The Revolution Will Be Live

Like A Stone*

On a cobweb afternoon
In a room full of emptiness
By a freeway I confess
I was lost in the pages
Of a book full of death
Reading how we'll die alone
And if we're good we'll lay to rest
Anywhere we want to go

(chorus)
In your house I long to be
Room by room patiently
I'll wait for you there
Like a stone I'll wait for you there
Alone

On my deathbed I will pray
To the gods and the angels
Like a pagan to anyone
Who will take me to heaven
To a place I recall
I was there so long ago
The sky was bruised
The wine was bled
And there you led me on

(chorus)
In your house I long to be
Room by room patiently
I'll wait for you there
Like a stone I'll wait for you there
Alone

And on I read
Until the day was done
And I sat in regret
Of all the things I've done
For all that I've blessed
And all that I've wronged
In dreams until my death
I will wander on

(You are viewing lyrics of Like A Stone by AUDIOSLAVE from the album Audioslave at LyricsAndSongs.COM)

* Dear Digory a.k.a KN, whenever I hear this song, I thought of men who just wait; now that I've got the lyrics I'm not sure whether it should be dedicated to you or me, or, maybe both you and me. It just take one call, text msg, or 'hello' to take us from deadlock to adventure. It's really up to you, and me. Ciao.

Dear Afflatus, I hope you don't mind me stealing your idea of theme songs and if mine are more hip than yours, heheh. Plus, I gotta make amends and mend fences before I die. So, there will be songs dedicated to all the men* that God had sent to teach me about the complexities of humanity - the cold and utilitarian side, the vulnerable and intense side, the warm, kind, generous and responsible side - and to finally understand, accept and forgive my father, may he rest in peace. It could be a Swan Song, or a Final Curtain, Tho' It Ain't Over Til the Fat Lady Sings. Maybe I should go see your Ayah Pin, oops Ayah Pa. See what the future holds for me. Regards to Cin, Nuggets, Becks and Princess. Cheers!

* Including platonic male friends, who taught me much, if not more. As for women who have befriended and betrayed me, I learnt not to be nice to Bitches anymore and best to ignore them. As for my kin, if Cain can hurt Abel, then my hurt is just a tiny drop in the vast Ocean of Life, I have forgiven you all, even if you haven't forgiven me.

Songs specially dedicated to:

EOW - Sunshine (John Denver), Country Road (John Denver), Leaving on a Jetplane
JKS - Wild World (Cat Stevens)
AO - Penantian (Zubir Ali)
HS - Soul Provider (Phil Collins), Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me (Elton John)
KN - Sonata Musim Salju (Hazami), The Long & Winding Road (Beatles), Bridge Over Troubled Water (Simon & Garfunkel), Like A Stone (Audio Slave)


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The residual Radical in me couldn't help but be excited to share this piece. I would like to write more on the Digital Convergence, Privacy on the Internet, etc.

The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live.

Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

In his 1974 song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Gil Scott-Heron sings of the ways that the dominant genres of television (the news, the soap opera, the commercial, the sitcom, etc.) prevent any oppositional political content from being represented there. In his view, the chief political function of television is to represent the interests of the white ruling class as natural and inevitable, while distracting us and turning us into passive consumers by "entertaining" us at the same time. The person whose structure of feeling is built around the experience of consumption, Scott-Heron suggests, is not the person who engages in radical political action: "The revolution will not go better with Coke/The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath." The song concludes with his insistence that the revolution will not be televised, it will not be a "re-run," it will be live."

In his insistence on liveness, on the necessity of revolution responding to and participating in reality itself, Scott-Heron updates a longstanding Marxist tradition anxious about our ability to represent and thus apprehend historical reality. Without a map of the historical situation in which we find ourselves, how can we possibly develop a plan for changing that reality? Our inability to map out our historical situation is frequently seen as the result of a stubborn melancholic intrusion of the lost past into the present. For example, in The 18th Brumaire Marx famously laments that: "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." Just when people seem ready to revolutionize themselves, they "anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service." Thus, they keep betraying themselves because they mis-recognize themselves, their real conditions of existence and their relations with each other. The revolutionary task is to be present to the present--to s ee the world as it is and act accordingly. I take this to be Lenin's suggestion when he remarks that," one can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself." We are always playing catch-up in relation to reality. There is a persistent time lag that we are always trying to close.

