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ok, i'll bite. um...more.
i think you're right in saying that what plenty people perceive or represent as revolutionary thought/action actually draws more of its motivation from opposition to the existing order. that, in this sense, it's an emotional, intellectual or even spiritual response to a system one feels alienated from - and only makes sense in the same context of opposition.
that most natural outsiders - and i include myself here - relish their outsider status, and find the idea of building something new, taking over responsibility for what comes next immeasurably less sexy (if we take the definition of actual revolution as being 'bringing down the old order, and rewriting power relations.')
but i don't really think this is a organized political thing, is it? nor a people-power, historical revolt. sounds more to me like trocchi's 'invisible insurrection of a million minds' - an incremental cultural shift.
when we were discussing responses to the whole 9/11 nitemare, i remember talking to fly about what position we should, ideally, advocate. 'revolutionary' seemed naive, idealistic - and it was difficult to see the conditions necessary to feed the desire in a stable, prosperous society like our own.
i suggested counter-reactionary. it puts me in a one man dialectical battle with those political elements i detest, gives me an actual target that needn't be a utopian daydream, and provides an artistic raison d'etre all in one. hence the title of a piece i put forward in a group exhibition, few years back:
"artists should be eternal dissidents." |
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