revolution - book - 1938/1965 - The Anatomy of Revolution

The Anatomy of Revolution
Crane Brinton 
1938/1965
Vintage Books

Crane Brinton was an American historian who specialized in the history of France.  For decades he taught history at Harvard University, focusing much of his work on the French Revolution.  The Anatomy of Revolution, Brinton’s best known work, was first published in 1938 and it was revised in 1965 to include a brief epilogue that profiled recent revolutionary events in America and Europe.  The 1965 edition also includes short mentions of recent revolutionary activity in Cuba and elsewhere.  

In his work, Brinton examines the components of a successful political revolution.  Through an analysis of the English (1642), American (1774), French (1789), and Russian (1917) revolutions, Brinton identifies a set of stages that each revolution moves through.  Brinton’s text appears to be partially directed at criticizing commonly held understandings of who creates a revolution and the course one takes.  While, for example, there may be an expectation that revolution is to come from an impoverished underclass, Brinton’s examination of history shows otherwise.   The author declared that the revolutions are consistently made by a disempowered but wealthy class of people who resent the dominant class.  Revolutions then go through successive waves of top-level organization, including a period during which of moderates who attempt to manage government and society in accord with revolutionary ideals, but their weak rule gives way to a period managed by extremists which leads to a period of terror.

Brinton does not find that these revolutions are equivalent to one-another on every stage, for example Brinton strained to identify a ‘terror’ stage in the American revolution.  From phase to phase, each of the national revolutions discussed by Brinton shows the characteristic stages he describes in varying levels of definition and/or attenuation.  The different stages include its beginnings (with an analysis of who is involved, and of the old regime), the rule of moderates, the rise of extremists, the reign of terror, and ‘Thermidor’, the word for the eleventh month of the French Revolutionary Character.  Thermidor is described as the outro of revolution when its fervor settles and new political and social forms rigidify.  Some revolutionary goals are compromised during this period.  Brinton’s structure for revolutions connotes a possibility that the Thermidor period may provides the ground for new revolutionary sentiments and activity.

Brinton’s text is not intended to be an in depth historical analysis of these critical events, but rather a breakdown of the most profoundly successful revolutions of the modern western world into their component parts.  Brinton’s ‘anatomy’ may be understood as a comprehensive description of a revolutionary progression because he described those revolutions that have been confirmed by history as successful.  Brinton did not analyze defeated revolution, aborted revolutionary beginnings, or anything resembling subaltern nationalist revolutionary activity.  Between the publication of his first and second edition, the struggle to establish the state of Israel found success, as did the revolutions to achieve Cuban and Indian Independence.  Perhaps a study of these more recent revolutions  may reveal that they, too, follow Brinton’s pattern.  Conversely, perhaps these recent events would open up new spaces for addition to Brinton’s structure.  Brinton does briefly allude to Cuba and other revolutions in his Epilogue, however he briefly states that these are different, but he suspects they share uniformities with their predecessors.  Maybe so.

Brinton’s text is accompanied by a comprehensive bibliography.  It is also supplemented by a series of appendices that give bibliographic annotations of important literature pertaining to the revolutions he discussed, so a reader may refer directly to the primary sources of revolution to confirm Brinton’s ‘anatomy’.

anarchism, anti-globalization - book - 2000 - Days of War, Nights of Love

Days of War, Nights of Love
Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective
2000
CrimethInc

Available in PDF format from http://www.daysofwarnightsoflove.com/

This book, the first full book published by the CrimethInc Ex-Workers collective, can be read as a poorly developed collection of ideas about capitalism, the media, work, and everyday life.  The collective is described, on their website, as a “decentralized anarchist collective composed of many cells which act independently in pursuit of a freer and more joyous world.”  I take that statement to mean that there is a small group of actual members directly involved in the work of writing and publishing the books and pamphlets they release... and that’s it.  The independent cells referred to are likely any show of activism that occurs   Days of War is useful to researchers in the sense that it is a quintessential manifestation of a radicalism that admires historical radical leftism yet lacks the will to develop a coherent philosophy of its own.  The book reads as a tribute to personal zines of the 1990s, hardcore punk, and the underground radical press of the 1960s. Futhermore in its graphic array much inspiration has been drawn from Situationism, albeit CrimethInc's text is lacking in the intellectual rigor the French neo-Marxists once displayed.  


