killing denouement

[meredith stern]

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.