, right at the heart of the European "enlightenment", is also a promise of change.
And "change" is at the heart of the European millenarian movements of the so-called "middle" ages. Samir Amin, whose groundbreaking work on "eurocentrism", raises a question on the matter of this timeline, a sequence where the "classic" ages of classical antiquity are followed by the so-called "dark" (or un-enlightened, as in little evidence of textual documentation) and the "middle" ages. Amin contends, as does McLuhan, that these "middle ages" were in fact entirely classical in their cultural forms and ways of thinking, and operating, and serving, in an economic, political system of power, going back to classical antiquity, he designates as "tributary". This involves a cultural, political and economic society that, when it comes to the reality of power;
power is made VISIBLE in the political theatre of being seen to make tribute.
This tributary system gives way in the so-called Renaissance, that is NO kind of re-birth at all, but does involve the birth of something else, capitalism, where the actual relations of power are obscured, INVISIBLE, and rendered only at a level of abstraction, and of course, in double entry book keeping.
The Prussian homage
The Prussian Homage is an oil on canvas painting by Polish painter Jan Matejko painted between 1879 and 1882 in Kraków (then part of Austria-Hungary). The painting depicts the "Prussian Homage," a significant political event from the time of the Renaissance in Poland in which Albrecht of Hohenzollern, the Duke of Prussia, paid tribute and swore allegiance to Matejko the Old in Kraków's market square on 10 April 1525. Matejko depicted over thirty important figures of the Polish Renaissance period, taking the liberty of including several who were not actually present at the event. This nineteenth century Polish artwork captures a moment, one among many in the Renaissance period, when the witness of an act of homage was to prove to be an empty show.
The painting glorifies this event in Poland's past and its culture, and the majesty of its kings. At the same time, the painting has darker undertones, reflecting the troubled times that befell Poland in the late eighteenth century, for the Kingdom of Prussia would become one of the partitioning powers that ended the independence of Poland. The painting was seen by some as anti-Prussian, foretelling its perceived betrayal of Poland; others have noted it is also critical of Poland, as Matejko included signs that signify this seemingly triumphant moment was a hollow, wasted victory. Matejko created his painting to remind others about the history of the no-longer-independent country he loved, and about the changing fates of history.This is a "Shakespearean" moment. In the second act of Hamlet, Shakespeare's eponymous character calls into question the difference between "seeming" and "being" after his mother dismisses Hamlet’s mourning of his father:
“Seem, madam? Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’” and goes on to say “These indeed ‘seem’,/ For they are actions that a man might play;/ But I have that within which passeth show—/ These but the trappings and the suits of woe” (1.2.75-86). When Gertrude says that the death of Hamlet’s father seems to affect Hamlet personally, he picks apart her rhetoric and calls into question the difference between seeming and Shakespeare. This again loops back to the idea of deceit.Especially in this play with Hamlet’s internal turmoil, Shakespeare is asking us to question what it means to appear one way and feel another way on the inside. Shakespeare calls into question what it means to truly know somebody, not just “know” their appearance.The heightening of the visual sense, that for McLuhan arrives with the Gutenberg Galaxy, the age of the printing press, at the expense of a multi-sensory "feeling" about what was essential and integral, led to myriad confusions in the general perception of what was real and what was an illusion.
And everything was to change!
According to John Milios' Marx’s Inquiry into the Birth of Capitalism: Why Does It Matter?
By the end of the fourteenth century, Venice emerged as a capitalist social formation, practically introducing capitalism in Europe.
The economic upswing of Venice never had as its “prime mover” the “private initiative” of certain ingenious merchants or any other “self-made” and “risk-taking” individuals. The “instigator” of Venice’s economic rise was the collectivity of a patrician class, having organized itself from the onset of the eleventh century as a militarized naval state which functioned as both coordinator and main undertaker of a multiplicity of money-begetting “ventures”: trade, piracy, plunder, slave trade, war. Venice remained a pre-capitalist economy and society under the economic, political and social rule of a class of pre-capitalist merchants, shipowners and directors of state-owned manufactures until the fourteenth century. The money-begetting activities of the Venetian ruling class constituted an unsettled process of original accumulation, in Marx’s context of the term. One pole of the process, the Venetian money-owners and their state, had already attained the clearly-defined characteristics of a spurious bourgeoisie. The other pole, however, the propertyless proletarian, had not yet emerged, and this is precisely why the bourgeoisie remained spurious. The wage-remunerated poor still participated in the ownership of the means of production through forms of “association” mediated by the very fact of their being wage-earners.
However, historical contingencies such as the Venetian-Genoese wars, the crises in the Venetian colonial system, and the plague, led to the prevalence of the capitalist mode of production in the second half of the fourteenth century in the Venetian social formation. These conditions led to the formation of huge, state-owned manufactures organized on the basis of the capital—wage-labour relation. The encounter of the propertyless proletarian with the collective money-owner of the Venetian Commune clearly took hold in these manufactures. In parallel, all non-salaried sources of income of the majority of seamen were drastically restricted, creating a proletariat of wage-earning mariners. In this case as well, money-owners auctioning off state-owned fleets, and shipowners commanding private ships, became capitalists, as “the confrontation of, and the contact between” them and the emerging proletariat took hold.
In all instances where a lack of “free labour” existed, forms of coerced labour, and above all the money-begetting slave mode of production, reappeared as a “necessary” manifestation of “entrepreneurship.”
Finally, in order to support the wars, a huge internal public debt was created, which on the one hand nurtured both advanced budgetary management and fiscal policies, and on the other created and greatly expanded capitalist finance. By the end of the fourteenth century, Venice emerged as a capitalist social formation, practically introducing capitalism in Europe.
Double-entry bookkeeping
In pre-modern Europe, double-entry bookkeeping had theological and cosmological connotations, recalling "both the scales of justice and the symmetry of God's world".
The earliest extant accounting records that follow the modern double-entry system in Europe come from Amatino Manucci, a Florentine merchant at the end of the 13th century. Manucci was employed by the Farolfi firm and the firm's ledger of 1299–1300 evidences full double-entry bookkeeping. Giovannino Farolfi & Company, a firm of Florentine merchants headquartered in Nîmes, acted as moneylenders to the Archbishop of Arles, their most important customer. Some suggest that Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici introduced this method for the Medici bank in the 14th century.
The double entry system began to propagate for practice in Italian merchant cities during the 14th century. Before this there may have been systems of accounting records on multiple books which, however, do not yet have the formal and methodical rigor necessary to control the business economy. In the course of the 16th century, Venice produced the theoretical accounting science by the writings of Luca Pacioli, Domenico Manzoni, Bartolomeo Fontana, the accountant Alvise Casanova and the erudite Giovanni Antonio Tagliente.
Hidden figures?
Is she a courtesan or a respectable member of the ruling elite of Venice in the 16th century?
In the 16th century, Venice, with a population of 150,000, had some 20,000 prostitutes. They were openly tolerated as a means of avoiding seduction or attacks against "honest women," and because the taxes generated by the sex industry were enough to run a dozen warships. Courtesans were the top end of this market, recognized as the city's greatest luxury item. Their apartments were decorated in the latest fashions and became the subject of many travellers' tales. The most famous in English was written by Thomas Coryat in 1608.
His hostess, Margarita Emiliana, was "decked with many chaines of gold and orient pearle like a second Cleopatra"; her walls were adorned with tapestries and gilt leather, and musical instruments, often a sign of debauchery, were scattered about. The bedroom, normally the most private part of a house, was not private in prostitutes' quarters. In Margarita Emiliana's, Coryat marvelled over such luxuries as minutely embroidered and perfumed textiles. The manufacture of luxury textiles, such as silk, was central to an Italian Renaissance economy based on status and conspicuous consumption. All over Europe, silk was a mark of wealth and power. In Venice, silk was worn by ecclesiastical figures, doges and other government officials, as well as wealthy patricians who wished to convey their status in society. The wealthiest members of society would not only strive to clad themselves in different silks, but also furnish their homes with items made from silk.
Wearers of silk also had to take into consideration what message their choice of clothing was conveying, as it “actually mattered whether your clothing was made of wool or silk, and precisely what grade of silk fabric you wore as well as the expense and appropriateness of the colour.”
There was a problem, however, when it came to the clarity of the message in the wearing of silk. The wearer of silk, whether from the wealthy elite of Venetian society, or the "high class" courtesan, or "low" prostitute, would not necessarily have had the resources to purchase such costly attire at their disposal. Capitalism has one of its foundational sources in the business of hiring out such luxury items. Anyone who could afford the cost of renting luxury silk garments, regardless of their social situation.
And Venice was famed for its many elaborately dressed and coiffed courtesans, and where foreign visitors marvelled at their opulent jewels and use of abundant cosmetics. Meanwhile, civic authorities, when not enlisting them as a deterrent to the scourge of sodomy, decried the courtesans' deliberately misleading resemblance to "honest women". Capitalizing on their popularity, the enterprising Pietro Bertelli published a series of prints of courtesans, each with a flap that lifted to reveal, below a seemingly innocent exterior, a glimpse of the carnal pleasures for which Venice was famed by its admirers and reviled by its detractors.
Here, the flap is the skirt, that can be lifted to display the courtesan's undergarments and chopines.These clever and amusing works appropriate the conceit of voyeurism prevalent in erotic imagery and prose. Here, the voyeur is not merely a passive observer but a physically engaged participant whose intervention is required for the salacious content to be exposed.
Chopines - platform shoes?
These chopines were over fifty centimetres tall, platform shoes that Venetian ladies ostensibly wore to keep their feet dry in the perpetually damp lagoon city. They couldn’t walk in these shoes, but stood in them enabling a public display of their virtues.
The second-hand trade in Venice was well established, with clothing and furniture regularly borrowed and rented. For special events whole rooms were furnished and decorated with rented goods, with the dealers acting as interior designers. An inventory of the goods of Henry Wotton, English Ambassador, listed a number of rented items: a billiards table, gondola, beds, sheets, awnings and firearms.
Second-hand dealers also acted as pawnbrokers, and in desperate circumstances desperate measures were taken to raise money. There are even records of wives and children being pawned.
Trade guilds, like that of the second-hand dealers, were an essential part of Renaissance town life. They regulated the supply of goods, mediated in disputes and supported members financially, spiritually and socially.
Contemporary accounts suggest that this trade was used to lure women into prostitution. They were tempted by beautiful garments and then, finding no way to pay off their debts, were forced to prostitute themselves.
Let's have an ORGY!!
This erotic comic book illustration is by the British illustrator and comic book artist Robin Ray who has worked under the pseudonym Erich von Götha as an alter ego. Robin Ray has gained a reputation with his erotic and, above all, sadomasochist content. The illustrations above, and below are from the fourth album of his most famous work, The Troubles of Janice, set in Venice, and contemporaneous with the life of Marquis de Sade.
"And be assured, they're all the best of society!"
But don't you believe them!
According to Joanne M. Ferraro in Making a Living: The Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (06 February 2018), in Venice the tenor of state regulation of prostitution differed from the usual situation where the state lifted prostitutes’ legal protections and attempted to place them, together with all other women, under the normative rules of patriarchy, restricting female sexuality exclusively to marital relations.
Sex workers exercising agency and entrepreneurship were then regarded as criminals. In both cases, market trends encouraged some degree of female independence from patriarchal control, despite moral injunctions against the commodification of sex and changes in state regulations.
But in Venice sex workers were never the legal subjects of their fathers or husbands. Nonetheless, some were exploited as family assets just the same. However, the state often targeted mothers rather than fathers as the socially constructed criminals selling children into prostitution. The state also criminalised procurers and procuresses. Despite these measures, many women continued to work in their own domestic and matrimonial venues, the most successful enjoying close links with the business community.Perhaps it was the social relationships in the Venetian setting that best explains the proliferation of the sex trade and the failures of top-down patriarchal regulation. In Venice that trade was largely under the supervision of women. As managers, they operated as actors rather than as victims, ignoring the stigma associated with organizing and selling sex, and taking advantage of the opportunities that came their way. They were not simply impoverished women passively trapped in an economy of fluctuating crises. Some exercised autonomy, making the entertainment and port economies operate for them and deploying successful strategies of survival and improvement. They moved astutely into the deregulated marketplace of an early modern commercial and entertainment mecca and engaged in complex negotiations with clients, neighbours, landlords, shopkeepers, and the authorities of church and state. This is significant testimony to their ability to make choices and to exert their own agency in a commercially oriented cultural environment.
There were recognised and designated areas, a "red light district" in Venice but there were also courtesans who were less obvious.
They were educated prostitutes who were refined and well dressed and serviced the social elite. Young, beautiful, intelligent, and well-educated courtesans of Renaissance Venice enjoyed privileges far above the rights of ordinary women. They mingled with the elite of the Venetian society such as kings, nobles, cardinals, and ambassadors.The best courtesan could earn in a day and night the equivalent in todays value of $20,000.Venice in the 16th century was a mecca for trade and tourism. People from all corners of the world came into the city to trade for spices, silk, or salt. Many people came to see religious relics. But pilgrims and merchants didn’t come to Venice just to save their souls and make business. They came to have fun. So prostitution boomed, and the always entrepreneurial Venetians legalised this business so that they could tax it.In 1509, there were 11,164 courtesans in Venice. The Venetians even had a catalogue of courtesans that had the names, addresses, and fees of the best courtesans.There were two groups of courtesans in Venice. The first group, the low-rank courtesans, catered to the needs of the middle class. They were called the cortigiane di lume ("courtesan of the light"). They were poor and cheap. They worked near the famous Rialto Bridge.
