Re: <nettime> V2-Day or on the political agency of radical comedians

[David garcia <davidg@xs4all.nl>]

Brian Holmes writes

> Yeah, but another corollary difference is the sheer existence of
> the piazza in Turin where the people gathered on April 25. What
> the Italians call "scendere in piazza" has no real translation in
> American English anymore: because there is no common sensation of
> "taking it to the streets," except maybe in post-hippie anarcho-punk
> San Francisco. Colbert is a man with an audience glued to their
> screens, not a man with an unpredictable crowd of political revelers
> collaborating on a change in the way that society relates to itself
> here and now. Whether this possibility of "taking it to the streets"
> could be reinvented in America is maybe up to the Latinos, since the
> great immigrant demos of a few years ago were the closest thing that
> the US has recently seen to an embodied mass movement. Yet it is
> disturbing the way the previous Seattle movement was nipped in the
> bud -- a big attempt to retake the streets was really repressed, in
> the most brutal possible manner.


Hi Brian,

just one thought on the possible US version of the piazza. I am
thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King's use of the Lincoln Memorial as
a site for re-drafting the American dream. I don't know enough about
the US to know of other public monuments that can be appropriated
and whose meanings can be subverted or re-invented or radically
recuperated.

David Garcia 




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