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: 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: pigs, every heart is a revolutionary cell, ☭☭☭, columbia, new school, police brutality, insurrection, nyu, occupy everything, anti-police brutality rally, hakim bey, peter lambourne wilson, take back the night, anarchism
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.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ☭☭☭, dissemination, every heart is a revolutionary cell, global southeast, GRANAD(A), insurrection, third world decadence movement
La Décadence n’a rien à faire avec Amour. La Décadence est un excellent marteau que nous employons pour détruire l’Empire.
[Decadence is not Love. Decadence is a hammer we use to crush Empire.]
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America is a series of several displeasures, beamed into our bedrooms in little increments of ketchup packets and adolescent angst. America is the kindly uncle that might violate you with his left hand even as he hands you tamarind sweets from his right. We’re feeling really unclean America, and we’d quite like a shower please, but your oceans are salty and even your rainwater runs cold. Never forget that we love you, America, even when we suspect you have mortgaged our dreams of personhood away.
We are brown and glossy and we think we have rather nice legs but our chappals are getting scuffy and that’s not going to land us an I-banking job, is it? Perhaps we should do good and queue up for the NGO-industrial complex to help you help us help them. Soon our governments will build another shopping mall, and we’ll program ourselves new dreams of getting off your global welfare state. Your cities are expensive, though and we cant afford your economic noblesse oblige anymore. We’e running out of band-aids already, yet we’re bleeding all over our new shoes. These heels are high! Slow down a bit there, we can’t quite keep up with your shadow. Yet with our orgiastic consumption and your immaculate white goods, we think we could be friends, what do you say?
Decadence is not Love. Decadence is a hammer we use to crush Empire
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anthropology, aum, ☭☭☭, bataille, becoming, blanchot, canetti, deleuze, dissemination, eisenstein, every heart is a revolutionary cell, extincts, extitutions, fascism, frekorps, guattari, hinduism, in the beginning, insurrection, larkin, nietzsche, superman, theweleit, universe, violence, what is to be (un)done
In the beginning was the language, and the language was gravity. Before the beginning was infinite violence. When violence met language, there was conflict; at once collision and collusion. Conflict became a reproductive space of exchange, and atomisation became the original sin. We learnt what evil was, and it was the One.
Gravity meanwhile was inscribed into (celestial) bodies, becoming the first legal contract between them. So it is that particles collide to produce fragmented planets and people, in an exchange of violent energy. Humans similarly collide to exchange pleasantries, and sometimes bodily fluids. On the level of language, morphemes collide to exchange ejaculations of speed and to reproduce meaning. In the eighteenth century, these forms might have been approached through money, character and root.
Yet this beginning is simply the beginning of the rational, instinctual Man-form, and its subsequent trajectory through time and space. Following Nietzsche, the universe itself is a monster of energy without beginning, without end, not expanding but constantly transforming, in an infinite play of forces, and waves of forces which work like concepts to create embodied affects. Violence is this monstrous energy.