The Bridge of The Tits
The Republic of Venice restricted prostitution to the area Carampane di Rialto by official decree in 1412. The prostitutes were severely restricted in their movement and behaviour. The buildings of the area had become property of the Republic when the last of the rich Rampani family had died without an heir. A curfew was imposed on them, and they could not leave the area except on Saturdays, when they had to wear a yellow scarf, as opposed to the white scarf of a marriageable woman. They could not work on certain holy days, with transgression of the rules sometimes resulting in flogging.During the 16th century, the prostitutes faced strong competition from homosexuals and formally asked the Doge to help them. The authorities, keen to suppress homosexuality (which was seen as a social problem), allowed the prostitutes to display their breasts from balconies and windows near the bridge to attract business. At night they were permitted to use lanterns to illuminate their breasts. More than this allowance, in order to divert with such an incentive the men from sin against nature, the Republic also paid prostitutes to stand in a line across a particular bridge with breasts exposed. This was the Ponte delle Tette, a small bridge on the rio di san Canciano, taking its name ("Bridge of the Tits") from the use of the bridge by these prostitutes, who were encouraged to stand topless on the bridge, and in nearby windows, supposedly to entice and convert suspected homosexuals. On a practical level the display of breasts also served to exclude transvestite prostitutes.
The display of breasts . . .
This video montage begins with a clip from the trailer for the 1998 American biographical drama film Dangerous Beauty directed by Marshall Herskovitz and based on the non-fiction book The Honest Courtesan by Margaret Rosenthal. The film is about Veronica Franco, a courtesan in sixteenth-century Venice who becomes a hero to her city, but later becomes the target of an inquisition by the Church for witchcraft. She is renowned for her notable clientele, feminist advocacy, literary contributions, and philanthropy. Her humanist education and surviving cultural contributions make Veronica Franco a compelling case study for the accomplishments of Courtesans in the late Venetian Renaissance.
In her notable works, Capitoli in Terze rime and Lettere familiari a diversi ("Familiar Letters to Various People"), Franco uses perceived virtue, reason, and fairness to advise male patricians and other associates. Her writings serve as a display of her intellect and social connections. She was able to exercise greater autonomy in her authorship than other traditional Venetian woman due to her established reputation and influence. Re:LODE Radio recommends The introduction to Eugenio L. Giusti's The Renaissance Courtesan in Words, Letters and Images, Social Amphibology and Moral Framing (A Diachronic Perspective) to gaining an insight into the remarkable intellectual achievement of Veronica Franco.
The public display of Venice's "honest courtesans" and the "courtesans of the light" is coyly represented in the edits from this trailer. By contrast the video montage then plays a short clip, repeated several times, explicitly showing topless prostitutes by the "bridge of the tits", as merchants from Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" pass by, gossiping about risky maritime "ventures".
Honest courtesans
The the high-rank courtesans, were called the cortigiane oneste ("honest courtesan") and were admired for their style, education, and intellect. Of course, they were also worthy of sin. Their clientele was the cream of Venetian society. Through their influential lovers, honest courtesans wielded significant political influence and got rich. Being an honest courtesan was a means to secure financial freedom.They exercised other freedoms too in a context where in patriarchy women of the 16th century had, generally, to adhere to strict moral laws and social rules. The Venetian courtesans clearly rebelled against these restrictions by dressing as flamboyant as they could. They wore dresses that displayed bare bellies, low-cut dresses, and corsets that revealed bare breasts. Occasionally, they even wore male breeches. The courtesans went for the most lively colours, silk, and pearls! In most cases, the high-ranking courtesans dressed better than the Venetian noblewomen.
Portrait of a Young Woman by Paris Bordone
The Venetian authorities became concerned that it was impossible to distinguish between courtesans and respectable women. So rules were drawn up in 1543 to determine what courtesans wore. Rather than ban undesirables, Venetians tended to make rules to control how they appeared in public. The general problem went much deeper though, where questions of difference between social classes and the question of seeming and being were at the heart of possible confusions.
Binary sign systems
Finding out what an artwork means requires considering how it is used, interpreted, presented and represented, and this requires some study. Finding out about how the world is now, and its history, artworks can provide many questions but also many revelations, not only in terms of "the facts", but also in terms of the "how" when it comes to the presentation of "the facts", and that includes the fictive as well the factive. The visual arts, as much as the textual, are therefore capable of functioning both as an Apocalypse (revealing) NOW, and as an Apocalypse (revealing) of THEN!
Sacred and Profane Love!
A binary pairing?
The title of the painting by Titian, probably painted in 1514, early in his career, is first recorded in 1693, when it was listed in an inventory as Amor Divino e Amor Profano (Divine love and Profane love). Although "much ink has been spilt by art historians attempting to decipher the iconography of the painting", and some measure of consensus has been achieved, basic aspects of the intended meaning of the painting, including the identity of the central figures, remain disputed.
The painting is presumed to have been commissioned by Niccolò Aurelio, a secretary to the Venetian Council of Ten, whose coat of arms appears on the sarcophagus or fountain, to celebrate his marriage to a young widow, Laura Bagarotto. It perhaps depicts a figure representing the bride dressed in white, sitting beside Cupid and accompanied by the goddess Venus.
Two women, one clothed, and the other un-clothed, and who appear to be modelled on the same person, sit on a carved Ancient Roman sarcophagus that has been converted to a water-trough, or a trough made to look like a Roman sarcophagus; the broad ledges here are not found in actual sarcophagi.
How the water enters is unclear, but it leaves through a phallic-looking brass spout between the two women, next to an anachronistic coat of arms in the carving. This belongs to Niccolò Aurelio, whose presence in the picture is probably also represented by the spout.
Between the two women is a small winged boy, who may be Cupid, son and companion of Venus, or merely a putto. He is looking intently into the water, and splashing a hand in it.
The woman on the left is fully and richly dressed; her clothes are now usually recognised as those of a bride, though in the past they have been said to be typical of courtesan wear. In her hair she wears myrtle, both a flower sacred to Venus and one worn by brides.
In contrast, the woman on the right is nude except for a white cloth over her loins and a large red mantle worn over one shoulder. It was generally recognised by the 20th century that, somewhat contrary to a natural first impression, if the painting indeed represented figures along the lines of Sacred and Profane Love, the clothed figure was "profane love", and the nude one "sacred love".
There have been a number of conflicting interpretations of the painting. Their starting point is to identify the purpose of the painting, which most interpretations in recent decades see as commemorating a marriage. Next the figures, who seem physically identical, but with one clothed and the other un-clothed, need to be assigned identities, at which point agreement ends. While the trend in recent years has been to downplay complicated and obscure explanations of the iconography of paintings by Titian (and other Venetian painters), in this case no straightforward interpretation has been found, and scholars remain more ready to consider allegorical alternatives of some complexity, Titian would probably not have devised a complicated allegorical meaning himself; it has been suggested that the Renaissance humanist scholar Cardinal Pietro Bembo, or a similar figure, may have devised the allegorical scheme. But the identity of any scholar that could be implicated in furnishing a program to Titian remains pure speculation.
Scholars have proposed several identifications of the figures, and analyses and interpretations which largely flow from these. The concept of Geminae Veneres or "Twin Venuses", a dual nature in Venus, was well developed in both classical thought and Renaissance Neoplatonism. In 1969 the scholar Erwin Panofsky suggested the two figures were representations of the 'Twin Venuses' with the clothed figure representing the 'earthly' Venus - (Venere Vulgare), while the other was 'celestial' (Venere Celeste).
The Romans had adapted the myths and iconography of Venus from her Greek counterpart Aphrodite for Roman art and Latin literature. In the later classical tradition of the West, Venus became one of the most widely referenced deities of Greco-Roman mythology as the embodiment of love and sexuality, and usually depicted nude in paintings.
From antiquity . . .
Fresco from Pompei, Casa di Venus, 1st century AD. It is supposed that this fresco could be the Roman copy of famous portrait of Campaspe, mistress of Alexander the Great.
. . . to the Paris Salon of 1863
The Birth of Venus (French: Naissance de Venus) is a painting by the French artist Alexandre Cabanel.
Shown to great success at the Paris Salon of 1863, The Birth of Venus was immediately purchased by Napoleon III for his own personal collection. The Birth of Venus was one of a multitude of female nudes. Bathed in opalescent colours, the goddess Venus shyly looks to the viewer from beneath the crook of her elbow.
Olympia
Two years later, Manet presented his now renowned painting Olympia at the Salon as well. Today both hang in the Musee’d’ Orsay. Unlike Venus's ethereal-like palette, Manet painted Olympia with pale, placid skin tone, and darkly outlined the figure. Her only seemingly modest gesture is her placement of her hand over her leg, though it is not out of shyness- one must pay before they can see. James Rubin writes of the two works:
“The Olympia is often compared to Cabanel’s Birth of Venus, for the latter is a far more sexually appealing work, despite its mythological guise… It is evident Manet’s demythologizing of the female nude was foremost a timely reminder of modern realities. The majority of critics attacked the painting with unmitigated disgust…: “What is this odalisque with the yellow belly, ignoble model dredged up from who knows where?” [And] “The painter’s attitude is of inconceivable vulgarity.”
(Rubin, James H. (1999), Impressionism, London: Phaidon Press Limited 67 - 68)The dialectics of Olympia and the Venus/Aphrodite binary
What shocked contemporary audiences was not Olympia's nudity, nor the presence of her fully clothed maid, but her confrontational gaze and a number of details identifying her as a demi-mondaine or prostitute. These include the orchid in her hair, her bracelet, pearl earrings and the oriental shawl on which she lies, symbols of wealth and sensuality. The black ribbon around her neck, in stark contrast with her pale flesh, and her cast-off slipper underline the voluptuous atmosphere. "Olympia" was a name associated with prostitutes in 1860s Paris.
The Venus of Urbino
Manet's Olympia painting is modelled after Titian's Venus of Urbino (c. 1534).
Whereas the left hand of Titian's Venus is curled and appears to entice, Olympia's left hand appears to block, which has been interpreted as symbolic of her role as a prostitute, granting or restricting access to her body in return for payment. Manet replaced the little dog (symbol of fidelity) in Titian's painting with a black cat, a creature associated with nocturnal promiscuity.
The aroused posture of the cat was provocative; in French, chatte (pussy) is slang for female genitalia. Olympia disdainfully ignores the flowers presented to her by her servant, probably a gift from a client. Is she is looking in the direction of the door, as a client intrudes, barging in unannounced?
Unlike the smooth idealized nude of Alexandre Cabanel's La naissance de Vénus, also painted in 1863, Olympia is a real woman whose nakedness is emphasised by the harsh lighting. The canvas is larger than usual for this genre-style painting. Most paintings that were this size depicted historical or mythological events, so the size of the work, among other factors, caused surprise. Olympia is fairly thin by the artistic standards of the time and her relatively undeveloped body is more girlish than womanly. Charles Baudelaire thought this thinness was more indecent than fatness.The model for Olympia, Victorine Meurent, would have been recognised by viewers of the painting because she was well known in Paris circles. She started modelling when she was sixteen years old and she also was an accomplished painter in her own right. Some of her paintings were exhibited in the Paris Salon. The familiarity with the identity of the model was a major reason this painting was considered shocking to viewers. A well known woman currently living in modern-day Paris could not simultaneously represent a historical or mythological woman.Then there's Olympia's maid! A binary pairing?
The figure of the maid in the painting, modelled by a woman named Laure, has become a topic of discussion among contemporary scholars.
As T. J. Clark recounts of a friend's disbelief in the revised 1990 version of The Painting of Modern Life: "you've written about the white woman on the bed for fifty pages and more, and hardly mentioned the black woman alongside her."
Olympia was created 15 years after slavery had been abolished in France and its empire, but negative stereotypes of black people persisted among some elements of French society. In some cases, the white prostitute in the painting was described using racially charged language.
It was not for following an artistic convention that Manet included Laure but to create an ideological binary between black and white, good and bad, clean and dirty and so on.
When paired with a lighter skin tone, the Black female model stands in as signifier to all of the racial stereotypes of the West.
"Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity"
This link is to an essay by Lorraine O'Grady, an American artist, writer, translator, and critic, originally published in 1992 in the book, New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action. The first part of the essay was published in Afterimage 20 (Summer 1992). Widely referenced in scholarly works, it is a cultural critique of the representation of Black female bodies, and the reclamation of the body as a site of black female subjectivity, and the West's construction of not-white women as not-to-be-seen.
O’Grady uses the painting Olympia by Édouard Manet as an example of Eurocentrism and its manifestation in both historical fact and in imaginative fiction. She begins:
The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather, like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, non-white or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in the West's metaphoric construction of "woman." White is what woman is; not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gathers in) is what she had better not be. Even in an allegedly postmodern era, the not-white woman as well as the not-white man are symbolically and even theoretically excluded from sexual difference. Their function continues to be, by their chiaroscuro, to cast the difference of white men and white women into sharper relief.
