Thinking tonight about Muybridge’s Horse in Motion and yesterday’s BART protest, i can imagine the BART cars, stopped on the platform, like so many (of Muybridge’s) discrete, static cells, separating workers on their rush hour commute. Once set in motion, the cells and their content blur into one continuous image: the vision of seamless progress—
—the vision (here J Crary) “compatible with the smooth surface of a global marketplace with its unbound pathways of circulation and exchange.” No wonder a drunk, teetering near the tracks, a black man, or any protestor threatening to disrupt this flow are met with speeding bullets and riot cops:
BART police (and all the sycophants of capital we see bemoaning the inconvenience of being ‘stopped’ from their rush-hour trajet as docile subjects) are meant to annihilate the very objects that make the space in between these cells visible—they protect the spectacle, the illusion that there is no homelessness, no economic interest in racism, no alternative to work, servitude and exchange.
Text by Thea Pell