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The difficulty of the task lies in the effort to determine what kind of a fluctuating "thing" reality is. This perpetual transformation is perhaps the one constant of modernity. In a phrase, which has since come to signify the ever-shifting, changeable and volatile character of modern life, Marx and Engels exclaimed in The Communist Manifesto that "all that is solid melts into air." (1) They referred first of all to the fact that capitalism by its nature is constantly expanding and therefore needs to constantly revolutionize itself in order to create new markets, leaving nothing solid or permanent in its wake, both destroying and conjuring into existence everything from cities to human populations along the way. They were also speaking of the way that capitalism reduces everything to the shadowy abstraction known as money. Both of these processes have accelerated and transformed themselves in the twentieth century. New technologies have greatly expanded the human capacity for both creation and destruction, an d the universality of money as a standard of value above all others has been supplemented by the (much discussed) process through which everything, if it is to be felt to exist at all, must also be able to be transformed into an image.

This is the situation of which Jean Baudrillard has written: "The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction." In some circles, this development, often discussed as one of the basic features of "posimodernism," has been understood as an abandonment of the possibility of ever catching up with the radicality of reality that Lenin spoke of. The world cannot be represented because it is itself always already a representation, because the spectacle constitutes reality itself; or, as Andy Warhol put it: "I don't know where the artificial stops and the real begins."
In the days and weeks following September 11 I was in Moscow and I heard many people suggest that the attacks signaled the end of postmodernism. Such diagnoses were heard throughout the American popular press as well. The terrorist attacks, the argument, would go, were a massive "return of the real." They were not a simulacrum but a horrifyingly actual event of historical proportions; here reality had emerged with perfect clarity from amidst the confusing simulacra. There was no confusing the artificial and the real here. Slavoj Zizek compared the effect to the moment in The Truman Show when the Jim Carrey character realizes that he has been living in a constructed reality, or the moment in The Matrix when the Keanu Reeves character is shown the "desert of the real" that he actually inhabits. Everybody else in the world knew that life in the present world is regularly punctuated by events of terrifying violence; only America was able to live in a (fake, simulacral) world in which this was not the case. Many p eople seemed to be thinking: "Now you know what it feels like to live in the rest of the world." The hope expressed in many places was that America and Americans, through their own experience of suffering through the newly awakened "real," would gain a newfound sympathy for the violent reality in which the rest of the world lived.

While I think that it is true that the events of September 1 had the potential to bring people around the world together through a recognition of a common experience of death and destruction (as I will discuss more below), it is not because the events of September 11 signify the arrival of the "real" and the end of the simulacral. On the contrary, the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) are the clearest signal yet that the media spectacle is now a constitutive element of our "reality;" they signal not the end of postmodernism, but its apotheosis. After all, the attacks were planned precisely from the point of view of their reproducibility as images. Less visually spectacular, less symbolic, less ideologically contingent attack-sites that would have killed more people could have been chosen by the terrorists; a nuclear power plant, for example. The WTC offered a perfectly condensed and extremely visible site for a disaster that capitalized on the iconic reproducibility and, often horrible, attraction of sp ectacle. And, in the hours, days and weeks following the event, the images of the planes crashing into the towers and the towers collapsing were reproduced ceaselessly, tirelessly on television, in newspapers, in magazines. (Anywhere on earth where some kind of visual media are present, these images were shown.) Furthermore, as I hope to suggest below, The Truman Show effect whereby we feel that our illusory world has been punctured by the intrusion of reality is itself an effect produced by "live" television. The belief-that here we have hit a bedrock of historical reality allows us to disavow the more disturbing ways in which the attacks on the WTC have brought the persistent ontology of "reality" itself into question.