Se défendre/To Defend Oneself or Why Occupy?

Michel Foucault: Se défendre

« Se défendre » est un inédit de Michel Foucault qui présente une saisissante synthèse de ce que peut être un rapport offensif à la légalité et aux institutions chargées de la mettre en oeuvre. Il vient d’être publié par Courant Alternatif avec un article (voir plus bas) qui montre ce que l’activité de défense doit aux luttes afin de souligner que le droit en général et les procédures judiciaires en particulier sont des espaces de lutte qu’il est nécessaire d’investir.

Se défendre

1- Evitons d’abord le problème ressassé du réformisme et de l’anti-réformisme. Nous n’avons pas à prendre en charge les institutions qui ont besoin d’être transformées. Nous avons à nous défendre tant et si bien que les institutions soient contraintes de se réformer. L’initiative doit donc venir de nous, non pas sous forme de programme mais sous forme de mise en question et sous forme d’action.
2- Ce n’est pas parce qu’il y a des lois, ce n’est pas parce que j’ai des droits que je suis habilité à me défendre ; c’est dans la mesure où je me défends que mes droits existent et que la loi me respecte. C’est donc avant tout la dynamique de la défense qui peut donner aux lois et aux droits une valeur pour nous indispensable. Le droit n’est rien s’il ne prend vie dans la défense qui le provoque ; et seule la défense donne, valablement, force à la loi.
3- Dans l’expression « Se défendre », le pronom réfléchi est capital. Il s’agit en effet d’inscrire la vie, l’existence, la subjectivité et la réalité même de l’individu dans la pratique du droit. Se défendre ne veut pas dire s’auto défendre. L’auto-défense, c’est vouloir se faire justice soi-même, c’est-à-dire s’identifier à une instance de pouvoir et prolonger de son propre chef leurs actions. Se défendre, au contraire, c’est refuser de jouer le jeu des instances de pouvoir et se servir du droit pour limiter leurs actions. Ainsi entendue, la défense a valeur absolue. Elle ne saurait être limitée ou désarmée par le fait que la situation était pire autrefois ou pourrait être meilleure plus tard. On ne se défend qu’au présent : l’inacceptable n’est pas relatif.
4- Se défendre demande donc à la fois une activité, des instruments et une réflexion. Une activité : il ne s’agit pas de prendre en charge la veuve et l’orphelin mais de faire en sorte que les volontés existantes de se défendre puissent venir au jour. De la réflexion : se défendre est un travail qui demande analyse pratique et théorique. Il lui faut en effet la connaissance d’une réalité souvent complexe qu’aucun volontarisme ne peut dissoudre. Il lui faut ensuite un retour sur les actions entreprises, une mémoire qui les conserve, une information qui les communique et un point de vue qui les mettent en relation avec d’autres. Nous laisserons bien sûr à d’autres le soin de dénoncer les « intellectuels ». Des instruments : on ne va pas les trouver tout faits dans les lois, les droits et les institutions existantes mais dans une utilisation de ces données que la dynamique de la défense rendra novatrice [1].
Michel Foucault

From: http://michel-foucault-archives.org/?Deux-textes-de-Michel-Foucault-en

(Source: http://variazionifoucaultiane.blogspot.com/2012/05/se-defendre.html) 14.5.2012.

 

Michel Foucault: To Defend Oneself

To Defend Oneself is an unpublished article by Foucault which presents a striking synthesis of what could be an offensive relationship to legality and institutions charged with enacting it. It is to be published by Courant Alternatif with an article (see below) which expresses what does the activity of defense owe to combats in order to accentuate that the law in general, and the legal procedures in particular are the spaces of combat which need to be moved into.