This book is a series of rants, driven by a collection of angry attitudes directed towards ‘capitalism’ and anything hegemonic.  I characterize the philosophical program of the text to be incoherent because its authors do not establish any kind of analytic framework.  The attitudes represented by this book are quite commonly expressed in zines, on the Internet, and less intellectually focused journals of radical ideas, like Adbusters (although Adbusters tends to accompany their luke-warm critiques with interesting images).  Days of War, Nights of Love emerges from a strained point of view where its writers have chosen to articulate, over three hundred pages, that action is more important than developing theory.  So while in its presentation, the book appears to benefit from a history of radical slogans and images, it appears to disavow that history while simultaneously ignoring the base of ideas and radical thought those slogans and images emerge from.  Ultimately, what this book conveys most strongly is a desperation by its authors to speak out against the things they hate, without considering the form of their statements or whether or not their utterances have previously been uttered.

Days of War also plays with history in strange ways that I suspect pertain to little more than the prejudices of the authors.  One particular example is a description of the prank pulled by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and friends in 1967 when they threw several hundred dollars in cash onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.  While the CrimethInc Collective lauded the action, they simply described its actors as friends of Black Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver.  Not only were the fellows in question NOT friends with Cleaver, they were famous sixties radicals in their own right.  So why erase their names?  Is there some vestigial hatred of Hoffman of the Yippies!?  Are they not to be named, even if their actions are to be admired?  Is there a vestigial admiration of Cleaver and the Black Panthers as the exemplars of American radicalism?  If that is the case then that is the exact same attitude many late-sixties American radicals held towards the Panthers.... during the late-sixties.

This book strives to be a forceful message of radical urgency.  It does not contain a single unique idea.  In fact, in its incoherence Days of War, Nights of Love manages to convey an implicit support for consumerism, embedded near to the surface of its passages calling for perpetual pleasure.  What is interesting about Days of War, Nights of Love is its appearance as a pastiche or an agglomeration of a number of distinct strains of twentieth century radicalism.  Furthermore, it is interesting because it valorizes anti-intellectualism, another theme of the 1960s (see Counterrevolution and Revolt by Herbert Marcuse for a critique of anti-intellectual tendencies among 1960s radicals), and it strives to make a virtue of its own incoherence.

street art - book - 2002 - Stencil Graffiti

Stencil Graffiti
Tristan Manco
Thames and Hudson
2002
112 pages

Hello friends in the Cybertubes!  I borrowed Stencil Graffiti by Tristan Manco from the Toronto Public Library.

Tristan Manco is a graphic designer based in Bristol, UK.  He is possibly best known as designer of the art for many Real World Records releases.  Manco has also written and edited a number of books on graffiti and street art, with this as his first.  Stencil Graffiti is primarily a collection of images (405 in total, with 400 colour images) of stencil based street art, although it also includes representations of some non-stencil art by some of the best known of the Stencil artists.  The images of the book comprise a survey of street art produced with stencils, and some insights into why some street artists choose stencils to produce their art.

Manco’s book is good for displaying the creative potential of the stencil as a tool in the production of street art, but it contains many of the same issues as other street art books, such as Graffiti NYC.  It’s images are mostly decontextualized from their street street and represented in the same way images are represented in a catalogue raisonné.  With street art, a work’s urban context is intrinsically relevant to the work, and I would like to see graffiti books better represent that aspect somehow.  Like many street art books, Stencil Graffiti attempts to make an argument for its subject matter to be elevated to a similar status as gallery art, and perhaps it is part of a strategy for achieving such an ascension that almost all of the the book’s images are closely cropped and could just as easily be imagined on a gallery wall.  

While the book adopts the mode of representation used most often in books displaying gallery art, a form of display which effaces the works of their original ‘street’ placement.  Stencil Graffiti still relies on a notion of the street, as a site of everyday life, to invest the images with vitality.  The book contains a tension that is, perhaps, irreconcilable.  The representation of stencil pieces used by Marco flattens out their vitality derived from their original context, but still Marco tries to maintain a referent to the original context it as a means of discerning what, exactly, is unique about these images.

Manco’s book contains many images, and its primary value is in displaying the array of possibilities for the stencil on city walls.   Most of the book is divided into a number of sections based on image content.  There is a literary section, for example, displays a stenciled wall piece of William S Burroughs, while a music section displays a number of musicians.  The conundrum with many of these graffiti books is that their readers probably already live in urban settings where these works of art are an ever present part of their daily environment. These books, in essence,  condense an aspect of the reader’s daily life and reflect it back to them after emptying it of most of its meaning.  Stencil Graffiti makes no effort to propose a history of stencil art, discuss the legitimate uses of stencils on walls to which the art may be contrasted, why the stencil pieces are primarily pop culture references, etc.  As a basic overview of the potential and possibilities of stencil graffiti, Manco’s book is adequate.  Manco may simply be trying to find some examples of a form of art that he can present to other designers.  For any deeper research needs, however, other books should be sought.  I would suggest a careful observation of city walls in a downtown core during a walk would be just as fruitful, if not moreso, than reading a book like this.  

