Survival of the Fireflies (Survivance des lucioles) is a critic text by Georges Didi-Huberman (2009) about the force emanating from the alternative production units vs. the great luminary forces by the creative industries. The author describes the exceptional places of this production that has came to learn to fight economy itself with economics, based on the metaphor and nature of fireflies[1]. These are some of the proposed analogies:
— being able to escape the major turbulence, having freedom of movement, being errant, nomad or imbued with a strong deterritorialization coefficient;
— being fleeting, discreet, marginal, interstitial, intermitent, a «state of exception» to the «fierce light of the power»;— resulting from present circumstances, although, as counterpoint, trying to counter them or engaging on a certain (calculated) alienation from the limits of one’s own time;
— preferring the least probable of one's own time's expectations and economics;
— preferring a part of reality, instead of its whole understanding;
— appreciating the value of the collective, looking for like-minded people or accomplices in a community at once dispersed, diverse, anachronistic and atopic;
— vanishing once placed before the «big reflectors»; which, pursuing the metaphor, explains the reason why countercurrent demonstrations go extinct when assimilated by their own time's trends.
A countercultural thinking is defined for rescuing the differences related to its own time. With a tendency to «organize pessimism»[2], between action and thought images are built to «protest against the kingdom's glory and its solid beams of light.»[3] Such is a political stance from a different positioning: through aesthetics agency, one tries to liberate politics from all the ostentation of its political speech.
Footnotes
^ A metaphor originally by Dante from its Divine Comedy or from Pasolini’s text, «L’ articolo delle lucciole» («The Fireflies’ Article»).
^ Benjamin quoted by DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. (2009). Survivance des lucioles. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
^ DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. (2009). Survivance des lucioles. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
