Interesting Find: meet the world campaign.
Icaro Doria, a Brazilian man, working for a magazine in Portugal started this campaign using real data from the UN and flag images, he’s created whats known as Meet the World. The colors within the flags from its respective country are used to represent current, geographical relevant issues. Take a look.
United States
Angola
Somalia
China
Colombia
Burkina
![A burst of laughter is the only appropriate response to all the serious “questions” posed by news analysts. To take the most banal: there is no “immigration question.” Who still grows up where they were born? Who still lives where they grew up? Who works where they live? Who lives where their ancestors did? And to whom do the children of this era belong, to television or their parents? The truth is that we have been completely torn from any belonging, we are no longer from anywhere, and the result, in addition to a new disposition to tourism, is undeniable suffering. Our history is one of colonizations, of migrations, of wars, of exiles, and the destruction of all roots. It’s the story of everything that has made us foreigners in this world, guests in our own family. [….]
To call this population of strangers in the midst of which we live “society” is such a usurpation that even sociologists wonder if they should abandon a concept that was, for a century, their bread and butter. Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the situations of cybernetic solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions of names like “colleague,” “contact,” “buddy,” “acquaintance,” or “date.” Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared by codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant recomposition of identity.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ln2me1fguL1qk6zvjo1_400.jpg)
A burst of laughter is the only appropriate response to all the serious “questions” posed by news analysts. To take the most banal: there is no “immigration question.” Who still grows up where they were born? Who still lives where they grew up? Who works where they live? Who lives where their ancestors did? And to whom do the children of this era belong, to television or their parents? The truth is that we have been completely torn from any belonging, we are no longer from anywhere, and the result, in addition to a new disposition to tourism, is undeniable suffering. Our history is one of colonizations, of migrations, of wars, of exiles, and the destruction of all roots. It’s the story of everything that has made us foreigners in this world, guests in our own family. [….]
To call this population of strangers in the midst of which we live “society” is such a usurpation that even sociologists wonder if they should abandon a concept that was, for a century, their bread and butter. Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the situations of cybernetic solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions of names like “colleague,” “contact,” “buddy,” “acquaintance,” or “date.” Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared by codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant recomposition of identity.
![bookbat:
clingtomymouth:
mhsteger:
Julia Kristeva (born 24 June, 1941), pictured above in New York, 1974
On laughter in the text:
‘The revolutionary practice of the text [i.e., of literary and poetic texts] is a kind of laughter whose explosions are those of language. The pleasure obtained from the lifting of inhibition is immediately invested in the production of the new. Every practice which produces something new (a new device) is a practice of laughter: it obeys laughter’s logic and provides the subject with laughter’s advantages. When practice is not laughter, there is nothing new; where there is nothing new, practice cannot be provoking: it is at best a repeated, empty act. The novelty of a practice (that of the text or any practice) indicates the jouissance [i.e., pleasure] invested therein and this quality of newness is the equivalent of the laughter it conceals…’
— from ‘[Lautréamont’s] Maldoror and Poems: Laughter as Practice,’ in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984; originally published in 1974; translated from the French by Margaret Waller, with my own slight modifications for clarity)
On depression in speech:
‘Let us recall that the speech of those in a depressive state tends to be repetitive and monotonous. Faced by an inability to make links, the phrase [in depressive speech] interrupts itself, cuts itself off, stops itself. Syntagma [i.e., phrases, syntactic units] even fail to be formed. A repetitive rhythm, a monotone melody, comes to dominate the broken logical sequences, and to transform them into a recurrent, obsessive litany. Ultimately, when even this frugal musicality begins to exhaust itself, or to be extinguished by the urge to silence, the depressive’s utterances seem to suspend all thought altogether, and to sink into the white noise of the asymbolic [i.e., meaninglessness], or to be swept away in the overflow of an uncontrollable chaos of ideas.’
— from Soleil Noir: Depression et Melancolie (1987; my translation from the French)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4j7c9egGf1qzdxojo1_400.jpg)
Julia Kristeva (born 24 June, 1941), pictured above in New York, 1974
On laughter in the text:
‘The revolutionary practice of the text [i.e., of literary and poetic texts] is a kind of laughter whose explosions are those of language. The pleasure obtained from the lifting of inhibition is immediately invested in the production of the new. Every practice which produces something new (a new device) is a practice of laughter: it obeys laughter’s logic and provides the subject with laughter’s advantages. When practice is not laughter, there is nothing new; where there is nothing new, practice cannot be provoking: it is at best a repeated, empty act. The novelty of a practice (that of the text or any practice) indicates the jouissance [i.e., pleasure] invested therein and this quality of newness is the equivalent of the laughter it conceals…’
— from ‘[Lautréamont’s] Maldoror and Poems: Laughter as Practice,’ in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984; originally published in 1974; translated from the French by Margaret Waller, with my own slight modifications for clarity)
On depression in speech:
‘Let us recall that the speech of those in a depressive state tends to be repetitive and monotonous. Faced by an inability to make links, the phrase [in depressive speech] interrupts itself, cuts itself off, stops itself. Syntagma [i.e., phrases, syntactic units] even fail to be formed. A repetitive rhythm, a monotone melody, comes to dominate the broken logical sequences, and to transform them into a recurrent, obsessive litany. Ultimately, when even this frugal musicality begins to exhaust itself, or to be extinguished by the urge to silence, the depressive’s utterances seem to suspend all thought altogether, and to sink into the white noise of the asymbolic [i.e., meaninglessness], or to be swept away in the overflow of an uncontrollable chaos of ideas.’
— from Soleil Noir: Depression et Melancolie (1987; my translation from the French)
we must take back that which the spectacle has taken from reality. the expropriators of the spectacle will be expropriated. the world has already been filmed. now it is time to transform it. - Guy Debord
I am not a vigilante. I do empathise with critics who say that some people have made obscene profits. I do not deny the damage caused by the accumulation of riches in a few hands. But to merely criticise this acceleration of profits and History, this “galloping avarice”, as Eugene Sue called it, while remaining in the materialist framework of profit, is a deficient, reductionist analysis.
What is happening is much more complex, and profoundly disturbing. We have gone into someting of a different nature. This economy of wealth has become an economy of speed. By the way, this is the problem the Left is currently facing. The Left is stuck in its old framework, states that capitalism is dead, and now thinks that more social justice will come about. This is a bit hasty deduction. We do really have a major problem on our plates.
—Paul Virilio
We must completely reorganize the idea we have of knowledge, we must abandon the mirror myths of immediate vision and reading, and conceive knowledge as a production […] The invisible is defined by the visible as its invisible, its forbidden vision: the invisible is not therefore simply what is outside the visible (to return to the spatial metaphor), the outer darkness of exclusion - but the inner darkness of exclusion, inside the visible itself because defined by its structure.
—Louis Althusser
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train - namely, the human race - to activate the emergency brake.
—Walter Benjamin
Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying `Enough’. He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable - this is Marcos.
—Subcomandante Marcos
The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters - there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void…. That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.
—Jean Baudrillard