To defend oneself

1- Let us first avoid the worn out problem of reformism and anti-reformism. We do not have to take charge of institutions that need to be transformed. We need to defend ourselves for as long and as much until the institutions are forced to reform. The initiative needs then to come from us, not in the form of a program but in the form of questioning and in the form of acting.
2- It is not because there are laws, not because I have rights that I have the ability to defend myself; it is in the measure within which I defend myself that my rights exist and the law respects me. It is then primarily the dynamics of the defense which can give value, an indispensable one for us, to the laws and rights. The law is nothing unless it comes alive in the defense it provokes; and only the defense, valuably, gives the force to the law.
3- In the expression to defend oneself the reflexive pronoun is capital. It is effectively a matter of inscribing life, existence,subjectivity and even reality of the individual  in the practice of the law. To defend oneself does not mean auto-defense. Auto-defense, it is the will to do justice to one self by one self; that is, to identify oneself with an instance of power and to prolong the actions of its own master. To defend oneself, on the contrary, is to refuse to play the game of the instances of power, and to use the law itself for limiting its actions. Thus understood, the defense has an absolute value. It cannot be limited or disarmed by the fact that the situation was worse before or could be better later. We do not defend ourselves except in the present; the unaccaptable is irrelevant.
4- To defend oneself requires then simultaneously an activity, the instruments and a reflexion. An activity: it is not about taking charge of a widow and orphaned child, but about making it so that the existing willingness to defend oneself comes into the light of day. On reflexion: to defend oneself is a work that demands a practical and theoretical analysis. It often requires the knowledge of reality which is so complex that no voluntarism can dissolve it. It requires then a return to actions undertaken, a memory which conserves them, information that communicate them and a point of vue which puts them in relation with others. We will of course leave it to the others to worry about denouncing «the intellectuals». On the instruments: we will not find them all ready-made in the existing laws, rights and institutions, but within the utilization of those premises that will be rendered innovative by the dynamics of defense.

 Žižek on Occupy Wall Street 

There is no lack of anti-capitalist sentiment in the world today. There’s an overload of critiques of the horrors of capitalism: books, in-depth journalistic investigations and television reports abound on companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, on corrupt bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, of sweat shops where children work overtime.

The “democratic illusion”, the blind acceptance of the institutions of democracy as the only and the right force for change, actually prevents radical change.

What is as a rule not questioned, however, is the democratic-liberal framework of fighting against the excesses of capitalism. The explicit or implied goal of such critiques is only to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy through pressure from the media, government inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on. But we never ever question the democratic institutional framework of the state of law. This is the sacred cow that even the most radical forms of ethical anti-capitalism—think of the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement—do not dare to touch. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?279483

 

Addressing the protesters at Zucotti Park:

"So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent to work in East Germany from Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends, ‘Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say; if it is written in red ink, it is false.’ After a month, his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: ‘Everything is wonderful here. The stores are full of good food, movie theatres show good films from the West, apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot find is red ink.’This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want, but what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom, ‘war on terror,’ and so on, falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink."

http://guerrillablog2.blogspot.com/2012/03/slavoj-zizek-speaks-at-occupy-wall.html?zx=d7341d264673f3f4

.Slavoj Zizek Speaks At Occupy Wall Street

. .Slavoj Zizek speaks at Occupy Wall St

[...] “[They are saying] we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is already socialism — for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property. But in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers; the true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers; we are the awakening from the dream that is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything; we are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know [inaudible] from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath its ground. Only when it looks down and notices it he falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street, ‘Hey! Look down!’
[inaudible] “… In 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, film, and in novels all stories that [inaudible -- something about portraying "alternate realities or time travel"]. This is a good sign for China; it means people still dream about alternatives, so attacked and prohibited is dreaming. Here we don’t think of prohibition because [inaudible -- "history"?] has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world — an asteroid destroying all of life, and so on — but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent to work in East Germany from Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends, ‘Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say; if it is written in red ink, it is false.’ After a month, his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: ‘Everything is wonderful here. The stores are full of good food, movie theatres show good films from the West, apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot find is red ink.’ This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want, but what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom, ‘war on terror,’ and so on, falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.
“There is a danger: Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: Carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after when we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like, ‘Oh, we were young, it was beautiful…’ Remember that our basic message is, ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives.’ A taboo is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want, but what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want? Remember: The problem is not corruption or greed; the problem is the system which pushes you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process in the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat. They will try to make this into a harmless moral protest, a decaffeinated protest. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of the world where to recycle Coke cans to give a couple of dollars to charity, or to buy a Starbucks cappuccino where one percent goes to Third World starving children is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture [inaudible -- calls for "mic check"]… We can see that for a long time, we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back.
“We are not Communists, if Communism means the system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless capitalists. In China today we have a capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American capitalism but doesn’t need democracy, which means, when you criticism capitalism, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are ‘against democracy.’ The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over. A change is possible.
“Now, what we consider today possible — just follow the media. On the one hand is technology and sexuality — everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever. But look at the field of society and economy — there, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich, they tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for healthcare, they tell you, ‘Impossible! This means a totalitarian state.’ Is there something wrong with the world where you are promised to be immortal but they cannot spend a little more for healthcare? Maybe we have to set our priorities straight. We don’t want higher standards of living; we want better standards of living. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons: the commons of nature, the commons of what is privatized by intellectual property, the commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight. Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not American here, but the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are ‘really’ Americans have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit is here now, and down there on Wall Street there are millions [?] who are worshiping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience.
“The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home, and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case. You know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire.”
rough transcript from http://carlygsdrafts.wordpress.com/
rough transcript from http://www.disinfo.com/

