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
2 replies on “A Note On The July 12 Protest Of The Summary Execution Of Charles Hill By Bay Area Rapid Transit Police On July 3, 2011”
This police officer is a left hand shooter, notice how he draws the weapon from his left hand. The shells in a left handed guns fall out towards the left (this is so they can aim without the shell hitting them in a face, which would happen if he had a right handed gun). the object that is circled in blue is a shell, notice how not until after the gun is fired the blue object flys left outward.