In the final section of Stencil Graffiti, Manco profiles a handful of well-known stencil artists.  This section of the book is interesting as it denotes an effort to form of a canon for the medium.  Blek le Rat, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and others are profiled, without Manco creating a clear sense of why these artists are superior to the anonymous who invented this art form.  Such profiles lead me to hope for a book that examines the relationships between street art and the gallery/art market systems in a rigorous manner. 

black panther party - book - 2007 - Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon

Jane Rhodes
Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of A Black Power Icon
The New Press
2007
404 pages


Jane Rhodes is, as of the time of this writing, the presiding Dean of for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Professor, and Department Chair at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnessota.  Much of her work focuses on black activism and the media representation of people of colour.  Judging from a quick survey of her publication titles, she often combines these two interests, which is the case with Framing the Black Panthers.  In this text, Rhodes charts a history of the Black Panther Party as it appeared in media of all kinds.

Rhodes begins her text with an analysis of the 1995 film Panther, directed by Mario Van Peebles.  Panther was a film by a black director that represented the Panthers positively as fighters for black freedom. In some sense Van Peeble's film is the cinematic culmination of a legacy of the Panther as a romantic revolutionary figure for the post-modern world of media and image driven politics.  After a lengthy analysis of Van Peebles’ film (and some other films that represent a black power ethos from the same period, including Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, and a brief mention is given to Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump).  Following her study of Van Peeble’s cinematic portrayal of the radical organization,  Rhodes proceeds to a comprehensive historical analysis of media and the Black Panther Party.

Framing the Black Panthers can be read as a microcosm of how radical politics appeared in the media during the 1960s.  At the first appearance of the Black Panthers in 1967, newspapers reacted immediately to the party with an oppositional, hostile tone. The BPP was founded in Oakland CA, where the two nearest major newspapers, The Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner, both immediately began attacking the Panthers in print following the emergence of the radical group.  These two publications consistently representing them as militant thugs without any coherent political platform perpetually on the edge of violence.  Incidentally, in the 1989 book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties by former New Left leader, David Horowitz’s, the Panthers are remembered with the same venom that they were characterized with by their contemporary mainstream press. During the late 60s, however, the Panthers were discussed positively from a flourishing underground press and also began their own party newspaper (which is archived online here). The offices of the BPP became a target for police repression, as media consistently represented party as a paramilitary mob.  Through the dissemination of their own newspaper however, the Panthers entrenched themselves into the communities which they sought to defend (and elevate).  Furthermore, the popularity of their newspaper within poor black communities meant that the Panthers political program was read and understood by the people the BPP was reaching out to.

Rhodes investigates how the Panthers became accomplished media figures over the course of their careers in radical politics.  One particular photograph, a representation of Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton enthroned in a large wicker chair with a Kalashnikov rifle in one hand and a spear in the other, became one of the iconic images of the late 1960s.  

The image was originally published in Ramparts magazine, but it developed a life of its own and was frequently used in the Panther’s own propaganda.  Rhodes described the Panther’s as an organization that was constantly concerned with the image it presented, with combating negative or racist portrayals, and with finding the widest possible audience for their messages.

Rhodes presents the Panthers as a force in radical politics that was always operating on two seemingly contraposed fronts: grassroots community organizing and the widespread dissemination of their ideas via media.  One of the most interesting chapters in Rhodes book is Servants of the People: The Black Panthers as National and Global Icons, which described how the Black Panther Party influenced subaltern nationalist groups, and Marxist revolutionary factions around the world.  Their ideas were influential, but so was their quasi-military all-black fashion and their mix of Marxist jargon and street talk.  The BPP were so influential because they were so successful in entering the realm of media, as Rhodes points out.

A final short note about Rhodes book.  A survey of her bibliography (which is divided into types of materials) shows a large number of books about the Black Panthers published in the decade before her own book's time of publication.  Rhode's book is relevant as the Panthers have entered another phase of media portrayals - representation in academic literature.

philip k dick - book - 1993 - I Am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K Dick

I am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K Dick
Emmanuel Carrère
1993
Metropolitan Books
336 pages

Emmaunel Carrère is a French author, screenwriter, and director who has, apparently, achieved some reknown in his native France.   He has also written a fictionalized account of the life of American science fiction author, Philip K Dick (1928-1982).  Dick was a north California based author whose work, which often explored the relationship between illusion and reality, reflected the countercultural scene of the 1960s and 70s to which he was an adherent.  
Currently Dick is probably best known as an author whose work is frequently mined for film ideas by Hollywood.   When Carrère’s 1993 biography was originally published, only two films were based on Dick stories, Blade Runner and Total Recall, both of which altered the titles of the works they were based on.  Blade Runner - 1982, was based on the Dick novel Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? and Total Recall 1990 was based on the short story We Can Remember it for you Wholesale.  Since 1993, a number of other movies have been produced from Dick’s writing, including the 2011 film, The Adjustment Bureau.