Rob Pattinson Needs A Paparazzi Strategy

All paparazzi photos courtesy of http://www.robsessedpattinson.com/2011/11/new-pictures-of-robert-pattinson-and.html
 Kristen and Rob in London over Thanksgiving. What a nice Thanksgiving paparazzi present to give them by posting their fear, anger, consternation, sadness at this recent stalking, car chasing, an violation of their privacy. Do they stalk Ashley Greene like this? Or Jason Rathbone? Or Kellan Lutz? Not like this. Why not? No big fuck bucks for pics. Ahhhhhhhh.


So one of his fan sites, one of the most popular, most devoted, one that gets millions of hits, posts not one or two but all fucking 943 1/2 of them! Now that's true love, ain't it! We just love this boy/man. We want to know everything about him, his every move, his every thought, every book he reads, every script he is considering, every, every, every...........well, even the slush minded get it. 


Protesting, boycotting, complaining, scolding and all that stuff will do no good. 


It's hits the site is after. The more hits the higher the commissions you get from the click throughs. Did you get that? Let me say it differently. Google clicks are statistically calculated on numbers of views a site gets. When the numbers get over a certain point, the percentages of commissions on a click-through sale increase. So if you click on a Rob Pattinson DVD on that site and it goes to Amazon, the site gets money as in $$$$$$. The more click throughs, the more chances you will get a click through that leads to a sale. But you also get money for each click to Amazon. 


So how do you increase the hits? Put up vanilla pics? Or.............controversial ones? Controversial ones invite lots of pro/con comments. Comments are hits. Each one. Lots of hits are generated this way. The problem is that when things get too hot a flame war starts. The site needs regular people to police for them. The regulars are the pit bulls for the site. Like the criminals in the Gulag who policed and terrorized the political prisoners who were lifers or close to lifers, as opposed to the shorter sentences for the criminals. So regulars are necessary for free policing. Flame wars drive regulars away, so you see it's a fine line to placate the regulars and increase the hits. Too much to one side reduces sales and too much ranting reduces sales. Newbies are needed for sales but they are not as reliable as regulars. They are the ones who will buy as new Rob obsessed fans, but with these new ones come new ones dressed as trolls, who will inflame and make the site unpleasant for the regulars.


So be clear as to your function on a site. You are simply free labor. You allow the administrators to enjoy themselves more and police less. Not that there's anything wrong with that, to quote Seinfeld. But do not expect the site to be a fan site for Rob purely for their own devotion and pleasure. There are sites that do do that, Rose at pattinsonintoxication, for example. Her motives are different from money, but she has them.


Now I also pimp Rob. I use Twilight, the books, the films, the irruption to read post modern thinking through them. I am about post modern thinking, guerrilla thinking, in all the ways one can imagine thinking guerrilla.


My guerrilla advice to Rob: You need a strategy for dealing with the papps. Papps are just grown up bullies from the playground who have expensive cameras and who make a living our of being bullies. Every kid picked on in the playground has to learn to deal with this as long as s/he stays in school. The intention is to torture and terrorize you. Just for fun. Just because they can do it. With papps it is for $$$$. The more you are tortured by them and reveal it, the more they are going to do it to you. This is why you need a strategy. You cannot depend on your fans. Just like the child on the school playground cannot depend on his/her parents. 


The strategy cannot be pleading with them to stop, not threatening them because they know you can't go too far to really hurt them. Nothing within the dialectical Dominating Discourse will work. As any child on the playground knows. Telling the police or the teacher does not work either. What to do.


JUDO them. Use their strengths against them. 


Ideas: Kutcher and Demi tweeted themselves in bed, in a bikini, at the beach, in the bathtub, at home, all the kinds of shots a papp would love to be able to get. Hard to sell pics when the subject is giving them away.


Joli: Stands there and says, "Take as many as you like." And she poses while they finish.


