Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: adalah, anarchism, anarchists against the wall, armed struggle, ⚑, BDS, boycott, consumerism, direct action, divestment, future gutter status, insurrection, international solidarity movement, israel, jordan, lifestyle politics, palestine, sanctions, Sufism, uri gordon, wayne price
 Palestina by Melanie Cervantes |
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, after coming across Wayne Price’s “the Palestinian Struggle and the Anarchist Dilemma, fleshing out my own thoughts on the death of armed struggle, and then following the recent successes of the US Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign. At least thus far it’s been something I’m a bit reluctant to take on especially as it looks like this is what I’ll inshallah be PhD applying to, so maybe part of a series? |
BDS – Pushing for institutional change
As much as I wholeheartedly believe in, and work with BDS campaigns at various levels, there’s something that makes me slightly uneasy about banking on consumerist/lifestylist, institutional, and interstatist avenues to produce social change. Not just the question of academic boycott, which I’m wholly torn on, but it that it feels like a ‘necessary evil’, a compromise for campaign efficiency, in a way. Necessary evils – awkward good/evil morality aside, it feels like an awkward liberal binary, or people who consider themselves anti-authoritarian but insist on centralised and hierarchical organisations and meeting structures for ‘efficiency’s sake’. You could perhaps look at it in the view that ‘every little bit helps’, think global act immediately local, and so on . Kind of the way I feel about veganism, buying local/from CSAs, fair trade etc – a good (if privilege imbued) along-the-way means to an end, but not the end in itself. But when BDS becomes, or rather, feels like the only avenue, what then?
MORE: WHAT DO YOU WANT THEN, A REVOLUTION?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: beer, braxis, brotest, BURP, censorship, comite invisible, consumerism, dubai, dystopia, electrodes, film, image, internet, invisible committee, l'insurrection qui vient, new school in collaboration, occupy everything, sleep dealer, surveillance society, the future, tiqqun, university of minnesota
Ignore the start picture – the video at the end is a Tiqqun one from 2001, and well worth watching. It’s dedicated to the lost children; here’s some other lost children in the hipstershapes of the Bro University Radicalization Project (BURP) which focuses
on redirecting the socially repressive forces of alcohol towards spontaneous anarchy, salutes the snap attack on sober conformity, a non-hierarchical attempt to liberate U spaces in favor of their natural free-form Bro-ness and Duder-tude, with chillaxing required for any kind of mutual aid, Miller or Bud.
This in turn begs the crucial question: BROTEST + BEER(Y) + BRAXIS = BURP??. Tiqqun’s invocation of electrodes is anyway fascinating in that the short was made in 2001, and is uneasily echoed in this year’s dystopian film Sleep Dealer, set in Mexico. I won’t rehash it here, but in brief, it depicts a near-futurist world of hypersurveillance and control, and a hypercapitalism that succeeds in total virtual alienation. Exploited workers thus ‘plug in’ to machines to remotely work across the border in America, through nodes in their bodies – put in by the technified coyoteks (!). The nodes themselves strongly resemble the 1/4 jack holes where you would plug a lead into a guitar or bass – it’s interesting to map this back to the connections that humans have with their own favourite shapes of wood (as opposed to perhaps a forest). In a final cessation of humanity, people can even leech and commodify their own emotions and memories (hello, NGO-industrial) and even plug into each other’s nodes – via a computer of course.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: activism, anarchism, anthropology, arabic, ⚑, BDS, bebsi bolitics, books, brotest, cairo, dissent, egypt, gender, maps, palestine, space, state security, summer, surveillance society, traces, up the broletariat
No hyperinsightful solutions, unfortunately. I don’t actually know too much about bolitics in Egypt right now at that, though I really should. ‘Egyptian freedoms’ are probably more of an oxymoron than I realise. This illustration though, lovely no? From a 2nd grade Arabic language reader from 1938, it was donated by Christian Awaraji in Beirut 1997, and used to belong to his aunt, Flavie Awaraji who was born in 1938 and died in 1947 in a bicycle accident. Its inside cover reads “This book belongs to the honorable mademoiselle Flavie Awaraji, 11th (2. elementary) 1944, Lycée Français in Beirut”. I am slightly overwhelmed by these kind of traces of unknown people, like forgotten pressed flowers in the pages of old books. Traces of the geographical kind are becoming fascinating too, after burying (bunkering?) self in Paul VIrilio’s work lately (and of course the recycked Weizman fetishisation. I need to segue away from print back to image though, perhaps even film (which shouldn’t fizz out with a castrated film major?)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: berlin, breaching the vortex, columbia, cortex, dead time, dispatchwork, dubai, eminent domain, flipper, gentrification, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, hardcore, jan vormann, occupation, open the gate, punk, the future
The picture above is from the Berlin that I won’t be revisiting in June – I think it’s from the alleyway/courtyard leading to Central Kino? Couldn’t agree/hope for more perhaps – capitalism is pretty much ‘civilised cannibalism’ anyways. Ditto with ecocide – I have issues with the “Earth-my-mother” vibe – but it seems that hyperconsumption and death-by fossil fuels looks a bit cannibalistic? And sorcery – I don’t remember where from but Paul Bohannon has opined that “men attain power by consuming the substance of others”. (For a desktop sticky note tells me so – I sense my life would implode slightly if the program ever crumbles). I’ve been thinking a lot about magic/sorcery and links to power and art lately following a recent final (and via Zerzan’s ‘Case Against Art’ – hopefully not the beginning of an awkward green-team foray) – more on this later perhaps. Also from Berlin though, this time to patch up the gaps of the past (not that the vortex hasn’t been breached already) is this lego brick project I’m really digging:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anthropology, brownbook, dead time, deira, dubai, estrangement, evan collisson, expat anxiety, future gutter status, ghost of petrodollar bubble past, headspace, karama, skateboarding, summer, uae