She continues, asking . . .
How could they/we not be affected by that lingering structure of invisibility, enacted in the myriad codicils of daily life and still enforced by the images of both popular and high culture? How not get the message of what Judith Wilson calls "the legions of black servants who loom in the shadows of European and European-American aristocratic portraiture," of whom Laura, the professional model that Edouard Manet used for Olympia's maid, is in an odd way only the most famous example? Forget "tonal contrast." We know what she is meant for: she is Jezebel and Mammy, prostitute and female eunuch, the two-in-one. When we're through with her inexhaustibly comforting breast, we can use her ceaselessly open cunt. And best of all, she is not a real person, only a robotic servant who is not permitted to make us feel guilty, to accuse us as does the slave in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). After she escapes from the room where she was imprisoned by a father and son, that outraged woman says: "You couldn't think up what them two done to me." Olympia's maid, like all the other "peripheral Negroes," is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background drapery.To repeat: castrata and whore, not madonna and whore. Laura's place is outside what can be conceived of as woman. She is the chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West's construct of the female body, for the "femininity" of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight. Thus only the white body remains as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze. The not-white body has been made opaque by a blank stare, misperceived in the nether regions of TV.
Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire
In the early 1980s, Lorraine O'Grady created the persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, who invaded art openings wearing a gown and a cape made of 180 pairs of white gloves, first giving away flowers, then beating herself with a white studded whip, which she often referred to as, "the whip-that-made-the-plantations-move". Whilst doing this she would often shout in protest poems that railed against a segregated art world that excluded black individuals from the world of mainstream art, and which she perceived as not looking beyond a small circle of friends. Her first performance as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was in 1980 at the Linda Goode Bryant's Just Above Midtown gallery in Tribeca. O'Grady also gives credit to Mlle Bourgeoise Noire for curating exhibitions, such as The Black and White Show in 1983 at Kenkeleba House, a black-run gallery situated in Manhattan's East Village.
Beginning in 1991 she added photo installations to her conceptually based work. And in 2007, she made her first video installation during a residency at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas.
The Wikipedia article on Lorraine O'Grady has a section on the essay "Olympia's Maid" that includes a commentary foregrounding "the binary logic of the west":"The creation of a black feminist aesthetic must challenge dominant culture's discourse of the black body [as] grotesque and articulate a black liberation discourse on the black body [as] beautiful." European and European-American society has historically viewed Blackness as ugly. It is up to those working within Black feminist theory and critique to reinvent a new positionality. This, O’Grady argues, comes at a time when subjectivity itself has been problematized by ideology. Ideology is a patriarchal practice and theory is what substantiates it; theories of the political and social as well as the ideological/intellectual aided in the creation of the devalued Black figure. Out of ideology, she writes, came the notion of binary logic: either/or-ism.As a standard, the Western mode of thinking, as proposed by many feminists, is ‘either:or-ism.’ It describes two modes of thought or plans of action that can be reached, but never can the two be reached together. "The binary logic of the west takes on an added dimension when confronted with the presence of a black woman." Behind the binary logic of science in the nineteenth century, literature and art situates the representations of Black woman at both the site and sight of violation. Either/or logic fragments that which it is applied to. Riffing off of this logical ideology, O’Grady makes mention of a contrasting Eastern mode of thinking: ‘both/and’ logic. It describes dialogical thinking and living, implying the functioning of both options within a scenario and suggests the abandonment of the either/or hierarchy.The Venus of Lust and the Venus of spiritual Love! A binary pairing?
In Greek mythology Aphrodite Urania was an epithet of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, signifying "heavenly" or "spiritual", to distinguish her from her more earthly aspect of Aphrodite Pandemos, "Aphrodite for all the people". The two were used (mostly in literature) to differentiate the more "celestial" love of body and soul from purely physical lust. Plato represented her as a daughter of the Greek god Uranus, conceived and born without a mother. According to Hesiod, she was born from the severed genitals of Uranus and emerged from the sea foam.
Pandemos was originally an extension of the idea of the goddess of family and city life to include the whole people, the political community. Hence the name was supposed to go back to the time of Theseus, the reputed author of the reorganization of Attica and its demes. Aphrodite Pandemos was held in equal regard with Urania; she was called σεμνή semni (holy), and was served by priestesses upon whom strict chastity was enjoined. In time, however, the meaning of the term underwent a change, probably due to the philosophers and moralists, by whom a radical distinction was drawn between Aphrodite Urania and Pandemos.According to Plato, there are two Aphrodites, "the elder, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite — she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione — her we call common." The same distinction is found in Xenophon's Symposium, although the author is doubtful whether there are two goddesses, or whether Urania and Pandemos are two names for the same goddess, just as Zeus, although one and the same, has many titles; but in any case, he says, the ritual of Urania is purer, more serious, than that of Pandemos. The same idea is expressed in the statement that after Solon's time . . .
. . . courtesans were put under the protection of Aphrodite Pandemos.
But there is no doubt that the cult of Aphrodite was on the whole as pure as that of any other divinities, and although a distinction may have existed in later times between the goddess of legal marriage and the goddess of free love, these titles/epithets did not express these later ideas possibly present in the Titian Sacred and Profane Love.The "Twin Venuses" remains the most accepted and convincing interpretation to this day. Others see the clothed figure as representing the bride, as idealized, and not a portrait, which would have been risqué in Venice, and with the nude figure representing Venus.
Although the first record of a version of what is now the usual title is only in an inventory of 1693, it remains possible that the two female figures are indeed intended to be personifications of the Neoplatonic concepts of sacred and profane love. The art historian Walter Friedländer outlined similarities between the painting and Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and proposed that the two figures represented Polia and Venere, the two female characters in the 1499 romance.
This idea that it contrasts two allegorized concepts of beauty or of love dates from the 18th century. However, biographical considerations suggest that the clothed Venus depicts Laura Bagarotto and the naked Venus represents "Truth". A conjectural case is made for the picture containing a coded message of the innocence of Laura's father, Bertuccio (executed in 1509).
Myth Today!
When it comes to myth today we don't need to just look at art! And, if we take a leaf out of Roland Barthes Mythologies, we just need to learn how to decipher the multiplicity of signs being produced for an Apocalypse NOW!
In PART 1. of this VERBI-VOCO-VISUAL "probe" into the Playboy "explanation" of Vietnam, and to Apocalypse Now and the Americanisation of the World, the essay from Barthes' Mythologies on "Ornamental Cookery" was referenced in the connecting of the "glaze" with the "male gaze".
Barthes' book Mythologies has two sections: Mythologies and Myth Today, the first section consists of a collection of essays on selected modern myths and the second further and general analysis of the concept and methodology Barthes developed following on from and updating Ferdinand de Saussure's system of sign analysis, that became foundational in Barthes' semiotics, by adding a second level where signs are elevated to the level of myth.
In the first section of Mythologies describes a selection of modern cultural phenomena, chosen for their status as modern myths and for the added meaning that has been conferred upon them. Each short chapter analyses one such myth, ranging from Einstein's Brain to Soap Powders and Detergents. They were originally written as a series of bi-monthly essays for the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles. The first of these essays is on Wrestling. Here are some chosen passages, beginning with the title and a quote from Charles Baudelaire.
The World of Wrestling
"The grandiloquent truth of gestures on life's great occasions." - Baudelaire
The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him. It is said that judo contains a hidden symbolic aspect; even in the midst of efficiency, its gestures are measured, precise but restricted, drawn accurately but by a stroke without volume. Wrestling, on the contrary, offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning. In judo, a man who is down is hardly down at all, he rolls over, he draws back, he eludes defeat, or, if the latter is obvious, he immediately disappears; in wrestling, a man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness.
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
. . . continued
Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him. It is said that judo contains a hidden symbolic aspect; even in the midst of efficiency, its gestures are measured, precise but restricted, drawn accurately but by a stroke without volume. Wrestling, on the contrary, offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning. In judo, a man who is down is hardly down at all, he rolls over, he draws back, he eludes defeat, or, if the latter is obvious, he immediately disappears; in wrestling, a man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness.
. . . continued
It has already been noted that in America wrestling represents a sort of mythological fight between Good and Evil (of a quasipolitical nature, the 'bad' wrestler always being supposed to be a Red). The process of creating heroes in French wrestling is very different, being based on ethics and not on politics. What the public is looking for here is the gradual construction of a highly moral image: that of the perfect 'bastard'.
The collaged image above showcases a YouTube video by:
Then & Now
The video is titled:Beating Trump: Barthes, Wrestling, & Myth Today
The Then & Now text accompanying the video runs:
Roland Barthes, born in 1915 and died in 1980, was a French literary theorist and philosopher famous for his understanding of how myths operated.The 1957 book Mythologies is a collection of Barthes analysis of French culture in the postwar period. The short articles examine topics as diverse the militarisation of toys, the romans in the films, detergent adverts, how drinking wine makes you French, Einstein’s brain, and the World of Wrestling.Trump spent time appearing in the WWE. How does Barthes analysis of Wrestling and Myth help us understand how Trump approaches rhetoric? Can Barthes help beat Trump in the 2020 elections?
Trump and the WWE!
The WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.), is an American integrated media and entertainment company that is primarily known for professional wrestling.
The Washington Post contextualised the condemnation of President Trump for tweeting a violent, doctored video of him punching CNN on July 2 2017, but the real punches were thrown back in 2007, at a scripted WWE match.
Here's a look at how the fight came to be.
When it comes to the mythological, and the "to and the fro", from cliché to archetype, from Mount Olympus to the streets of Paris, then be prepared . . .
. . . to be distracted from distraction by distraction. And all the while;
"only those who are realistic are mythical. This is what is foreseen by our divine reason. What reason is unable to see are the inevitable mistakes, it will lead you to. They will be many!"
The quotation above is taken from the subtitles of the 1969 film Medea by the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini and based on the ancient myth of Medea. Filmed in Göreme's early Christian churches, Pisa, and the Citadel of Aleppo, it stars opera singer Maria Callas in her only film role.The film is largely a faithful portrayal of the myth of Jason and the Argonauts and the events of Euripides' play The Medea concerning the betrayal of Medea by Jason and his eventual demise at her hands. The film does not use the dialogue as written by Euripides but the plot does closely follow the structure of his play. The beginning portions of the film also follow the early life of Jason and his voyage to Colchis where he meets Medea.
In the prologue of the film the centaur Chiron teaches the young boy Jason philosophical truths about the world and tells him about the voyage he will one day embark on to Colchis.
One of many philosophical truths set out in this sequence has a relationship to Barthes' approach to uncovering, unpacking, de-constructing and de-mystifying the world of images and ideas in the spectacle of modern life. Chiron explains to the young Jason that in the lands of Colchis:
"Life there is very realistic! Because only those who are mythical are realistic and only those who are realistic are mythical! This is what is foreseen by our divine reason. What reason is unable to see are the inevitable mistakes, it will lead you to. They will be many!"The next sequence shows Medea and the land of Colchis that houses the Golden Fleece and is home to many bizarre rituals. A human sacrifice is performed in front of hundreds of cheering onlookers.
This is a land where: "Life there is very realistic! Because only those who are mythical are realistic", and if the blood of human sacrifice fertilises the earth and guarantees the future, then that's being realistic!
So, a young man is offered up as a human sacrifice and his organs and blood are sprinkled over the crops in a ritual sparagmos. It is presided over by the Queen Medea.
Chiron's warning: "What reason is unable to see are the inevitable mistakes, it will lead you to."
For a post-Renaissance capitalocene era the fate of the "realistic" is to become "mythical"!
This video montage begins with an advertisement for one of Paco Rabanne's fragrances The fragrance is called Olympéa, a clear reference to Mount Olympus, seat of the gods in ancient Greek mythology, including Aphrodite, the goddess associated with love, beauty, pleasure, passion and procreation. She was syncretized with the Roman goddess Venus. Aphrodite's major symbols include myrtles, roses, doves, sparrows, and swans. The chosen imagery for this advertisement veers towards a kitsch version of Olympus as a palatial CGI generated fitness and beauty spa, with Rabanne's Aphrodite a young goddess on the lookout for hunky young gods and/or mortals.
The montage then cuts to a German language trailer for Pasolini's Medea, a suitable and earthy antidote to the digital hyperreality of the Olympéa ad.
This is followed by a Dior ad that presents dusty, sun-drenched landscapes, accompanied by a performance of the pizzica tarantata, a liberating and spellbinding folk ritual in which a spider’s bite leads to a healing song and dance.
From earth to water and Dior and the actor Charlize Theron enters an echoland of associations with the legendary the birth of Venus. In myth, Venus-Aphrodite was born, already in adult form, from the sea foam (Greek αφρός, aphros) produced by the severed genitals of Caelus-Uranus. Roman theology presents Venus as the yielding, watery female principle, essential to the generation and balance of life.
Succeeding scenes from several other Dior ads featuring Charlize Theron in palatial architectural spaces that Re:LODE Radio associates with the quasi-surreal cinematic atmosphere created by Alain Resnais in his L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), the 1961 with a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
A trailer and sequence from this film is followed by two more Dior ads, each with a modern Venus (or Alice), one featuring the spectacular interiors and vistas of Versailles, while the other features a reference to Through the Looking Glass and Jean Cocteau's Orpheus (Orphée), a 1950 French film that is directly quoted in the Dior ad.