Joli knows that the most prized photo is the one that captures your soul. The unaware one. The one that captures you posed NOT. The surprise one. So if you display I am tortured you give them what they want. 


I would have a neck tag printed with a web site address of one of my favorite guerrillas, Tamira Thayne,  of http://www.dogsdeservebetter.com Thayne is legislating in all 50 states for anti dog chaining laws to limit the amount of time in one day that a dog can be chained outside. She chains herself to a doghouse outside the Harrisburg Pennsylvania legislature in protest of their refusal to pass that law. She gets married while she and her husband are chained to a doghouse on the steps of the Harrisburg capitol building. Pennsylvania and Missouri are the puppy mill winners in the country. She and her organization has recently taken over Michael Vick's former pit bull emporium for rescue purposes, to whitewash it so to speak, launder the money vampire blood out of it. 


So I myself would walk around with that neck tag, or put it on every time I went out to confront the papps. Then I would stand there and let them take the pics to give http://www.dogsdeservebetter.com all the hits from my fans.


That's just me. But Rob, you desperately need a strategy. Please don't tell me all the brains on your payroll are dead or slushy. paparazzi photos


Now see how I just pimped Rob for doggies on chains in the cold and heat everywhere they are without love or affection or proper care.

Ayn Rand:A Great Post Modern Philosopher and Nietzsche's Heir

And the secret is: Ayn Rand has destroyed Capital. Atlas Shrugged is her fictional novel and non-fictional treatise, text, whatever, on Capital.


Capital stripped bare by Speculation itself, like the bride by her bachelors. What becomes of Capital once the veil of Profit is lifted? What becomes of Labour once the veil of Capital is lifted? (Baudrillard - Cool Memories II 38)


Contrary to the historical slogan which says that the 'emancipation of the workers will be achieved by the workers themselves', we have to accept that Capital will be put to death by Capital itself or (not at all). (CM II 38)


Baudrillard in Forget Foucault asserts that Foucault did not heed Nietzsche by going to the end. He asks himself the question why Foucault stopped at the edge. And both Rand and Foucault ignored Nietzsche's warning: Beware of disciples.


Rand was more capitalist than any capitalist. She was excessively so. Nietzsche recommends the "being worse than worse". Rand was worse. 





She took every conceptual and formulated ideal she had and pushed it to the edge and then beyond until it fell over into the abyss. Sex (Nathaniel Brandon), business empire (NBI and The Objectivist Newsletter), the virtue of selfishness, free and unregulated capitalism as the economic system of choice for free individuals. Her novel Atlas Shrugged is more novel than a novel. She pushed it to the extreme of what a novel was, and it was more so. Her characters are pushed to the edge, each one "worse than worse" in their attributes. Time has caught up with it. It no longer seems prophetic.

And my god, this is pure Nietzsche. Even the great and intellectually powerful Foucault said towards the end of his life, that he had not acknowledged Nietzsche early enough for his great debt to him. 


But it will be Baudrillard who will go all the way with Nietzsche. Baudrillard will tell us how to end the evil of anything. Push it to the limit and beyond, worse than worse, and then it will suicide. This is what DeLillo has Eric Packer do by imploding the speculative currency market.  Eric Packer wants all the yen there is.


But by god Rand did it. Fictionally, and with her life as she lived it. And through Greenspan, her acolyte, she has destroyed Capital. Deregulate Capital and Global Speculative Capital appears on the scene.  Marx never foresaw this. It is excessive Capital. More Capital than Capital. Worse. 


It is not possible to continue to see Capital as anything other than what it has become in the last decade. We are now seeing it all the way to its Death. 


I cannot believe she pulled it off.


But like Nietzsche's God, its ghost will be around for quite some time.

ZIZEK: THE FILM AND THE MAN = THE DESERT OF THE REAL

Trailer from www.zeitgeistfilms.com
http://zizekthemovie.com/sightsandsounds/trailer.mov

All - yes ALL - neo-liberals, liberals, and radicals are required to know who ZIZEK is. It would help if conservative and the religious right also knew. Keanu Reeves in The Matrix knew, why don't you.?

After Baudrillard comes Zizek!

Zizek on Belief
http://zizekthemovie.com/sightsandsounds/belief.mov

http://zizekthemovie.com/sightsandsounds/trailer.mov


http://zizekthemovie.com/sightsandsounds/belief.mov


And for other radical films instead of Hollywood:


http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/
The fact that Zizek's film premiered at 2005 Toronto Films means that Cronenberg knows very well who Zizek is.