Dubai again and a strange affection for a city that I guess is my home, little as it does want me here. Jobs here seem impossible at first hunt, perhaps I should look to skip and dip on standby tickets for the next two months? I will definitely be in Cairo (and not Berlin) for a fortnight sandwiched in June, and Kashmir/Mumbai for the first 2-3 weeks of July. Hopefully finding an affordable (!) sublet in NYC for August and couchsurfing for the last dredges of July til I can inshallah move in. My life is currently packed into six boxes in the radio station – I fascinatingly had five last year and four the year before. I suspect the number could go down though as I have scores of books to disperse (like theory, like cats) into the atmosphere, and several boxes lined with wake-up-an-hour-before-kickout-time dump and run panic. [you can't go home again..]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anti-civillization, art, ⚑, deterritorialization, education, john zerzan, new school, occupation
Today’s territory is the product of many centuries of police operations. People have been pushed out of their fields, then their streets, then their neighborhoods, and finally from the hallways of their buildings, their universities, in the demented hope of containing all life between the four sweating walls of privacy. The territorial question isn’t the same for us as it is for the state. For us it’s not about possessing territory. Rather, it’s a matter of increasing the density of the communes, of circulation, and of solidarities to the point that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory.
This response to a New School investigation makes me giggle a fair bit. A looming (albeit last) deadline and the need to pack my life up into approximately 5 cardboard boxes (one still lies unpacked from this time last year) does not make me giggle so much. As (de)territorialisation goes, I’m trying to work through the magicalities of war, as mediated through art. This is not going well, and the only way out seems to be some kind of mobilisation of Zerzanic all-art-as-artifice? And expanding the war-machine-as-semantic to include all semiotics/representation? I am reading a lot more anti-civ stuff than I perhaps like these days – almost to the point of wondering how far i could get sucked in with someone more ‘moderate’ ? (And a far better writer, please – unless he’s trying to take down language in his own awkward butchery?). John Zerzan also looks frighteningly like a dentist I once had (who was a racecar driver in his free time); this too is disconcerting.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: academy, anarchism, anti-copyright, authorship, ⚑, copyleft, creative commons, david graeber, diagrammatology, dissertations, graphic notation, intellectual ownership, music score, obamanarchy, original thought, ProQuest, sade, sylvano bussoti
I feel very drawn to diagrams lately, and the lovely, almost extitutional scores of Italian composer, artist and filmmaker Sylvano Bussoni. And diagramming my future gutter status to boot. I’m fairly sure I want to do a PhD, if I can figure out how to acquire visas/grants. It’s a bit ways off anyway. But its gotten me thinking about the mores of intellectual property and authorship credit. How can anyone ‘own’ an idea or concept? And at what degree level is a person considered a legitimate or plausible author? How much of a difference is there between private (material) property and ‘ownership’ of original thought?. In this sense (with apologies to Graeber), it’s worth thinking about how compatible anarchism and the academy really are?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: (cha)osmosis, anarchism, anthro, ⚑, bluestockings, future gutter status, hakim bey, M.A.Z., magic, magical automous zone, MAZ, michael albert, parecon, space, TAZ, thesis
My life feels marginally more sorted now. only just, though. berlin is semi-certain but still up in the air. dubai in summer seems very likely. magic is back, in a really good way. Instead of fieldworking in summer in dubai – not on labour or domestic worker abuse or anything that involves asking the ‘wrong’ questions and getting my family kicked out, I will now thesisise on anarchist spaces and magic though a theory (yet to be fully developed) of the Magical Autonomous Zone. Probably in the city – places like Bluestockings, 123, ABC No Rio? But also taking that outside – into homes, into collective projects and into the street.
more: the Magical Autonomous Zone?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: academic essay, beehive collective, development, globalization, help us help them, hope he can, imf, ngo-industrial complex, world bank
I don’t think I fully agree with this anymore, or the way in which it is written. I am drowning in finals and my limbs keep going dead. The ant is from Beehive Collective‘s Mesoamerica Resiste campaign.
____
A new spectre is haunting the world. Picking up where the colonial projects left off, it aims to complete their transnational projects and crystallise the dominant world order once and for all. It can be seen as the newest stage and mutation of both capitalism and colonialism, with aid workers as the new missionaries. Yet this avatar breaks with previous projects in that it commodifies not just goods or people, but emotion itself. It equally seeks to neuter dissent and reproduce itself not through the politicised discrimination and particularization of colonialism, but instead, through a generalized depoliticisation. And although it may operate with a similarly well intentioned ‘help us help them’ ethos, its realized effects are slightly less admirable. This is the Non Governmental Organisation Industrial complex.
