Friday, December 10, 2010

“Who are our nomads today?”

"It is true that, at the center, the rural communities are absorbed by the despot's bureaucratic machine, which includes its scribes, its priests, its functionaries. But on the periphery, these communities commence a sort of adventure. They enter into another kind of unit, this time a nomadic association, a nomadic war machine, and they begin to decodify instead of allowing themselves to become overcodified. Whole groups depart; they become nomads. Archaeologists have led us to conceive of this nomadism not as a primary state, but as an adventure suddenly embarked upon by sedentary groups impelled by the attraction of movement, of what lies outside."

"It is common knowledge that nomads fare miserably under our kinds of regime: we will go to any lengths in order to settle them, and they barely have enough to subsist on …. But the nomad is not necessarily one who moves: some voyages take place in situ, are trips in intensity. Even historically, nomads are not necessarily those who move about like migrants. On the contrary, they do not move; nomads, they nevertheless stay in the same place and continually evade the codes of settled people. We also know that the problem for revolutionaries today is to unite within the purpose of the particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organisation of the party or state apparatus. We seek a kind of war-machine that will not re-create a state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity."

"And even if the journey is a motionless one, even if it occurs on the spot, imperceptible, unexpected, and subterranean, we must ask ourselves, 'Who are our nomads today …?'"


(Gilles Deleuze, "Nomad Thought")

Thursday, December 09, 2010

la calle / the street ...

La calle


Es una calle larga y silenciosa.

Ando en tinieblas y tropiezo y caigo

y me levanto y piso con pies ciegos

las piedras mudas y las hojas secas

y alguien detrás de mí también las pisa:

si me detengo, se detiene;

si corro, corre. Vuelvo el rostro: nadie.

Todo está oscuro y sin salida,

y doy vueltas y vueltas en esquinas

que dan siempre a la calle

donde nadie me espera ni me sigue,

donde yo sigo a un hombre que tropieza

y se levanta y dice al verme: nadie.


– Octavio Paz



The Street


A long and silent street.

I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall

and rise, and I walk blind, my feet

stepping on silent stones and dry leaves.

Someone behind me also stepping on stones, leaves:

if I slow down, he slows;

if I run, he runs. I turn: nobody.

Everything dark and doorless.

Turning and turning among these corners

which lead forever to the street,

where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,

where I pursue a man who stumbles

and rises and says when he sees me: nobody


– Octavio Paz (Trans. Muriel Rukeyser)

Monday, December 06, 2010

aguardo

aguardo

sem guarda-chuva

nem anjo da guarda



Copyright © 2010 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

identicalities 4




Copyright © 2010 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira