“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Revolution: "I used to watch television, now television watches me"

A great short piece by Peter Hallward in The Guardian on the opening of a new space (kind of a Badiouian read) in the so-called Middle East. (I can't help thinking we need drastically to undo this phraseology.)

Best line, from a protester: "I used to watch television, now television watches me." This is what Rousseau means when in his theory of drama he argues “Let the spectators become a spectacle for themselves.”

1 comment:

Thomas Gokey said...

I've long thought that we need to create a character who is the inverse of Yakov Smirnoff. This would be a great line for this character, something like "In capitalist X we don't watch television, television watches us."

I feel like there is another joke nearby but I can't put my finger on it, something about the way Facebook has turned our friendships into it's money.