Exporting the Revolution

“Youth is provisional”

“The stuff of market pictures, loans and auctioned prospects, finance and gentrification, enhancement and anxiety”

“Or else it is, away from the metropole, the material of the drain, which is to say that either youth itself is drained, or the nation-state is drained of the youth: it is either unemployment or remittances”

“If youth is ever fatally confrontational, they say it is misdirected will, gone too soon. It is without history”

“Between the romance of the moment of revolt and the bitterness of loss is a tragic bookkeeping. The time of the restoration, after political defeat, is a time of tallying and making lists if it is not to be a time of surrender”

“This form of enumeration is eulogistic, and must start from an account of both those who are made to depart and to disappear”

“Spontaneity begets misunderstanding and dismissal. A riot is direct, interpersonal, and fully spontaneous”

“To borrow the language of world-systems theory: it is a matter of accepting that there is currently one world-hegemon, the United States, which does not in any way imply that other states, like Russia or China, cannot engage in imperialist expansion, or that dissent against enemy regimes to the United States implies implicit defense of the hegemonic world order. Any ongoing struggles in the world-system dominated by a waning hegemon are warped by the gravitational pull of that hegemon”

“Between spontaneity and organization, there are forms which flash by and must be stubbornly recorded by any historian of the immediate”

“A text written by an unnamed Iranian protester under the name L, titled “Women Reflected in Their Own History” and published in the first weeks of the uprising in Iran, attempts that formal work of the historian of the immediate, she who reaches for language to approximate the appearances of struggle that are not easily contained by pre-existing signifiers”

“She speaks of a “figural desire,” a form of mimetic contagion, experienced by herself and comrades upon catching sight of other women facing state violence. On the street, the body is warm and numb and can take a police baton. “Historical syncope” is the term she uses for the pause in history felt upon witnessing another body in the face-off. The riot is always within history, which is to say a lot, and not nearly enough”

“I’ve heard one question posed often, about why it is that both the art and politics of the slave society of ancient Greece, the epic and the agora, still fascinate and enthrall, notwithstanding the supremacist biases of the disciplines tasked with studying the Hellenics”

“Some Marxists answer this question by suggesting that the fascination is due to the fact that ancient Greek society was not mediated by an impersonal money-form, but was ruthlessly direct: direct forms of political participation (Athenian democracy), direct forms of subjugation (slavery), directness in aesthetic and literary form (gods and men and women sleeping with each other in the epic)”

“So there is a romantic longing for the direct and interpersonal, or for an agora reachable by way of the eradication of all currencies”

“But this remains farfetched. Against an agora (ἀγορά) in space, I am thinking of a syntagma (σύνταγμα) in time”

“Syntagma Square, the central square in Athens, was site of the mass anti-austerity protests which began in 2010 following the Greek debt crisis; it is named after the country’s first constitution which was conceded by the German monarch of the Kingdom of Greece in 1884, also referred to as a syntagma”

“So it is after all a city square, and also that highest, most legitimized form of power: a new state’s constitution is only written after the revolutionary moment has passed”

“In semiotics, a syntagma is simply a list where the items, not necessarily in one order, amount to more than their sum”

“A syntagma is also the most basic infantry unit, armed with spears, in the Macedonian army”

“If we squint enough, we might see Tiktok videos of the newly-assembled armed units in the West Bank who have named themselves the Lion’s Den, after the 2021 Palestinian Unity Intifada—all of whom are, in the stricter sense, youths”

“Of syntagmas in the texts of socialist utopian Charles Fourier, Roland Barthes writes that their “enumerative cumulus” joins together “a very ambitious thought and a very futile object,” intervening “between the domestic details of the example and the scope of the utopian plan,” in this case, an inventory of a burning domicile”