OCTOBER JALEH MANSOOR, DANIEL MARCUS, AND DANIEL SPAULDING Occupation as a revolutionary tactic has a long history, from the factory takeovers in post–World War I Italy, to the Sorbonne in May 1968, to Tahrir Square in 2011. The use of “Occupy” as a rallying cry is of more recent origin, cependant. In December 2008, students at the New School barricaded themselves inside a student center

OCTOBER COCO FUSCO The Occupy movement succeeded in forcing the issue of economic inequality into mainstream public debate in the U.S. on the eve of a presiden- tial-campaign year. That in itself is an admirable achievement. Occupy won broad sympathy and quickly forged alliances with other interest groups because it focused on a widely shared dilemma—a rarity in an era of sectarian politics. Occupy also

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OCTOBER ROSALYN DEUTSCHE I am grateful to Occupy for injecting the scandal of extreme economic inequality into what is commonly referred to as “public political discourse”—that of the media and of representative democracy. But Occupy is not a representa- tionist practice. Plutôt, in the words of Isabell Lorey, it performs “an exodus from the dominant political-economic order . . . in order to expand and

OCTOBER PAUL CHAN The appearance of art is itself social. Art participates in the world as a medium of transfiguration. Every artwork is socially defined more by what it anticipates than what it is, none more so than ones that expect revolutions tomorrow. From heap to whole: that is the social promise of art. What gives art quality is the force of its non-judging judgment.

JULIA BRYAN-WILSON In Oakland, where I live, and at UC Berkeley, where I teach, Occupy has been defiant, fractious, exhausting, exhilarating. The zone of possibilities it promised was threatened by ruthlessly violent state and administrative pushback and the repressive criminalization of dissent. Cops wielding batons, rubber bul- lets, and pepper spray: these are searing images. But other scenes persist—a port closed by thousands of anti-capitalist

THOMAS BEARD It was a st range coincidence. My arraignment for an Occupy Wall Street–related arrest was scheduled for the same day as the opening of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, for which I’d co-curated the film program. On December 17 of last year, the three-month anniversary of OWS, I participated in a demonstration at Duarte Square, a small park on the western end of Canal

OCTOBER DOUG ASHFORD A few verses from “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman, a poet cited by Justice William O. Douglas in the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972), overturning the anti-loitering laws of that Florida city as vague and un-American. This decision has affected the free movement of Americans ever

How Language Looks: On Asger Jorn and Noël Arnaud’s La Langue verte* STEVEN HARRIS In November 1968, the Paris publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert brought out Asger Jorn and Noël Arnaud’s La Langue verte et la cuite, an event accompanied by a banquet for 2,000 at a Danish restaurant in Paris, and a considerable response from the press, though the book has largely dropped from view since.1

Yvonne Rainer. The Mind Is a Muscle, Part I (Trio A). 1973. f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 Septembre 2 0 2 3 Practicing Trio A JULIA BRYAN-WILSON Walk On This is a text about embodiment and presence, about specters and time. It is about tempo, about slowness, about pacing, à propos

“Cinema in the Hands of the People”: Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant Film* TREVOR STARK Approach the groups, listen. A whole population is discussing serious mat- ters, and for the first time workers can be heard exchanging their views on problems which until now have been broached only by philosophers. -—August Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Paris, May 19, 18711 J'ai

Starry Skies and Frozen Lakes: Alexander Kluge’s Digital Constellations* PHILIPP EKARDT Film, Literature, and TV Since its beginnings in cinema and literature, the work of Alexander Kluge has manifested itself in increasingly diverse formats and media environ- ments, including television and, more recently, the digital realm. Kluge’s cine- matic debut was the 1960 Brutality in Stone (Brutalität in Stein), co-directed with Peter Schamoni, the first

Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor Paglen JULIAN STALLABRASS In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military pro- jects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., en utilisant

Roundtable on Digital Experimental Filmmaking Malcolm Turvey: We are here to discuss the various ways digital technologies have, and have not, impacted experimental filmmaking. There was a time, au milieu des années 1990, if not before, when some people argued that digital technologies were revolutionary and that they would fundamentally change filmmaking. Now that the dust has settled, or at least started to settle, and we can

The Brutalism of Life and Art* ALEX KITNICK Eduardo Paolozzi In February 1950, shortly after returning from two years in Paris, Eduardo Paolozzi displayed six sculptures and sixteen bas-reliefs at London’s Hanover Gallery, all of which, as the critic Herbert Read would soon put it, displayed “a scorn of bourgeois finish.”1 Placed in oversized wooden frames like archaeological finds, the bas-reliefs were made out of

Beyond the Black Box: The Lettrist Cinema of Disjunction ANDREW V. UROSKIE I was not, in my youth, particularly affected by cine- ma’s “Europeans” . . . perhaps because I, early on, developed an aversion to Surrealism—finding it an altogether inadequate (highly symbolic) envision- ment of dreaming. What did rivet my attention (and must be particularly distinguished) was Jean- Isidore Isou’s Treatise: as a creative

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MARIA GOUGH Kentridge’s Nose* Gogol’s grotesque raged around us; what were we to understand as farce, what as prophecy? The incredible orchestral combinations, texts seemingly unthinkable to sing . . . the unhabitual rhythms . . . the incorporat- ing of the apparently anti-poetic, anti-musical, vulgar, but what was in reality the intonation and parody of real life—all this was an assault on conventionality. —Grigorii