Jimmy Choo presents Shimmer in the Dark featuring Cara Delevingne as a version of the earthly and profane Venus Twin, a goddess walking on the streets of the city.The video montage begins with a kitsch version of Aphrodite Urania, an epithet of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, signifying "heavenly" or "spiritual", to distinguish her from her more earthly aspect of Aphrodite Pandemos, "Aphrodite for all the people". Cara Delevingne, shimmering in the dark is, perhaps, a version of an "Aphrodite for all the people" and as the montage ends, we encounter another version of this Twin Venus on the streets of Paris in an ad for Louis Vuitton that proved controversial.The binary pairing of the Twin Venuses were used (mostly in literature) to differentiate the more "celestial" love of body and soul from purely physical lust, and in this last excerpt in the montage the result turned out to glamorise prostitution.
From a "celestial" Venus . . .
Lauren Cochrane reported (Thu 28 Mar 2013) for the Guardian, under the headline:
Fashion video sparks outrage amid prostitution allegationsLauren Cochrane writes:
The French fashion house Louis Vuitton has been accused of glamorising prostitution in an advertising campaign video to showcase the label's autumn/winter collection. The video has sparked outrage in France after Libération, the leftwing newspaper, published a letter signed by various high-profile lawyers and intellectuals accusing it of "assimilating luxury with the world's second most profitable criminal activity after drug trafficking". One signatory, Dominique Attias, a lawyer who is outspoken about gender issues in France, called it "an extremely shocking representation of women".In the video, which was also hosted on the Guardian website, models including Georgia Jagger and Cara Delevingne wander through the dark streets of Paris wearing lingerie-inspired clothes, stopping to lean into car doors. The implication appears to be that they are prostitutes.The video was made for Love magazine and styled by Katie Grand, the editor-in-chief and a collaborator of Louis Vuitton's creative director Marc Jacobs. It was directed by James Lima, who has also made films for Prada and Loewe. Speaking to the Guardian, Grand, who is one of the most influential stylists in fashion, apologised "if our film offended anyone", adding: "It certainly wasn't my intention to cause offence." Louis Vuitton has declined to comment on the film.The controversy goes beyond this single issue to the heart of the fashion industry, which is often accused of making light of darker issues. The Libération letter says as much. "Do creators from the universe of luxury realise that they are promoting violence, pornography and sexual slavery?" it asks.The consequence of the images are the images of the consequences!
And so it repeats! Ad nauseam!
In introducing the second section of his book Mythologies - Myth Today - Barthes asks and answers this question:
What is a myth, today? I shall give at the outset a first, very simple answer, which is perfectly consistent with etymology: myth is a type of speech.Of course, it is not any type: language needs special conditions in order to become myth: we shall see them in a minute. But what must be firmly established at the start is that myth is a system of communication, that it is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form. Later, we shall have to assign to this form historical limits, conditions of use, and reintroduce society into it: we must nevertheless first describe it as a form.
In the next section of Myth Today, headed: Myth as a semiological system, he writes:
For mythology, since it is the study of a type of speech, is but one fragment of this vast science of signs which Saussure postulated some forty years ago under the name of semiology. Semiology has not yet come into being. But since Saussure himself, and sometimes independently of him, a whole section of contemporary research has constantly been referred to the problem of meaning: psycho-analysis, structuralism, eidetic psychology, some new types of literary criticism of which Bachelard has given the first examples, are no longer concerned with facts except inasmuch as they are endowed with significance. Now to postulate a signification is to have recourse to semiology. I do not mean that semiology could account for all these aspects of research equally well: they have different contents. But they have a common status: they are all sciences dealing with values. They are not content with meeting the facts: they define and explore them as tokens for something else.Signs of the times?
The semiotics that provide Barthes with his methods, and a purpose, have proved influential, as has the type of thinking that accompanies the application of this method and its purpose. Re:LODE Radio considers this to b the desire to reveal the meanings, the ramifications, of all the signs that human activity generates, in what amounts to a new type of apocalypse, a revelation!
Later in the section of Myth Today headed: Myth as a semiological system, Barthes says:
Semiology, once its limits are settled, is not a metaphysical trap: it is a science among others, necessary but not sufficient. The important thing is to see that the unity of an explanation cannot be based on the amputation of one or other of its approaches, but, as Engels said, on the dialectical co-ordination of the particular sciences it makes use of. This is the case with mythology: it is a part both of semiology inasmuch as it is a formal science, and of ideology inasmuch as it is an historical science: it studies ideas-in-form.Let me therefore restate that any semiology postulates a relation between two terms, a signifier and a signified. This relation concerns objects which belong to different categories, and this is why it is not one of equality but one of equivalence. We must here be on our guard for despite common parlance which simply says that the signifier expresses the signified, we are dealing, in any semiological system, not with two, but with three different terms. For what we grasp is not at all one term after the other, but the correlation which unites them: there are, therefore, the signifier, the signified and the sign, which is the associative total of the first two terms. Take a bunch of roses: I use it to signify my passion. Do we have here, then, only a signifier and a signified, the roses and my passion? Not even that: to put it accurately, there are here only 'passionified' roses. But on the plane of analysis, we do have three terms; for these roses weighted with passion perfectly and correctly allow themselves to be decomposed into roses and passion: the former and the latter existed before uniting and forming this third object, which is the sign. It is as true to say that on the plane of experience I cannot dissociate the roses from the message they carry, as to say that on the plane of analysis I cannot confuse the roses as signifier and the roses as sign: the signifier is empty, the sign is full, it is a meaning. Or take a black pebble: I can make it signify in several ways, it is a mere signifier; but if I weigh it with a definite signified (a death sentence, for instance, in an anonymous vote), it will become a sign. Naturally, there are between the signifier, the signified and the sign, functional implications (such as that of the part to the whole) which are so close that to analyse them may seem futile; but we shall see in a moment that this distinction has a capital importance for the study of myth as semiological schema.The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco the Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, cultural critic, political and social commentator, and novelist is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory, and Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes, including the paranoid style in modern culture, where signs always point to something else, beyond, and invariably to a metaphysical and fearfully portentous meaning. This is Apocalypse NOW, a NEW "middle ages"! In the middle ages thunder was a sign from God, and prayer a reversal of spiritual forces. James Joyce was susceptible to superstition and had an almost primeval fear of thunder.
Image above, based on Salvador Dali's Meditative Rose, by Justyna Stawida, Make-Up Artist and Body Painter.
Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk
The seismic roar of the heavens 100 letters long precipitates the Fall at the beginning of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and rumbles throughout the work.
Marshall McLuhan has a take on this thunder, the first of ten, in War and Peace in the Global Village, the 1968 book by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. The book contains a collage of images and text that illustrates the effects of electronic media and new technology on human society, and he uses James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a major inspiration for this study of war as education and education as war throughout a history of human kind condensed by Joyce into ten thunders. McLuhan claims that the ten thunders in Finnegans Wake represent different stages in the history of man:
- Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West. From herding to harnessing animals.
- Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts. First social aggression.
- Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.
- Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to greed and power.
- Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and postures and pastors.
- Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print process and individualism.
- Thunder 7: Tribal man again. All choractors end up separate, private man. Return of choric.
- Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of sight and sound.
- Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and decentralizing at once create cities in crisis. Speed and death.
- Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.
Thunder 10 is 101 letters long:
UllhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockarUmberto eco's Foucault's Pendulum (Il pendolo di Foucault) is also divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth. This satirical novel is full of esoteric references to Kabbalah, alchemy, and conspiracy theory — so many that critic and novelist Anthony Burgess suggested that it needed an index.
The pendulum of the title refers to an actual pendulum designed by French physicist Léon Foucault to demonstrate Earth's rotation, which has symbolic significance within the novel. Some believe that it refers to Michel Foucault, noting Eco's friendship with the French philosopher, but the author "specifically rejects any intentional reference to Michel Foucault" — this is regarded as one of his subtle literary jokes.
From transparency and connectedness of meanings to the opaque and mystifying?
Connectedness in meaning was the essential task of representation in pre-Renaissance visual communication, especially when constructing images designed to set out a comprehensive view of the larger realities when it comes to Heaven and Earth.
An example of this can be found in the interior of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice which is NOT decorated in mosaics! "Decoration" is not the appropriate term for a visual programme that is better understood as a model, or a map/diagram of signs "revealing" the "truth" of the cosmos through many apposite juxtapositions. The images are rendered in mosaic, and they are in "a fairly pure Byzantine style". However, in succeeding phases of work Byzantine influence reflecting the latest style of the capital was reduced by stages, disappearing altogether by about the 1130s, after which the style was Italian in essentials, reflecting "a change from a colonial to a local art". The main period of decoration was the 12th century, a period of deteriorating relations between Venice and Byzantium, but very little is known about the process or how it was affected by politics.
Byzantine studies?
Adjective: Byzantine
1. relating to Byzantium (now Istanbul), the Byzantine Empire, or the Eastern Orthodox Church.
2. (of a system or situation) excessively complicated, and typically involving a great deal of administrative detail.
Four Military Saints by Michael Damaskinos, showing St George and St Theodore Teron on the left, and St Demetrios and St Theodore Stratelates on the right, all on horseback, with angels holding wreaths over their heads, beneath Christ Pantokrator.
To the scholar attempting to de-code Byzantine Iconography, semiotics would prove to be a useful method of analysis. Alongside such methods, it is useful to find someone like Christopher Walter who, as a scholar, is able, as a result of his studies, to raise profoundly philosophical issues along with academic findings and analysis. A review by Elizabeth Key Fowden of Christopher Walter: The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition, foregrounds Walter's use of a quote from the American writer James Baldwin. She writes:
Christopher Walter has twice chosen to use an evocative passage from James Baldwin's Another Country in order to bring us closer to how Byzantine people saw saints, particularly the handsome soldier saints who gazed down serenely from their church walls: "There was a great force in the face and a great gentleness. It was a face which suggested, resonantly in the depths, the truth about our natures." The combination of force and gentleness - tranquility in full armor - may seem paradoxical. For Walter, this paradox is central to the question woven through his finely balanced study: "What is a warrior saint?" With echoes of Baldwin's "What is the truth about our natures?" Walter's approach to the question is both lucid and subtle, like his prose; never tiresome in his argumentation, he tends to open rather than close discussion, though he leaves the reader much better equipped to discuss. This is a rare and unusual book - at once a work of intellectual history and at the same time a cataloguing of warrior saints and their hagiographical, iconographical, and cultic development. One hopes that it will not be used simply as a quarry for subsequent scholars but that future studies will engage with the issues it raises about the nature of social and religious identity and of violence.
World Orders?
The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinople. It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453. During most of its existence, the empire was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in Europe."Byzantine Empire" is a term created after the end of the realm; its citizens continued to refer to their empire simply as the Roman Empire or Romania, and to themselves as Romans – a term which Greeks continued to use for themselves into Ottoman times. Although the Roman state continued and its traditions were maintained, modern historians distinguish Byzantium from its earlier incarnation because it was centred on Constantinople, oriented towards Greek rather than Latin culture, and characterised by Eastern Orthodox Christianity.The first use of the term "Byzantine" to label the later years of the Roman Empire was in 1557, 104 years after the empire's collapse, when the German historian Hieronymus Wolf published his work Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ, a collection of historical sources. The term comes from "Byzantium", the name of the city to which Constantine moved his capital, leaving Rome, and rebuilt under the new name of Constantinople. The older name of the city was rarely used from this point onward except in historical or poetic contexts. The publication in 1648 of the Byzantine du Louvre (Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae), and in 1680 of Du Cange's Historia Byzantina further popularised the use of "Byzantine" among French authors, such as Montesquieu. However, it was not until the mid-19th century that the term came into general use in the Western world.The timeline of this "Roman Empire" that ends in the 15th century, as the rupture with the previous classical and medieval world, corresponds to Samir Amin's version of the particular significance of the end of a millennia of highly visible power relations during this period, and replaced by the visual illusions of an emerging ideology associated with the capitalist, colonial, imperialist systems of global exploitation of people and the planet.
All the signs . . .
In the capitalocene age, where all things are subject to constant change, regardless of the consequences, changes governed by the imperative to maximise profit, the constant refrain heard, again and again, is that:
"That's just the way it is - Some things will never change - That's just the way it is!"
All the Signs from Houston to Galveston and Back
by Earl Staley, September 24, 1970. Early Staley papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
This artwork by Earl Staley provides a platform for a video montage that "bookends" the recording of "Changes", the "hip hop" song by 2Pac with "The Way It Is", a song by American rock group Bruce Hornsby and the Range. In Tupac Shakur's song "Changes", the chorus of "The Way It Is" was slightly reworded and sung by Talent and used for this song. Bruce Horsby's chorus of "The Way It Is" runs:
That's just the way it is - Some things will never change - That's just the way it is - Ah, but don't you believe them
In 2Pac's "Changes" the chorus runs:
Come on, come on - That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Aww, yeah
Bruce Hornsby's song "The Way It Is" was released in September 1986 as the second single from their debut album The Way It Is.