Carrère creates the image of Philip K Dick as a working class writer who was prolific because that was the only way to make a living as his work was relegated to the poorly-paid genre-ghetto of science fiction.   Dick’s writing has received literary acclaim in North America, and academic recognition, although such accolades were posthumously bestowed upon the author. During his career Dick won the Hugo award (a major award for science fiction literature) for his 1963 novel The Man in the High Castle, but that only marginally raised his status as a writer.  Dick did find critical acclaim and acceptance within his own lifetime in Europe, and particularly in France, although the famed Polish sci-fi author Stansislaw Lem was also a proponent.  While Carrère’s biography first appeared in France in 1993, where Dick had long been recognized as a great writer, this bio did not appear in English until 2003, after Stephen Spielberg directed The Minority Report (based on a Dick story) and revived Dick’s oeuvre as a mine for film concepts.  

Carrère’s biography was an early effort in what is now a crowded field of books about Philip K Dick.  As a novelist, Carrère fictionalized aspects of Dick’s life, alluding to states of mind that are impossible to know, and conversations that were never recorded.  Carrère focuses on Dick’s relationship with women, and the processes of thought and labour, or the influencing interests on the writing of Dick’s best known works.  Dick’s Potboiler works (a slang term for genre novels written primarily to garner income) like Our Friends from Frolix 8 or The Zap-Gun were not mentioned.  Rather, Carrère focuses on the now widely known texts such as Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge, and a few others, and suggests indirectly that these novels were the axes around which their author’s life revolved.  Carrère constructed a narrative of Dick’s life wherein his actual situation was consistently written into his science-fiction.   When Dick was writing one of his major works then it meant the relationship he was in, his current political attitudes, the books and music that most interested him then, and other aspects of daily life were all intimately connected to Dick’s text of the moment.  

I Am Alive and You are Dead does have a lot of connective tissue between the parts that describe the events that produce each novel.  These in-between bits often focus on the state of Dick’s family life and his constantly shifting relationships with women.  Furthermore, his unraveling mental state was a frequent subject for Carrère.  Along with Thomas Pynchon, Dick is regarded as one of the great authors of paranoia, and Carrère is sure to find numerous examples of this state of mind in his personal life.  Furthermore, Dick was a writer who’s work, mostly focusing on the illusory nature of reality, fit well into the zeitgeist of 1960s northern California.  Hippies appreciated Dick’s exposure of a world behind the apparent world, while Dick appreciated the Hippie’s hallucinogenic drugs.  

Probably one of the most interesting aspects of Carrère’s biography of the troubled sci-fi writer is his telling of Dick’s conversion of his bungalow home into a hippie commune.   Dick allowed runaways and drugged-out kids to stay at his home for a time during the early 1970s.  This also was a time when the writer’s paranoia was most acute, and in Carrère’s telling, he occasionally entered paranoid, drug induced, manic phases where he looked for evidence of federal infiltration of his him.  Meanwhile, his house had become well known as a crash-pad for runaways to the local police.  

Carrère also goes into great detail about Dick’s gnostic experience, in which God came to him in the form of a pink light for short a period of time.  This experience succeeded Dick’s life with the runaways, as the first published mention of this mystic encounter by the author was in his 1977 work, A Scanner Darkly; the novel in which Dick describes those years when his home was also a drug commune.  The experience of touch with the divine was profoundly transformative for Dick, and when God’s presence withdrew from his life, he attempted suicide as a result of his failure to cope with that loss.  Following his failed attempt to take his own life, Dick began to manically make notes on the experience.  These notes contributed to Dick’s final works, his spiritually focused VALIS trilogy, wherein Dick attempted to comprehend his contact with the divine through science-fiction.

Carrère’s fictionalization of Dick’s life is interesting because it highlights questions about authenticity that pertain to all biographical writing, but with Dick it also presents his life in a manner that connects to the work of the subject.  The representation of the untrue, to supplement the true, as a theme of this biography serves to demonstrate the relevance of Dick’s lifelong project in imagining the unreal in the real (and vice-versa).  Dick’s literary ideas have vast implications for contemporary culture, as theorized by figures such as French philosopher of real and simulation, Jean Baudrillard, who made direct reference to Dick in his seminal essay collection, Simulacra and Simulation.  By admitting that his biography of Dick is part fiction, Carrère is using a biography of a writer of simulacra to highlight the seemingly realistic yet fictional nature of all biography.