Brigitte Bardot and Robert Pattinson - Cheesecake and Beefcake - Complicit Exploitation

Rob and Bardot = Jouissance

People know what they do. They even often know why they do what they do. But what they don't know is what they do does. - Michel Foucault

The Terrorism of Jean Baudrillard

Utilizing the postmodern semiotic theory of Jean Baudrillard, Beever explores the root and meaning of terrorism.

He argues that, among the many forms of violence, the proliferation of the image is a subtle and violent virulence of signs: the exploitation of the signified through the proliferation of the “murderous image”.  

Violence on this level is the violence endemic to terrorism. 

This project explores Baudrillard’s conception of symbolic violence as the virulence of signs and helps us come to terms with the semiotic foundation of terrorism.

Make Me a Calendar

No Face Lift - Tsk tsk.

Brigette Bardot in first scene of Godard's Contempt

 

More Bardot

Complicit Rob, eh.

 You want to be taken seriously? Stop this crap. 

Why the Wall Street Demonstration Will Fail

http://cosmopolisfilm2.blogspot.com/2011/08/understanding-simulacra-and-simulation.html?zx=d0db2160906347e5

Cronenberg's eXistenZ is serious filmic social theory of the nature of our postmodern landscape. Cronenberg, like Baudrillard, would like to oppose the reality he describes, but points out that terrorist resistance to it is merely absorbed into the system and cannot defeat it. Ironically, terrorism and resistance are "game-themes" in eXistenZ, suggesting that they broach no threat, but are actually required by the system in order to provide a pretext to continue information emission. Baudrillard, too, would like to be a terrorist- to lash out violently against those who are in control, but such a role is no longer possible in a world where death and violence have no impact and are met by glassy eyed apathy as the result of data-glut. It seems that the only hope is awareness of the effect that media have on communication and human relationships. Cronenberg, like Baudrillard , McLuhan, and Shenk, urge us to be aware of what constant exposure to information and simulacra do to the human psyche and to culture. The content of the media is irrelevant. It is the quantity of data and simulacra to which we are exposed and the methods by which we are subjected to that information that result in data smog, mental disorders, and violence. The most effective strategy to resist the system is to behave like an irreverent child, declining to constitute ourselves as subjects, refusing to process the data and abstaining from responding to it. By passively ignoring the data input thrown at us by the parental system, it will cease to exist as it does now. We can turn off the tv, shut down the computer, and stop playing the game.



DeLillo has Vija Kinski elucidate Baudrillardian theory to Eric Packer in Cosmopolis:

A specter is haunting the world, they cried.

He was enjoying this. Teenagers on skateboards sprayed graffiti at advertising displays on the sides of buses. The styrofoam rat was toppled now and there were police in tight formation advancing behind riot shields, helmeted men who moved with a totalistic grimness that made Kinski seem to sigh.

Protesters were rocking the car. He looked at her and smiled. There were close-ups on TV of faces scorched by pepper gas. The zoom lens caught a man in a parachute dropping from the top of a tower nearby. Chute and man were striped in anarchist red-and-black and his penis was exposed, likewise logotyped. They were knocking the car back and forth. Projectiles came popping from tear-gas launchers and cops free-lanced in the crowd, wearing masks with twin filtration chambers out of some lethal cartoon.

"You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."

"Its own grave-diggers," he said.

"But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside."

The camera tracked a cop chasing a young man through the crowd, an image that seemed to exist at some drifting distance from the moment.

"The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are marketdriven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system."

He watched the vodka slosh in her glass as the car bounced back and forth. There were people banging on the windows and hood. He saw Torval and the bodyguards sweep them off the chassis. He thought briefly about the partition behind the driver. It had a cedar frame with an inlaid fragment of ornamental Kufic script on parchment, late tenth century, Baghdad, priceless.

She tightened her seat belt.

"You have to understand."

He said, "What?"

"The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. What is the flaw of human rationality?"

He said, "What?"

"It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds. This is a protest against the future. They want to hold off the future. They want to normalize it, keep it from overwhelming the present."

There were cars burning in the street, metal hissing and spitting, and stunned figures in slow motion, in tides of smoke, wandering through the mass of vehicles and bodies, and others everywhere running, and a cop down, genuflected, outside a fast food shop.

"The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there," she said. "This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it."