Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, ☭☭☭, ⚑, channel 33, dubai, egypt, egyptian revolution, February 11th, january 25, political graphics, posters, solidarity
 - Caesar Diablo |
 - Nick Bygon |
| So this site tells me that Mubarak’s finally gone. A nice day in history: Feb 11th saw the beginning of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and Nelson Mandela’s 1990 release from prison. Shades of Dubai’s now defunct Channel 33, which used to have a daily 15 minute “Today, in history!” programme. I remember watching it at 19:00 every night for about a year, right before my mother sat down to The Bold and the Beautiful. The one with the stripes and bolt of pink satin in the sax-y opening credits. |  |
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: (cha)osmosis, anarchism, anthro, art, ⚑, blackening theory, blendie, brian dettmer, castration anxiety, future gutter status, kelly dobson, language, machine therapy, magic, parapraxis, phase vicoder, synaesthesia, technomagical anarchism, thesis, voice activation
| this is incredibly sick. a 1950s blender modded to recognise a human speaking its language? whirrrr. imagine if this was around in the 1950s? shit would get so feral. or, an orchestra of these with black metal’s finest to multiply the castation anxiety please (this looks way more appealing than it should?) it’s by kelly dobson, who “From the age of four was doing odd jobs such as smashing windows and hauling machine parts from one area of the yard to another. She had machine friends… She is developing a method of personal, societal, and psychoanalytical engagement termed Machine Therapy. (which) is tangentially about the parapraxis of machine design — what machines do and mean for people other than what we consciously designed them to do and be used for“. |
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Blendie the voice-activated blender!
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: 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: 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: (cha)osmosis, anarchism, ⚑, discourse, dissemination, frozen, goethe, GRANAD(A), insurrection, l'insurrection qui vient, language, SCUM, tarnac 9, the coming insurrection
I. why can’t all words be beautiful? why can’t every text message be a communiqué, and every email a psychospiritual manifesto? when will we unplug our computers and throw our phones out of the 37th floor window?
II. SCUM advocated the cutting up of men. is language male; should discourse too be castrated? in the semantics of state violence, peace is the punctuation between performances of war. war is our oldest and lengthiest word poem; it does not yet and can not meet an end. we are always at war. i am at war with you as i am at war with myself.
III. goethe once said that beautiful architecture is like frozen music. how do we pull these structures down to let the polyphony play? athens is burning, and our metropolis is not, yet. if not fires then what kinds of incendiary creative devices? if rupture is to reveal structure, how can we punctuate language itself? radical hyphenisation will become revolutionary hymenisation and punctuation marx will become insurrectionary interrobangs.
IV. whose empire is it anyway? the sun set on a British empire with a full stop. will this American period ever end? today we are post discliplinary and our former imperial soap moulds have become incontrovertible modalities. late stage capitalism is a dying red star; will we all become cyborgs wired in place?
V. why is our nation in a subsistential crisis while yours is in an existential crisis? next comes the crisis of resistance, and it will not be our crisis but theirs.
VI. we are made of soil and air and hydrocarbons. each one of us could be a hydrogren bomb. every heart could be a revolutionary cell. we’re tired of language and we’re tired of talking. when we stand up we reaffirm our spatio-temporal relations to Institution and Empire. when we rise up, we flow.
- GRANAD(A)
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there will be no explosion except for a concept?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, APOC, ⚑, bluestockings, brutality, disintersectionality, gustav landauer, journal of aesthetics and protest, malav kanuga, new school, occupation, occupy everything, police, reclaim, reykjavik, space, squat
So they evicted the Reykjavik squat.
“In this society, the most easy thing is to be silent; to stay behind the yellow police line and stand still; to stay at home and obey to authorities’ orders. That behavior leads to personal comfort. And isolated and personal comfort seems to be the main goals of many people’s lives. The financial crisis are not the problem. The period of prosperity is the problem! It spoiled and silenced the public; it killed every sign of resistance. We squatted this house as an act of resistance. Do the same – again and again and again. That’s how we change this society.”
Again and again and again and again. I’ve been thinking a lot about space and the production of knowledge lately, starting with Malav Kanuga’s piece in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest on Bluestockings as a site for with social struggle, through “”fieldworking”" at Bluestockings, through thinking about the recent NYU and New School occupations through a recent discussion on an APOC listserv. It’s a good time to think about privilege and the fetishising of DA and occupations uber alles and the fact that apart from noticing the relative whiteness and male bodiedness at the 2nd (.2) New School occupation (as opposed to the NYU one), as a person, woman, of colour I didn’t even pause to question the ‘anti police brutality rally’ until days later.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anti-police brutality rally, ☭☭☭, ⚑, columbia, every heart is a revolutionary cell, hakim bey, insurrection, new school, nyu, occupy everything, peter lambourne wilson, pigs, police brutality, take back the night
Off the sidewalks, into the future! Swoooosh I guess we’re rupturing the spacetimecontinuum vortex now? As per usual an anti-police brutality rally was met with, surprise, more “police brutality”. Even with this it’s worth thinking about what “police brutality” looks like – or doesn’t look like at a majority white, privileged space like the New School. NYPD has a community affairs unit, who knew? It’s starting to feel like an insurrectionary circuit is being traced from union square via new school to washington square park and back. How do we abolish exchange? Perhaps our vegan potlucks in the park should become mutualist potlatches. Maybe we should start eating the pigs? Rev Billy showed up to preach but I guess we weren’t all buying what he was selling. Has even anti-commercialism been commodified? And how does his hair defy gravity so bouffantly? I want to know.
