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: police, new school, occupy everything, anarchism, bluestockings, journal of aesthetics and protest, malav kanuga, squat, APOC, occupation, space, gustav landauer, reclaim, brutality, disintersectionality, reykjavik
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.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anarchist bookfair, anthropology, ☭☭☭, cat party, catastrophe, dead time, dissemination, dubai, expat crisis, future gutter status, headspace, listen trotskyist, new school, situationism, summer
“I sometimes think I envy those people who know where they belong;
writers who have a language and a history that is granted them with no catches, no hooks. Theirs for the taking. Along with a nation of willing accomplices, compatriots who see their own fate and that of their nation’s history and literary tradition reflected in the mirror the writer’s labour. It is all so neatly sewn up. Of course, I enjoy no such privilege. I belong to that nomad tribe, the great unwashed, those people born in the joins between continental shelves, in the unclaimed interstices between time zones, strung across latitudes. A tribe of no fixed locus, the homeless, the stateless. I have two passports and quite a variety of other documents to identify me, all of which tell the world where I have been, but not who I am, nor where I am going to…
A petrodollar summer?
