Here is an excerpt from the translator’s foreword to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project:
To speak of awakening was to speak of the “afterlife of works,” something brought to pass through the medium of the “dialectical image.” The latter is Benjamin’s central term, in The Arcades Project, for the historical object of interpretation: that which, under the divinatory gaze of the collector, is taken up into the collector’s own particular time and place, thereby throwing a pointed light on what has been. Welcomed into a present moment that seems to be waiting just for it-- “actualized,” as Benjamin likes to say-- the moment from the past comes alive as never before. In this way, the “now” is itself experienced as preformed in the “then,” as its distillation-- thus the leading motif of “precursors” in the text. The historical object is reborn as such into a present day capable of receiving it, of suddenly “recognizing” it. This is the famous “now of recognizability” (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit), which has the character of a lightning flash. In the dusty, cluttered corridors of the arcades, where street and interior are one, historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and momentary come-ons, myriad displays of ephemera, thresholds for the passage of what Gerard de Nerval (in Aurelia) calls “the ghosts of material things.” Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by “progress,” is the ur-historical, collective redemption of lost time, of the times embedded in the spaces of things.
Last night, I read through a journal that I keep. I usually do this about once every three months. Keeping a journal helps to keep track of things. There are usually things in each read through that surprise me, that I forgot. I am grateful for a place to keep those thoughts collected.
I read this last night, it was a passage from a mushroom trip back in February
Desire and longing for something that is impossible to have.
Do the things we make, the impact we have on our world, amount to (transmutation?) expressions, spells cast to what could be considered the underworld?
Is our personal underworld the traces we leave behind?
Is that what a ghost is?
Moments, both insignifigant and signifigant, frozen in time until another vital energy interacts with them thus revitalizing them, also adding their own life layer.
When I read that it immediately struck me as eerily similar to what the foreword of The Arcades Project describes. I wonder if I have read the foreword before, and gave up because at the time it seemed convoluted.
The Arcades Project is one of the books that @corpseinorbit recommends. He makes a good podcast about CIA type stuff and the like. Speaking of which I have another excerpt for you. This one is from Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of The United States:
The Church Committee uncovered CIA operations to secretly influence the minds of Americans:
The CIA is now using several hundred American academics (administrators, faculty members, graduate students engaged in teaching) who, in addition to providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes, write books and other material to be used for propaganda purposes abroad. . . . These academics are located in over 100 American colleges, universities, and related institutions. At the majority of institutions, no one other than the individual concerned is aware of the CIA link. At the others, at least one university official is aware of the operational use of academics on his campus. . . . The CIA considers these operational relationships within the U.S. academic community as perhaps its most sensitive domestic area and has strict controls governing these operations. . . .
In 1961 the chief of the CIA’s Covert Action Staff wrote that books were “The most important weapon of strategic propaganda.” The Church Committee found that more than a thousand books were produced, subsidized, or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967.
Now a lot of that covert action is out in the open. Think tank funding and whatnot. The National Endowment for Democracy, etc.
Do you think you have read a CIA sponsored book?
I find the idea of a book being “the most important weapon of strategic propaganda” to be empowering. What you write and advocate for has significance, not only in the moment but over the ages.
Edward Abby’s book The Monkey Wrench Gang has been described as “An incendiary device bound as a book.” The ideas of environmental justice contained therein have inspired countless environmentalists to take action and to care about their earth.
Earth First!
It is exhausting to learn about the myriad ways our air and water are being polluted with toxic waste every day. All in the interest of a few people’s pocketbooks.
I watched a documentary about fracking, Groundswell Rising, and I was reminded of footage I’ve seen on Liveleak of the wars that we carry out over the world. The glaring lights and loud machinery keeping children up in their homes, the endless streams of trucks coming in and out of the neighborhoods, the poisoning of the people.
It reminds me of a concept I came across recently, Michel Foucault’s “boomerang effect.”
This “boomerang effect”, which Foucault had identified, was the process by which the mechanisms of control which Western colonizer countries developed to repress colonized countries and peoples would eventually end up finding their way back to the West, being utilized by Western governments against their own people
The relentless pursuit of profit that manifests in imperial wars designed for raw material extraction has found it’s way to the homeland. Though I suppose it has already been here, it’s just changed tactics. Halliburton’s Army is in your backyard.
I don’t know how to carry on. Everything seems hopeless. Where do we go from here? How did we get here?
In a talk between Mike Davis and Roberto Lovato on Roberto’s new book Unforgetting: Family, Migration, Gangs, Borders, and Revolution Roberto talks about how we need to “Pursue militant acts of political imagination” and he talks about the beautiful poetry that surrounded the acts of extreme violence and war he experienced in El Salvador. “We have to unforget the beauty. . . .” at 1:19:45 he asks the question “What is the Jedi knowledge of revolution?” and the answer is “Es un acto spiritual, it is a spiritual act. You need an animus that allows you to stay positive in some way, not just feel good, but positive in struggle, positive to take on intrepid risks in the name of saving the planet from ourselves.”
We need to become poet-warriors.