Bruce Hornsby makes explicit reference in the last verse of the song to the Economic Opportunity Act, also known as the 1964 Poverty Act, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Well, they passed a law in '64 - To give those who ain't got a little more - But it only goes so far - Because the law don't change another's mind - When all it sees at the hiring time - Is the line on the color bar
So, even after two long decades, "some things", such as institutional and structural racism driving social injustice, along with "the line on the color bar", "will never change"!
"Ah, but don't you believe them"
This is Bruce Hornsby's warning - never accept that "some things will never change", even when "the way it is" continues unchanged.
For Tupac by the time he makes his original recording of "Changes" in 1992, change needs to come, but it hasn't arrived. And by the time "Changes" was later remixed in 1998 by Poke from Trackmasters, while growing up to adulthood carries the loss of innocence, and so "Things will never be the same". Instead a lot of bad things just carry on, and so; We gotta start makin' changes. Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers. And that's how it's supposed to be. How can the devil take a brother, if he's close to me? I'd love to go back to when we played as kids. But things changed, and;
"That's the way it is"
Tupac's lyric:
Come on, come on - I see no changes, wake up in the morning, and I ask myself - Is life worth living, should I blast myself?
I'm tired of bein' poor, and even worse I'm black - My stomach hurts, so I'm lookin' for a purse to snatch
Cops give a damn about a negro - Pull the trigger, kill a nigga, he's a hero
Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares - One less hungry mouth on the welfare
First, ship 'em dope and let 'em deal the brothers - Give 'em guns, step back, watch 'em kill each other
It's time to fight back, that's what Huey said - Two shots in the dark, now Huey's dead
I got love for my brother, but we can never go nowhere - Unless we share with each other
We gotta start makin' changes - Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers - And that's how it's supposed to be - How can the devil take a brother, if he's close to me? - I'd love to go back to when we played as kids - But things changed, and that's the way it is
Come on, come on - That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Ooh, yeah
Come on, come on - That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Aww, yeahI see no changes, all I see is racist faces - Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races - We under, I wonder what it takes to make this - One better place, let's erase the wasted - Take the evil out the people, they'll be acting right - 'Cause mo' black and white is smokin' crack tonight - And only time we chill is when we kill each other - It takes skill to be real, time to heal each other - And although it seems heaven sent - We ain't ready, to see a black President
It ain't a secret, don't conceal the fact - The penitentiary's packed, and it's filled with blacks - But some things will never change - Try to show another way but you stayin' in the dope game - Now tell me, what's a mother to do?
Bein' real don't appeal to the brother in you - You gotta operate the easy way - (I made a G today) But you made it in a sleazy way - Sellin' crack to the kid (I gotta get paid) -Well, hey, well, that's the way it is
Come on, come on - That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Aww, yeah
Come on, come on - That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Aww, yeahWe gotta make a change - It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes
Let's change the way we eat - Let's change the way we live - And let's change the way we treat each other
You see, the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do - What we gotta do, to survive
And still I see no changes, can't a brother get a little peace?
There's war in the streets and war in the Middle East- Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs - So the police can bother me - And I ain't never did a crime, I ain't have to do
But now, I'm back with the facts givin' 'em back to you- Don't let 'em jack you up, back you up - Crack you up and pimps smack you up - You gotta learn to hold ya own - They get jealous when they see ya, with ya mobile phone - But tell the cops, they can't touch this - I don't trust this, when they try to rush, I bust this - That's the sound of my tool, you say it ain't cool?
But mama didn't raise no fool - And as long as I stay black, I gotta stay strapped - And I never get to lay back - 'Cause I always got to worry 'bout the pay backs - Some buck that I roughed up way back - Comin' back after all these years - Rat-a-tat, tat, tat, tat, that's the way it is
That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is (Way it is) - Aww, yeah
That's just the way it is - Things will never be the same - That's just the way it is - Aww, yeah
Some things will never change
This last line is NOT defeatist!
Tupac is a realist!
And Tupac is on a mission here:
"We gotta make a change - It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes - Let's change the way we eat - Let's change the way we live - And let's change the way we treat each other.You see, the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do - What we gotta do, to survive."
The song re-uses lines from "I Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto" which was recorded during the same year, and samples the 1986 hit "The Way It Is" by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. At times Tupac re-used lines from other unreleased songs because he planned to make an updated version at a later date. The remixed version released in 1998 has notably different percussion, and a few minor changes to the musical elements. The chorus on the original track features a notable difference in a vocal sample of the line, "It's like that and that's the way it is", from Run DMCs "It's Like That", which is also played twice during the intro. The second chorus adds the Ice Cube line, "Dope dealers, you're as bad as the police," from his song, "Us". The third chorus omits the Ice Cube sample and adds B-boy-style chant with an unknown person repeating, "Clap your hands and feel it, clap you hands and feel it!" until the song ends.
Tragically Tupac never "got to lay back", always had to worry "'bout the pay backs. Some buck that he roughed up way back - Comin' back after all these years". Two years before the remixed version of "Changes" was released in 1998, Tupac was the victim of an unsolved shooting . . .
. . . rat-a-tat, tat, tat, tat!
In Las Vegas on the night of September 7, 1996, at about 11:15 pm at a stop light, a white, four-door, late-model Cadillac sedan pulled up to the passenger side and an occupant rapidly fired into the car. Tupac Shakur was struck four times: once in the arm, once in the thigh, and twice in the chest with one bullet entering his right lung. Shakur was taken to the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada where he was heavily sedated and put on life support. In the intensive-care unit on the afternoon of September 13, 1996, Shakur died from internal bleeding. He was pronounced dead at 4:03 pm.
"that's the way it is"Since his death many of the unreleased and unmastered songs have been officially released, including this recording that overlays audio of Tupac talking of his experience, as well as sound clips of news reports on the shooting and resulting tragic death in Las Vegas.The Re:LODE Radio video montage is called . . .
. . . all the signs - that's just the way it is!
And uses All the signs, filmed by Earl Staley, September 24, 1970 on a road trip from Houston, Texas, to Galveston.
Re:LODE Radio intends to pick up the idea of "all the signs" a little later in this mosaic of texts and images, but the links and parallels are multiple.
Galveston in Jimmy Webb's song, first released in 1968, set against the background of the Vietnam War; a Juneteenth pilgrimage, against the background of Tupac's "war in the streets and war in the Middle East. Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs, so the police can bother me"; and Black Lives Matter NOW!
In this Re:LODE Radio video montage, the song "The Way It Is" by American rock group Bruce Hornsby and the Range plays over the silent film by Earl Staley of "all the signs" on the trip from Houston to Galveston. Then Tupac's "Changes" plays while the film documents the signs along the road into Galveston and the beginning of the return journey to Houston.
Coming into Houston as Tupac's "Changes" fades, a "ricorso" of the song "The Way It Is" underlines the fact that no matter how many times we are told:
that's just the way it is! Don't you believe them!
Change is coming, and the global capitalist system, the driver of inequality and social injustice everywhere, has to change! Or, if it doesn't, we lose the habitability of the planet!An Apocalypse Now? Or . . .
Perhaps the device in this montage of "bookending" and "centring" Tupac's song "Changes" in a sequence that begins and ends with Bruce Hornsby's "The Way It Is", is a version of the "Rule of Three".
Why it is that a group of three elements enhances the effect of a communication is NOT clear, but it works for Re:LODE Radio in telling this story of how, over the years, decades, and centuries, economic, social and racial injustice continues, despite continuing calls for change.
Here are a triad of memorable examples of the rule of three:
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – Rights outlined in the U.S. Declaration of IndependenceLiberté, égalité, fraternité – The slogan of the French Republic predating 1790Turn on, tune in, drop out - 1960s counterculture-era phrase popularized by Timothy Leary.
Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights activist and preacher, was known for his uses of tripling and the rule of three throughout his many influential speeches. For example, the speech "Non-Violence and Racial Justice" contained a binary opposition made up of the rule of three: "insult, injustice and exploitation", followed a few lines later by "justice, good will, and brotherhood". Conversely, segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace inveighed: "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" during his 1963 inaugural address.
Let's have an ORGY!! Apocalypse THEN!
This work of visual art is known as The Garden of Earthly Delights has three folding panels, and is the modern title given to a triptych oil painting on oak panel painted by the Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch, between 1490 and 1510.
When the triptych's wings are closed, the design of the outer panels becomes visible. These exterior panels show the world during creation, probably on the Third Day, after the addition of plant life but before the appearance of animals and humans. Rendered in a green–gray grisaille, these panels lack colour, probably because most Netherlandish triptychs were thus painted, but possibly indicating that the painting reflects a time before the creation of the sun and moon, which were formed, according to Christian theology, to "give light to the earth". The typical grisaille blandness of Netherlandish altarpieces served to highlight the splendid colour inside.
When the triptych's wings are opened what is revealed is, literally, a "revelation", especially the central panel, an image that both fascinates and perplexes everyone who has tried to understand what its original purpose and meaning might have been. Was it originally commissioned as an altarpiece? If so, it is unlikely that such subject matter was intended for a church or monastery. What it is that the imagery symbolises has led to a wide range of speculations and interpretations, that say more about the paradigms of speculators and interpreters than the work.The "Garden" was first documented in 1517, one year after the artist's death, when Antonio de Beatis, a canon from Molfetta, Italy, described the work as part of the decoration in the town palace of the Counts of the House of Nassau in Brussels. The palace was a high-profile location, a house often visited by heads of state and leading court figures.
It is this public and prominent status of the painting that has led some to conclude that the work was commissioned, and not "solely ... a flight of the imagination". A description of the triptych in 1605 called it the "strawberry painting", because the fruit of the strawberry tree (madroño in Spanish) features prominently in the center panel. Early Spanish writers referred to the work as La Lujuria or "Lust".
An ORGY of lust or Paradise and the fulfilment of the Millennium?
Many of the numerous human figures in the central panel appear to revel in an innocent, self-absorbed joy as they engage in a wide range of activities; some appear to enjoy sensual pleasures, others play unselfconsciously in the water, and others, in various groups and processions frolic in meadows with a variety of animals, where differences in scale are seemingly of little importance.
As shown in the details above and below, in the middle of the background, a large blue globe resembling a fruit pod rises in the middle of a lake. Visible through its circular window is a man holding his right hand close to his partner's genitals, and the bare buttocks of yet another figure hover in the vicinity.
According to Fraenger, the eroticism apparent in the central panel frame could be considered either as an allegory of spiritual transition or a playground of corruption.
Re:LODE Radio chooses to foreground the research and conclusions of Wilhelm Fraenger, a specialist in the epoch of the German Peasants' War and of the mysticism of the Late Middle Ages. He wrote important studies of Jerg Ratgeb, Matthias Grünewald and Hieronymus Bosch. His work on Bosch was very influential in its day and considered Bosch under the aspect of occultism, seeing Bosch as an artist guided by an esoteric mysticism.In 1947, Wilhelm Fraenger argued that the triptych's central panel portrays a vision of a future joyous world, of a time when mankind will experience a rebirth of the innocence enjoyed by Adam and Eve before their fall. In his book The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch, Fraenger wrote that Bosch was a member of the heretical sect known as the Adamites — who were also known as the Homines intelligentia and Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit. This radical group, active in the area of the Rhine and the Netherlands, strove for a form of spirituality immune from sin even in the flesh, and imbued the concept of lust with a paradisical innocence.
The Adamites were originally an obscure sect, adherents of an Early Christian group in North Africa dating probably from the 2nd century. Adherents professed to have regained Adam's primeval innocence.
Various accounts are given of their origin. Some have thought them to have been an offshoot of the Carpocratian Gnostics, who professed a sensual mysticism and a complete emancipation from the moral law. St. Epiphanius and Augustine of Hippo mention the Adamites by name, and describe their practices. They called their church "Paradise", claiming that its members were re-established in Adam and Eve's state of original innocence. Accordingly, they practiced "holy nudism", rejected the concept of marriage as foreign to Eden, saying it would never have existed but for sin, and lived in absolute lawlessness, holding that, whatever they did, their actions could be neither good nor bad.
Practices similar to these just described appeared in Europe several times in later ages. During the Middle Ages the doctrines of this obscure sect, which did not itself exist long, were revived in the 13th century in the Netherlands by the Brethren of the Free Spirit and the Taborites in Bohemia, and, in the 14th century, by some German Beghards. Everywhere they met with firm opposition from the mainstream churches. The earliest surviving documentation of the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit is to be found in a text called the Compilatio de novo spiritu put together by Albert the Great in the 1270s, concerning a group of persons investigated in the Swabian Ries area of Germany.The themes which occur in these documents, and which would emerge again in subsequent investigations, included:
- Autotheism – in other words, a belief that the perfected soul and God are indistinguishably one. This was often expressed through the language of indistinction or annihilation. This belief would be heretical because it would undermine the necessary distinction between fallen created being and creator.
- Denial of the necessity of Christ, the church and its sacraments for salvation – such that austerity and reliance on the Holy Spirit was believed to be sufficient for salvation. They believed that they could communicate directly with God and did not need the Catholic Church for intercession.
- Use of the language of erotic union with Christ.
- Antinomian statements -"Nothing is a sin except what is thought to be a sin". Critics of the Free Spirit interpreted their beliefs to mean that they considered themselves to be incapable of sin and above the moral conduct of the Church.
- Anticlerical sentiment.
