Emily Wardill’s research around political rhetoric was also rooted in Herbert Marcuse’s plea for a “new sensibility”—one that would take the form of linguistic therapy to help us become conscious of the political linguistics that serve as the armor for the Establishment. Marcuse recognized that corporate capitalism and the conservative political realm sustaining its values and functions required the systematic manipulation of language. He foresaw that the right would effectively co-opt subversive language to feign sympathy, dissolve dissent, and sustain the status quo. […]
Wardill may not have imbibed the same Marcusian grape juice that I have, but she has reckoned with the fact that, as an artist, she enables herself to “think about things like moving image and narrative socially, critically, politically, philosophically, and historically and step outside of a line of inevitability. If you think about the way that the internet developed—in that it started with intentions to democratize information and sidestep established power systems—and how over time, those ideals became mythologies that were used to sell a technology that gathers our data and makes us addicted to screens, there are some parallels with industrial cinema, and approaching it from another angle is a way to reappropriate a powerful tool for people who are alive.”(1) […]
Emily reached out after some years to reconnect and to describe her recent project—a film centered around interviews with Isabel do Carmo, who, in the mid-1970s, at the age of 35, had become one of the most militant and extreme leftists in Portugal as a member of the Revolutionary Brigades fighting against Estado Novo, a fascist regime developed by António de Oliveira Salazar. In an interview with the New York Times from the period of her activism, do Carmo distanced herself from former revolutionary models offered by male predecessors who were working within the terms of Marxism and communism, claiming instead that “to be a real revolutionary, you have always to create new theories and techniques according to the reality as you find it.”(2) Isabel do Carmo, who is now 79, is not a witch, rather an endocrinologist; she once had set out to reclaim what had been abducted, as Isabelle Stengers writes, and to oblige change. In this, although do Carmo did not cast a spell, she created a new frame for imagining transformative action, which may amount to the same thing. In the ongoing derision of female lives, we are often relegated to witches, bitches, and whores, with the implication that we may perform merely transactional roles, rather than transformational ones. As we remain stuck in between an artistic dimension and a political dimension, we necessarily keep an ear to the ground for how we might learn from one another, so that our work might affect political change. Meanwhile, our actions are characterized as cunning, and our ability to bring forth the changes we intend is attributed to the supernatural.
“This is the common struggle of all women, whatever their male defined ideological origins; and this struggle alone has the power to transform women who are enemies against one another into allies fighting for individual and collective survival that is not based on self-loathing, fear, and humiliation, but instead on self-determination, dignity, and authentic integrity.”(3) — Andrea Dworkin
Marta Kuzma