During the late thirteenth century, such concerns increasingly became applied to the various unregulated religious groups such as beguines and beghards, who had greatly increased in number in the preceding decades. Concerns over such sentiments then began to occur elsewhere, especially during the 1300s, and especially in Italy. Partly motivated by such concerns, in 1308 Pope Clement V summoned a general council, which met at Vienne from October 1311 to May 1312. In particular, it had to engage with the report from the Paris inquisition (1308–1310) into the beguine Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls a text which had become well read through France, but had been condemned in 1310 as heresy, and Porete herself had been burned at the stake. It was the Council of Vienne which first associated these various beliefs with the idea of the 'Free Spirit'.The Taborite movement was started in 1419 in opposition to the authority of the Holy Roman Empire. One sect of Taborites, the Bohemian Adamites, dissociated themselves from other Taborites and took up the practice of going naked through towns and villages. They preached that "God dwelt in the Saints of the Last Days" and considered exclusive marriage to be a sin.
The historian Norman Cohn observed:
"Whereas the Taborites were strictly monogamous, in this sect free love seems to have been the rule. The Adamites declared that the chaste were unworthy to enter the Messianic kingdom ... The sect was much given to ritual naked dances held around a fire. Indeed, these people seemed to have spent much of their time naked, ignoring the heat and cold and claiming to be in the state of innocence enjoined by Adam and Eve."
Cohn also commented that the Adamites were criticised by other Taborites for "never thinking of earning their own living by the work of their hands".Fränger believed The Garden of Earthly Delights was commissioned by the order's Grand Master. Later critics have agreed that, because of their obscure complexity, Bosch's "altarpieces" may well have been commissioned for non-devotional purposes. The Homines intelligentia cult sought to regain the innocent sexuality enjoyed by Adam and Eve before the Fall. Fränger writes that the figures in Bosch's work "are peacefully frolicking about the tranquil garden in vegetative innocence, at one with animals and plants and the sexuality that inspires them seems to be pure joy, pure bliss." Fränger argued against the notion that the hellscape shows the retribution handed down for sins committed in the center panel. Fränger saw the figures in the garden as peaceful, naive, and innocent in expressing their sexuality, and at one with nature. In contrast, those being punished in Hell comprise "musicians, gamblers, desecrators of judgment and punishment".
Examining the symbolism in Bosch's art — "the freakish riddles … the irresponsible phantasmagoria of an ecstatic" — Fränger concluded that his interpretation applied to Bosch's three altarpieces only: The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and the Haywain Triptych. Fränger distinguished these pieces from the artist's other works and argued that despite their anti-cleric polemic, they were nevertheless all altarpieces, probably commissioned for the devotional purposes of a mystery cult.
However, the Wikipedia article on the triptych points out that while commentators accept Fränger's analysis as astute and broad in scope, they have often questioned his final conclusions. These are regarded by many scholars as hypothesis and conjecture.
The modern use of the term "apocalyptic" is of importance, primarily because of the "psychology" that is associated with millenarianism and millenarian movements. The Wikipedia article on Apocalypticism says that:
Apocalypticism is the religious belief that there will be an apocalypse, a term which originally referred to a revelation, but now usually refers to the belief that the end of the world is imminent, even within one's own lifetime. This belief is usually accompanied by the idea that civilization will soon come to a tumultuous end due to some sort of catastrophic global event. These views and movements often focus on cryptic revelations about a sudden, dramatic, and cataclysmic intervention of God in history; the judgment of all men; the salvation of the faithful elect; and the eventual rule of the elect with God in a renewed heaven and earth. Arising initially in Zoroastrianism apocalypticism was developed more fully in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic eschatological speculation.
Apocalypticism is often conjoined with the belief that esoteric knowledge that will likely be revealed in a major confrontation between good and evil forces, destined to change the course of history. Apocalypses can be viewed as good, evil, ambiguous or neutral, depending on the particular religion or belief system promoting them. However, it is not exclusively a religious idea and there are end times or transitional scenarios based in modern science and technology.
However, an apocalypse is not necessarily an "end of days" event, and our present times include several levels of possible meaning in the use of the word. And, predictably, the most positive level is regarded by the powers that be as heretical, and easily labelled extreme.
A reminder . . ."Apocalypse" (ἀποκάλυψις) is a Greek word meaning "revelation", "an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling".
As a genre, apocalyptic literature details the authors' visions of the end times as revealed by an angel or other heavenly messenger. The apocalyptic literature of Judaism and Christianity embraces a considerable period, from the centuries following the Babylonian exile down to the close of the Middle Ages.
There are echoes of eschatology, or "the end of times", in popular culture, literature, films, comics, manga and other art forms. A list of apocalyptic films can be found on Wikipedia, that include the 1961 film:
The Day the Earth Caught Fire . . .
. . . and the 2004 film:
The Day After Tomorrow
Originally this speculative eschatology was to be found in a part of theology concerned with the final events of history, or the ultimate destiny of humanity. Hence, this concept is commonly referred to as the "end of the world" or "end times".
The word arises from the Greek ἔσχατος eschatos meaning "last" and -logy meaning "the study of", and first appeared in English around 1844. The Oxford English Dictionary defines eschatology as "the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind". A relatively modern term pointing to a longer history of belief systems.
Fact and or fiction?
However the apocalypse, revelation, or "seeing things as they actually are", is also associated with a more positive, revolutionary and transformative scenario, that in the medieval period generated collective efforts to create perfection on the planet Earth, a period of peace to last a thousand years before a final judgement day. Rather than wait for divine judgement and a destination in heaven or hell, these Millenarianist movements, including religious, social, or political groups (from Latin mīllēnārius "containing a thousand"), were driven in the belief in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which;"all things will be changed".This is a collective mind set focused on real change, and requiring radical and revolutionary change to the system of power. In the middle ages this involved creating autonomous social and political space for what Norman Cohn described as anarcho-syndicalist communities. See Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957, revised and expanded in 1970) an amazing study of millenarian cult movements.
Covering a wide span of time, Cohn's book discusses topics such as anti-Semitism and the Crusades, in addition to such sects as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, flagellants, the Anabaptists, and the Ranters.
The Pursuit of the Millennium concludes with a discussion of the theocratic king John of Leiden, who took over the city of Münster in the so-called Münster rebellion of 1534. The context of power, and the abuse of power then, and which was clearly visible, included the church, principalities, kingdoms and empires. Today it is global capitalism, a far more complex and often invisible force.
The cover chosen for the Paladin publication in the 1970's was the painting of The Battle of Alexander at Issus (German: Alexanderschlacht) is a 1529 oil painting by the German artist Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538). Altdorfer was a pioneer of landscape art and a founding member of the Danube school. It portrays the 333 BC Battle of Issus, in which Alexander the Great secured a decisive victory over Darius III of Persia. The painting is widely regarded as Altdorfer's masterpiece, and is one of the most famous examples of the type of Renaissance landscape painting known as the world landscape, which here reaches an unprecedented grandeur.
The LODE and Re:LODE projects and Re:LODE Radio are, in art historical terms, and in many ways, an echo of this type of world landscape. The purposes and methods may be very different, but the atmosphere and sense of crisis at a local and global scale are shared across nearly 500 years.
The world landscape, a translation of the German Weltlandschaft, is a type of composition in Western painting showing an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and lowlands, water, and buildings. The subject of each painting is usually a Biblical or historical narrative, but the figures comprising this narrative element are dwarfed by their surroundings.
The German term Weltlandschaft was first used by Eberhard Freiherr von Bodenhausen in 1905 with reference to Gerard David, and then in 1918 applied to Patinir's work by Ludwig von Baldass, defined as the depiction of "all that which seemed beautiful to the eye; the sea and the earth, mountains and plains, forests and fields, the castle and the hut".
In Altdorfer's work the global scale shown in the detail above frames the action at a particular location, in this case a battle between empires rather than the hermit's hut.
The scope of Norman Cohn's book The Pursuit of the Millennium has this kind of scale, albeit in a world where it is Europe and its Asian adversary that are the real and imagined world pyscho-geography. However, it is worth commenting on the fact that 37 years before Altdorfer completed his work Columbus had begun the "discovery", from a European standpoint, of a "New World".
Referencing psychogeography with world landscape rather than, or as well as urban landscapes, has its place in the fact that one of the many people influenced by Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium include the French Marxist philosopher and writer Guy Debord, who considered the chiliastic cults discussed by Cohn something of a model for the Situationist International.
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
Norman Cohn - The Pursuit of the Millennium
Published on YouTube by Intellectual Deep Web
The man who points . . .
. . . in the bottom right hand corner of the central panel is the only clothed figure in the Garden.
Is this a portrait of the patron, or a self portrait of the artist? The woman below him lies within a semicylindrical transparent shield, while her mouth is sealed. Does she bear a secret?
Re:LODE Radio considers that if this central panel is, as the modern title suggests, a garden of earthly delights, perhaps reflecting a desire to regain the innocent sexuality enjoyed by Adam and Eve before the Fall, then an alternative to the notion that the painting is one kind of moral warning or anther can be found in re-naming the work The Millennium. The upshot of this vision of a "Paradise" of recovered innocence is revolutionary, and a time when . . .
"all things will be changed"
. . . including an integral and holistic mind, body and social experience expressed through sex and sexuality, reminiscent of Wilhelm Reich's SEX POL!
Wilhelm Reich's Orgone accumulator or "sex box".
Guy Debord, the Situationist, as mentioned above, while profoundly informed by Norman Cohn's historical work, refuted the thesis of Cohn's book thus:"Modern revolutionary hopes were not, as Norman Cohn thinks he shows in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the irrational consequences of the religious passion of millenarianism. Quite the contrary: it is millenarianism, a revolutionary class struggle speaking for the first time the language of religion, that is already a modern revolutionary tendency, but still lacking the awareness that it is historical alone. "
La Société du spectacle, §138; emphasis in original.If The Millennium and/or The Garden secretly present the potential of an embodied liberation, true emancipation when . . .
"all things will be changed". . . it's worth connecting to the lived experience of NOW and the inspirational music and lyric of Tupac's "Changes". This song has echoed down the years in the work of other recording artists.
This video montage begins with the first few seconds of audio and video from the "official" Tupac video of "Changes" and then cuts to the beginning of E-40's 1996 "Things'll Never Change" featuring Bo-Roc. As E-40's chorus ends, the beginning of Polo G's interpolated "Changes" on his 2020 song "Wishing for a Hero", with a thrice repeated intro. As the video of "Wishing for a Hero" ends the video of "Things'll Never Change" resumes, and as this video ends Tupac's video of "Changes" resumes.The common dialectic in these three lyrics, the samples, and chorus, is the juxtaposition of the loss of the innocence and joy of childhood with the reality of growing up and going out into a world that's a war zone. The condition of adulthood in a world of racial, social and economic inequalities, exploitation and injustice is equivalent to as a yet unidentified circle of Hell.
From the Garden of Eden to the Streets of Hell the chorus for change . . .
The chorus in each of these three interwoven lyrics is comparable with the Greek chorus found in ancient Greek tragedy, that is a homogeneous, non-individualised group of performers, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action.
Ancient Greek theatre always included a chorus that offered a variety of background and summary information to help the audience follow the performance. They commented on themes, and demonstrated how the audience might react to the drama. According to Schlegel, the Chorus is "the ideal spectator", and conveys to the actual spectator "a lyrical and musical expression of his own emotions, and elevates him to the region of contemplation" In many of these plays, the chorus expressed to the audience what the main characters could not say, such as their hidden fears or secrets. Some historians argue that the chorus was itself considered to be an actor. Aristotle stated in his Poetics:
The chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action, not in the manner of Euripides but of Sophocles.
Scholars have considered Sophocles to be superior to Euripides in his choral writing. Of the two, Sophocles also won more dramatic contests. His chorus passages were more relevant to the plot and more integrated in tragedies, whereas the Euripidean choruses seemingly had little to do with the plot and were often bystanders.
Let's party . . .
. . . in Paradise!
The Garden of Earthly Delights took on a new meaning in the context of the so-called counter culture of the 1960's and '70's, a revolutionary image and as a mass produced colour printed wall poster in a "new age", of "be-ins" and "love-ins" and anti-Vietnam War protests.
This video montage begins with a PBS documentary on the so-called "Summer of Love" and then followed by a trailer for the 2016 film Paradise Club.
This is a story about a young dancer who, ostensibly, finds herself in the heart of San Francisco in 1968 at the height of the sexual revolution. Dancing in the Paradise Club, Catherine's journey leads to her entanglement in an affair, protesting against the Vietnam War, and all the while struggling to find herself. Can she navigate a world burning down around her or will she lose everything?
Striptease in Paradise, and for money!
It's a strip club, a depressing environment where the mix of misogyny and money, in a sleazy world of sexual exploitation, overlaps with the idea, or gloss, of sexual liberation. It is NO such thing! This is a place and time where if there is any kind of freedom, it is the freedom to exploit. This film is one among many examples in popular culture NOW that re-writes history, just as in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood Tarantino turns history into a fairy story. A fake nostalgia uses glamour to cover the TRUTH.
The trailer for Paradise Club is followed by a scene, deleted from the film, that Re:LODE Radio considers to be an example of artistic realism tinged with an intended, or unintended, version of Berthold Brecht's distancing effect.
More commonly known as the alienation effect or as the estrangement effect (German: Verfremdungseffekt or V-Effekt), Brecht first used the term in an essay on "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936, in which he described it as "playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious".In Moscow, in the spring of 1935 Brecht had seen a command performance of Beijing Opera techniques by Mei Lanfang, that Brecht first used the German term in print to label an approach to theatre that discouraged involving the audience in an illusory narrative world and in the emotions of the characters. Brecht thought the audience required an emotional distance to reflect on what was being presented in critical and objective ways, rather than being taken out of themselves as conventional entertainment attempts to do.The proper English translation of Verfremdungseffekt is a matter of controversy. The word is sometimes rendered as defamiliarization effect, estrangement effect, distantiation, alienation effect, or distancing effect. In Brecht and Method (1998), Fredric Jameson abbreviates Verfremdungseffekt as "the V-effekt"; many scholars similarly leave the word untranslated.
The video montage ends with a fairytale version of a party at the Playboy Mansion featured in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Is this film a weird example of "the V-effekt" or is it just an example of escapism?
Love-in, or . . .
Across the 'Frisco Bay
Across the Bay in Oakland something was happening that was REAL and POLITICAL in a different way! It was NOT bourgeois and it was BLACK!
During World War II, tens of thousands of black African Americans left the Southern states during the Second Great Migration, moving to Oakland and other cities in the Bay Area to find work in the war industries such as Kaiser Shipyards. The sweeping migration transformed the Bay Area as well as cities throughout the West and North, altering the once white-dominated demographics. A new generation of young black African Americans growing up in these cities faced new forms of poverty and racism unfamiliar to their parents, and they sought to develop new forms of politics to address them.
In late October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense). In formulating a new politics, they drew on their work with a variety of Black Power organizations. Newton and Seale first met in 1962 when they were both students at Merritt College. They joined Donald Warden's Afro-American Association, where they read widely, debated, and organized in an emergent black nationalist tradition inspired by Malcolm X and others. Eventually dissatisfied with Warden's accommodationism, they developed a revolutionary anti-imperialist perspective working with more active and militant groups like the Soul Students Advisory Council and the Revolutionary Action Movement. Their paid jobs running youth service programs at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center allowed them to develop a revolutionary nationalist approach to community service, later a key element in the Black Panther Party's "community survival programs."Dissatisfied with the failure of these organizations to directly challenge police brutality and appeal to the "brothers on the block", Huey Newton and Bobby Seale took matters into their own hands. After the police killed Matthew Johnson, an unarmed young black man in San Francisco, Newton observed the violent insurrection that followed. He had an epiphany that would distinguish the Black Panther Party from the multitude of Black Power organizations. Newton saw the explosive rebellious anger of the ghetto as a social force and believed that if he could stand up to the police, he could organize that force into political power. Inspired by Robert F. Williams' armed resistance to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and Williams' book Negroes with Guns, Newton studied gun laws in California extensively. Like the Community Alert Patrol in Los Angeles after the Watts Rebellion, he decided to organize patrols to follow the police around to monitor for incidents of brutality. But with a crucial difference: his patrols would carry loaded guns. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale raised enough money to buy two shotguns by buying bulk quantities of the recently publicised Little Red Book and reselling them to leftists and liberals on the Berkeley campus at three times the price.
According to Bobby Seale, they would "sell the books, make the money, buy the guns, and go on the streets with the guns. We'll protect a mother, protect a brother, and protect the community from the racist cops."
On October 29, 1966, Stokely Carmichael – a leader of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) – championed the call for "Black Power" and came to Berkeley to keynote a Black Power conference. At the time, he was promoting the armed organizing efforts of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in Alabama and their use of the Black Panther symbol. Newton and Seale decided to adopt the Black Panther logo and form their own organization called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Newton and Seale decided on a uniform of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, black berets.
Sixteen-year-old Bobby Hutton was their first recruit.
By January 1967, the BPP opened its first official headquarters in an Oakland storefront, and published the first issue of The Black Panther: Black Community News Service.
Black Panther Party membership "consisted of recent migrants whose families traveled north and west to escape the southern racial regime, only to be confronted with new forms of segregation and repression". In the early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement had dismantled the Jim Crow system of racial caste subordination in the South with tactics of non-violent civil disobedience, and demanding full citizenship rights for black people. However, not much changed in the cities of the North and West. As the wartime and post-war jobs which drew much of the black migration "fled to the suburbs along with white residents", the black population was concentrated in poor "urban ghettos" with high unemployment and substandard housing and was mostly excluded from political representation, top universities, and the middle class. Northern and Western police departments were almost all white. In 1966, only 16 of Oakland's 661 police officers were African American (less than 2.5%).
Civil rights tactics proved incapable of redressing these conditions, and the organisations that had "led much of the nonviolent civil disobedience", such as SNCC and CORE, went into decline. By 1966 a "Black Power ferment" emerged, consisting largely of young urban blacks, posing a question the Civil Rights Movement could not answer: "How would black people in America win not only formal citizenship rights, but actual economic and political power?"
Young black people in Oakland and other cities developed study groups and political organisations, and from this ferment the Black Panther Party emerged.
The initial tactic of the party utilized contemporary open-carry gun laws to protect Party members when policing the police. This act was done to record incidents of police brutality by distantly following police cars around neighbourhoods. When confronted by a police officer, Party members cited laws proving they had done nothing wrong and threatened to take to court any officer that violated their constitutional rights. Between the end of 1966 to the start of 1967, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense's armed police patrols in Oakland black communities attracted a small handful of members. Numbers grew slightly starting in February 1967, when the party provided an armed escort at the San Francisco airport for Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow and keynote speaker for a conference held in his honour.The Black Panther Party's focus on militancy was often construed as open hostility, feeding a reputation of violence even though early efforts by the Panthers focused primarily on promoting social issues and the exercise of their legal right to carry arms. The Panthers employed a California law that permitted carrying a loaded rifle or shotgun as long as it was publicly displayed and pointed at no one. Generally this was done while monitoring and observing police behaviour in their neighborhoods, with the Panthers arguing that this emphasis on active militancy and openly carrying their weapons was necessary to protect individuals from police violence. Nevertheless, chants like "The Revolution has come, it's time to pick up the gun. Off the pigs!", helped create the Panthers' reputation as a violent organisation.
The black community of Richmond, California, wanted protection against police brutality. With only three main streets for entering and exiting the neighbourhood, it was easy for police to control, contain, and suppress the population. On April 1, 1967, a black unarmed twenty-two-year-old construction worker named Denzil Dowell was shot dead by police in North Richmond. Dowell's family contacted the Black Panther Party for assistance after county officials refused to investigate the case. The Party held rallies in North Richmond that educated the community on armed self-defence and the Denzil Dowell incident. Police seldom interfered at these rallies because every Panther was armed and no laws were broken. The Party's ideals resonated with several community members, who then brought their own guns to the next rallies.
Awareness of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense grew rapidly after their May 2, 1967 protest at the California State Assembly. On May 2, 1967, the California State Assembly Committee on Criminal Procedure was scheduled to convene to discuss what was known as the "Mulford Act", which would make the public carrying of loaded firearms illegal. Newton, with Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver, put together a plan to send a group of 26 armed Panthers led by Seale from Oakland to Sacramento to protest the bill. The group entered the assembly carrying their weapons, an incident which was widely publicized, and which prompted police to arrest Seale and five others. The group pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disrupting a legislative session. At the time of the protest, the Party had fewer than 100 members in total.
The Black Panther Party first publicized its original "What We Want Now!" Ten-Point program on May 15, 1967, following the Sacramento action, in the second issue of The Black Panther newspaper.
- We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
- We want full employment for our people.
- We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
- We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
- We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.
- We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
- We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
- We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
- We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
- We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
"In America black people are treated very much as the Vietnamese people, or any other colonised people . . ."
Are the Black Panthers . . .
Upon its inception the Black Panther Party's core practice was its open carry armed citizens' patrols ("copwatching") to monitor the behavior of officers of the Oakland Police Department and challenge police brutality in the city.
From 1969 onwards, a variety of community social programs became a core activity. The Party instituted the Free Breakfast for Children Programs to address food injustice, and community health clinics for education and treatment of diseases including sickle cell anemia, tuberculosis, and later HIV/AIDS. It advocated for class struggle, with the party representing the proletarian vanguard.
Black Panther Party members were involved in many fatal firefights with police. Newton declared:
Malcolm, implacable to the ultimate degree, held out to the Black masses ... liberation from the chains of the oppressor and the treacherous embrace of the endorsed [Black] spokesmen. Only with the gun were the black masses denied this victory. But they learned from Malcolm that with the gun, they can recapture their dreams and bring them into reality.
Huey Newton allegedly killed officer John Frey in 1967, and Eldridge Cleaver (Minister of Information) led an ambush in 1968 of Oakland police officers, in which two officers were wounded and Panther Bobby Hutton (Treasurer) was killed.
FBI infiltrators caused the party to suffer many internal conflicts, resulting in the murders of Alex Rackley and Betty Van Patter.
In 1967, the Mulford Act was passed by the California legislature and signed by governor Ronald Reagan. The bill was crafted in response to members of the Black Panther Party who were copwatching. The bill repealed a law that allowed the public carrying of loaded firearms.
In 1969, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover described the party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." He developed and supervised an extensive counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, and many other tactics, designed to undermine Panther leadership, incriminate and assassinate party members, discredit and criminalize the Party, and drain organisational resources and manpower. The program was responsible for the assassination of Fred Hampton, and is accused of assassinating other Black Panther members, including Mark Clark.
Government persecution initially contributed to the party's growth, as killings and arrests of Panthers increased its support among African Americans and the broad political left, who both valued the Panthers as a powerful force opposed to de facto segregation and the military draft. The party enrolled the most members and had the most influence in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. There were active chapters in many prisons, at a time when an increasing number of young African-American men were being incarcerated.
Black Panther Party membership reached a peak in 1970, with offices in 68 cities and thousands of members, but it began to decline over the following decade. After its leaders and members were vilified by the mainstream press, public support for the party waned, and the group became more isolated. In-fighting among Party leadership, fomented largely by the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, led to expulsions and defections that decimated the membership. Popular support for the Party declined further after reports of the group's alleged criminal activities, such as drug dealing and extortion of Oakland merchants.
By 1972 most Panther activity centered on the national headquarters and a school in Oakland, where the party continued to influence local politics. Though under constant police surveillance, the Chicago chapter also remained active and maintained their community programs until 1974. The Seattle chapter persisted longer than most, with a breakfast program and medical clinics that continued even after the chapter disbanded in 1977. The Party continued to dwindle throughout the 1970s, and by 1980 had just 27 members.
This next video montage creates an apposition of the different conditions of everyday life that were experienced by African Americans living in Oakland, with the "counterculture" migration of white suburban middle-class young Americans who had the where-with-all to converge on San Fransisco in the summer of 1967.
Meanwhile . . .
This video montage begins with the sound track of "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay", a song co-written by soul singer Otis Redding and guitarist Steve Cropper. It was recorded by Redding twice in 1967, including once just three days before his death in a plane crash. The song was released on Stax Records' Volt label in 1968, becoming the first ever posthumous single to top the charts in the US. It reached number 3 on the UK Singles Chart.
Otis Redding started writing the lyrics to the song in August 1967, while sitting on a rented houseboat at commodore seaplane slips in Sausalito, California. He had completed his famed performance at the Monterey Pop Festival just weeks earlier. In a September 1990 interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Cropper explained the origins of the song:
Otis was one of those the kind of guy who had 100 ideas. [...] He had been in San Francisco doing The Fillmore. And the story that I got he was renting boathouse or stayed at a boathouse or something and that's where he got the idea of the ships coming in the bay there. And that's about all he had: "I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again."
This montage then cuts to film documentation of the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco during 1967, accompanied by the sound track of "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear [Some] Flowers in Your Hair)", an American pop song, written by John Phillips, and sung by Scott McKenzie. It was produced and released in May 1967 by Phillips and Lou Adler, who used it to promote their Monterey International Pop Music Festival held in June of that year. According to Paul Ingles of NPR;"...local authorities in Monterey were starting to get cold feet over the prospect of their town being overrun by hippies. To smooth things over, Phillips wrote a song, "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)."Phillips reported writing the song in about 20 minutes. The song, which tells the listeners, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair", is credited with bringing thousands of young people to San Francisco, California, during 1967 and the late 60's.
The extinction of rebellion?
The demise of the Black Panther Party was assured by the actions of both state and federal agencies so determined to remove a potentially significant threat to the actually existing structures of power, privilege and the interests of a capitalist class. The Wikipedia article on the Black Panther Party acknowledges that:
The Party's history is controversial. Scholars have characterised the Black Panther Party as the most influential black movement organisation of the late 1960s, and "the strongest link between the domestic Black Liberation Struggle and global opponents of American imperialism". Other commentators have described the Party as more criminal than political, characterised by "defiant posturing over substance".
Re:LODE Radio considers this last point as "moot", that is, as in a specialised legal meaning, dating from the 16th century, where a moot is “the discussion of a hypothetical case by law students for practice; a hypothetical doubtful case that may be used for discussion”. And the Black Panther Party had more than style, more than a revolutionary aesthetic, "to beat a dogma with". Regardless of the criminality and criminalisation of the BPP the Black Panthers . . .
. . . spoke the truth to power!
When it comes to the TRUTH, and an unvarnished history, Re:LODE Radio quotes from a previous post published on Wednesday, 19 August 2020:
Seventy Eight Days to Save the Earth in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"
Speaking truth to power
In this post for Re:LODE Radio's 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH" it is worth quoting from the Marianne interview with Bernard Stiegler where he says of Greta Thunberg:
"I think she is telling the truth in the way of what the Greeks called parrhesia. She is out of step with a system which, as everyone knows, is going into the wall. She is accused of all the evils because in reality it challenges us all by this position of absolute radicalism which forces us to take our place - not in front of it, but in terms of our responsibilities in the Anthropocene.
In rhetoric, parrhesia is a figure of speech described as: "to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking".
Parrhesia has a particular value and quality in the work and thinking of Michel Foucault. This Ancient Greek word has three different forms, as related by Michel Foucault. Parrhesia is a noun, meaning "free speech". Parrhesiazomai is a verb, meaning "to use parrhesia". Parrhesiastes is a noun, meaning one who uses parrhesia, for example "one who speaks the truth to power".
The term parrhesia is borrowed from the Greek παρρησία parrhēsía (πᾶν "all" and ῥῆσις "utterance, speech") meaning literally "to speak everything" and by extension "to speak freely", "to speak boldly", or "boldness".
The term first appears in Greek literature, when used by Euripides, and may be found in ancient Greek texts from the end of the fifth century B.C. until the fifth century A.D. It implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk.
Parrhesia was a fundamental component of the democracy of Classical Athens. In assemblies and the courts Athenians were free to say almost anything, and in the theatre, playwrights such as Aristophanes made full use of the right to ridicule whomever they chose. Elsewhere there were limits to what might be said; freedom to discuss politics, morals, religion, or to criticize people would depend on context: by whom it was made, and when, and how, and where.
If one was seen as immoral, or held views that went contrary to popular opinion, then there were great risks involved in making use of such an unbridled freedom of speech, as Socrates found out when he was sentenced to death for not adoring deities worshiped by the Athenians and for corrupting the young.
Michel Foucault developed the concept of parrhesia as a mode of discourse in which one speaks openly and truthfully about one's opinions and ideas without the use of rhetoric, manipulation, or generalization. Foucault's use of parrhesia, he tells us, is troubled by our modern day Cartesian model of evidential necessity. For Descartes, truth is the same as the undeniable. Whatever can be doubted must be, and, thus, speech that is not examined or criticized does not necessarily have a valid relation to truth.
There are several conditions upon which the traditional Ancient Greek notion of parrhesia relies. One who uses parrhesia is only recognized as doing so if holding a credible relationship to the truth, if one serves as critic to either oneself or popular opinion or culture, if the revelation of this truth places one in a position of danger and one persists in speaking the truth, nevertheless, as one feels it is a moral, social, and/or political obligation. Further, in a public situation, a user of parrhesia must be in a social position less empowered than those to whom this truth is revealed.
Foucault (1983) sums up the Ancient Greek concept of parrhesia as such:
So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death.
and
To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.
Foucault (1984) sums up that:
The Parrhesiastes is the person who says everything. Thus, as an example, in his discourse "On the Embassy," Demosthenes says: It is necessary to speak with parrhesia, without holding back at anything without concealing anything. Similarly, in the "First Philippic," he takes up exactly the same term and says: I will tell you what I think without concealing anything.
Bernard Stiegler says; “reading [is] an interpretation by the reader of his or her own memory through the interpretation of the text that he or she had read.”
For Re:LODE Radio this revelation, or discovery, of Bernard Stiegler, and quoted extensively in relation to his work applies to the information that frames the LODE Zone Line. Re:LODE Radio and Re:LODE Cargo of Questions are intended to create a psycho-geographical space for both the reader and the writer (along with the righter of wrongs), the looker and the listener, and speaker too. In this vein, in this way, along this LODE Line, we return, in the footsteps of others, to Death Valley:
Zabriskie Point (revisited)
Michel Foucault drops acid in Death Valley
Simeon WadeHeather Dundas
Editor’s Note: Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault in 1926) was one of the central thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Neither a traditional philosopher nor a trained historian, Foucault examined the intersection of truth and history through the specific historical dynamics of power.In France, Foucault was a major figure in structuralist thinking of the 1960s and in the years that followed. However, in the United States, especially in popular culture, Foucault is often thought of as an inciter of the “French theory” movement that swept through American universities in the 1970s and 1980s. Often controversial, Foucault’s analyses of the uses of power in society, as well as his concerns with sexuality, bodies, and norms have been pivotal in the development of contemporary feminist and queer theory.One early follower of Foucault’s thinking was Simeon Wade, assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate School. A native of Texas, Wade moved to California in 1972 after earning his Ph.D. in the intellectual history of Western civilization from Harvard in 1970. In 1975, Foucault was invited to California to teach a seminar at the University of California, Berkeley. Following a lecture, Wade and his partner, musician Michael Stoneman, invited Foucault to accompany them on a road trip to Death Valley. After some persuasion, Foucault agreed. The memorable trip occurred two weeks later. This interview was conducted by Heather Dundas on 27 May 2017, and has been edited for length, clarity, and historical accuracy.
Boom: What can you tell us about the above photo?
Simeon Wade: I snapped the above photo with my Leica camera, June 1975. The photograph features the Panamint Mountains, the salt flats of Death Valley, and the frozen dunes at Zabriskie Point. In the foreground, two figures: Michel Foucault, in the white turtleneck, his priestly attire, and Michael Stoneman, who was my life partner.
Boom: How did you end up in Death Valley with Michel Foucault?
Simeon Wade: I was performing an experiment. I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in history would be affected by an experience he had never had before: imbibing a suitable dose of clinical LSD in a desert setting of great magnificence, and then adding to that various kinds of entertainment. We were in Death Valley for two days and one night. And this is one of the spots we visited during this trip.
50 years on . . .
Revisiting Zabriskie Point in Death Valley 50 years on from the making of Zabriskie Point, the title of the 1970 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni the echoes between then and now, of the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement, of the psycho-pathological denial of systemic racism, social injustice, inequality, police brutality and the suppression of dissent.
. . . the temperature itself has become a warning to the whole world of the future habitability of the planet for human survival!
In a room at a university campus in 1970, white and black students argue about an impending student strike. Kathleen Cleaver, a member of the Black Panthers and wife of Eldridge Cleaver, appears in a documentary-like student meeting scene at the opening of the film.
The character Mark leaves the meeting after saying he is "willing to die, but not of boredom" for the cause, which draws criticism from the young white radicals.
Mark goes to a bloody campus confrontation between students and police. Some students are tear-gassed and at least one is shot. As Mark reaches for a gun in his boot, a Los Angeles policeman is seen being fatally shot, although it is unclear by whom.
Murals at People's Park
The atmosphere of police oppression that Antonioni achieves in this first part of the film is redolent of the events that had previously taken place the year before at UC Berkeley with the student protests associated with the campaign to create Peoples Park. In particular the event that came to be known as "Bloody Thursday" (May 15, 1969) when Alameda County Sheriff's deputies used shotguns to fire at people sitting on the roof at the Telegraph Repertory Cinema. James Rector was visiting friends in Berkeley and watching from the roof of Granma Books when he was shot by police; he died on May 19. The Alamada County Coroner's report listed cause of death as "shock and hemorrhage due to multiple shotgun wounds and perforation of the aorta." The buckshot is the same size as a .38 caliber bullet.
Governor Reagan conceded that Rector was probably shot by police but justified the bearing of firearms, saying that "it's very naive to assume that you should send anyone into that kind of conflict with a flyswatter. He's got to have an appropriate weapon." The University of California Police Department (UCPD) said Rector threw steel rebar down onto the police; however, Time magazine claimed that Rector was a bystander, not a protester. Carpenter Alan Blanchard was permanently blinded by a load of birdshot fired directly into his face.
At least 128 Berkeley residents were admitted to local hospitals for head trauma, shotgun wounds, and other serious injuries inflicted by police. The actual number of seriously wounded was likely much higher, because many of the injured did not seek treatment at local hospitals to avoid being arrested. Local medical students and interns organized volunteer mobile first-aid teams to help protesters and bystanders injured by buckshot, nightsticks, or tear gas. One local hospital reported two students wounded with large caliber rifles as well.
News reports at the time of the shooting indicated that 50 were injured, including five police officers. Some local hospital logs indicate that 19 police officers or Alameda County Sheriff's deputies were treated for minor injuries; none were hospitalized.
In an address before the California Council of Growers on April 7, 1970, almost a year after "Bloody Thursday" and the death of James Rector, Governor Reagan defended his decision to use the California National Guard to quell Berkeley protests:
"If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement."
Berkeley Tribe editors decided to issue this quote in large type on the cover of its next edition.
Mark flees the campus and rides a city bus to suburban Hawthorne, California where, after failing to buy a sandwich on credit from a local blue-collar delicatessen, he walks to Hawthorne Municipal Airport, steals a small Cessna 210 aircraft and flies into the desert.
Meanwhile, the character Daria, is driving across the desert towards Phoenix in a 1950s-era Buick automobile to meet her boss Lee, who may or may not also be her lover. Along the way Daria is searching for a man who works with "emotionally disturbed" children from Los Angeles. She finds the young boys near a roadhouse in the Mojave desert but they tease, taunt, and grab at her, asking for "a piece of ass", to which she asks in reply, "Are you sure you'd know what to do with it?"
Daria leaves them quickly and drives away in her car. Later, while filling the Buick's radiator with water, she is seen from the air by Mark flying above in the stolen Cessna aircraft. He buzzes her car, in an echo of Hitchcock's North by Northwest cropduster scene, and then flies very low over her as she lies face down in the sand. He throws a T-shirt out of the window of the aircraft for her to pick up. Daria's emotions quickly transition from being understandably upset and confused, to curiousity and she ends up smiling by the end of this sequence.
Mark and Daria then meet at the desert shack of an old man, where Mark asks her for a lift so he can buy gasoline for the aircraft. The two then drive to Zabriskie Point, where they make love. Meanwhile the landscape of geological formations seems to come alive in an hallucinatory orgy.
The scene was filmed with dust-covered and highly choreographed actors from The Open Theatre. In a campaign of political harassment, the United States Department of Justice investigated whether this violated the Mann Act – which forbade the taking of women across state lines for sexual purposes – however, no sex was filmed and no state lines were crossed, given that Death Valley is in California.
State officials in Sacramento, no doubt with the blessing of California Governor Ronald Reagan, were also ready to charge Antonioni with "immoral conduct, prostitution or debauchery" if he staged an actual orgy. FBI officials investigated the film because of Antonioni's political views, and officials in Oakland, California accused the director of staging a real riot for a scene early in the film.
Returning to the stolen aircraft, Mark and Daria paint it with politically-charged slogans and psychedelic colours. Daria pleads with Mark to travel with her and leave the aircraft but Mark is intent on returning and taking the risks that it involves.
He flies back to Los Angeles and lands the plane at the airport in Hawthorne. The police, accompanied by some radio and television reporters, are waiting for him, and patrol cars chase the aircraft down the runway. Instead of stopping, Mark tries to turn the taxiing aircraft around across the grass but is shot to death by one of the policemen.
Daria learns about Mark's death on the car radio. She drives to Lee's lavish desert home, set high on a rock outcropping near Phoenix, Arizona, where she sees three affluent women sunning themselves and chatting by the swimming pool.
She grieves for Mark by drenching herself in the house's architectural waterfall. Lee is deeply immersed in a business meeting having to do with the complex and financially risky Sunny Dunes development. Taking a break, he spots Daria in the house and happily greets her. She goes downstairs alone and finds the guest room that has been set aside for her but after briefly opening the door, she shuts it again.
Seeing a young Native American housekeeper in the hallway, Daria leaves silently. She drives off but stops to get out of the car and look back at the house, her own imagination seeing it, and the contents of a luxuriously furnished and high maintenance materialist consumer lifestyle, repeatedly blown apart, floating in billowing clouds of orange flame, while household items seem to float in space. This cinematic choreography of destruction, rendered in high definition slow motion photography, is transformed by Pink Floyd's experimental musical score. Daria leaves this way of life and its materialism and drives into the sunset.
Zabriskie Point (revisited)
Toni del Renzio, one of the founders of the Independent Group at the ICA, London, was working in northern California in 1967 and 1968, lecturing on art and media at UC Berkeley and Santa CruzIt was there he witnessed the San Francisco hippie explosion at first hand, recounting his experiences in his 1969 book The Flower Children. A delay in publishing this work meant that his take on this cultural phenomenon, as a champion of Surrealism in the early 1940's, and one of the "Fathers of Pop" (sic), would have provided a significant starting point to an understanding of the political dimensions of what was happening.
And coincidentally, while teaching a class at UC Berkeley in 1969, on what turned out to be an experimental approach and exploration of "conceptual art", a class scheduled for the early hours on the instigation of the student group, Del Renzio's friend Antonioni was involved creating a version of the Millennium . . .
. . . in The Desert of Earthly Delights at Zabriskie Point.
Continued in PART 5.
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