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Wtf
by w 04 Nov '20

04 Nov '20

Funny how things have changed. A mainstream democratic election campaign using tactical media tropes like https://trumpcovidplan.com/ and tactical media activists turning into mainstream media hacks, like Yesman Andy in https://progressive.org/op-eds/elect-biden-then-give-him-power-servin-20102… Strange times.

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ask thingist: what is the name of the year 2020?
by sebastian＠rolux.org 02 Nov '20

02 Nov '20

[via https://thegermanissue.com/texts/what_is_the_name_of_the_year_2020.html] What Is the Name of the Year 2020? This summer, when re-reading Peter-Paul Koch's essay "Making <time> safe for historians,"(1) I was, once again, reminded that years should be treated as names, not as numbers. This may be most obvious to those of us who have ever tried to arithmetically operate with dates that lie outside the confines of our immediate present – but the issue at hand is more than just a technical problem. Just like, over time, cyclical concepts of time have gone out of fashion,(2) the postulate that human history will, and must, remain in alignment with a monotonically ascending sequence of integers, has been running out of steam for quite a while, and may have already entered its trajectory towards the dustbin of said history.(3) Until organized religion planted the dubious origins of today's numbering schemes, the rise and fall of kings and dynasties was a rather obvious choice for naming otherwise uneventful years.(4) The Roman Consular Years are one of many examples,(5) and when historians try to map them back onto the set of numbers, the shaky foundations of human historiography become painfully apparent. But there were always those outlier years when it was hard to make out who was actually in power, or when being in power, or not, didn't seem to make much of a difference. 2020 appears to be a special year in many ways. It is also one of the rare years whose name - its "number" - already had a proper meaning. Until the year itself arrived, 20/20 used to be synonymous with "perfect vision,"(6) and one could argue that the year so far has reinforced this meaning. "2020 feels as if someone had switched on the light: Everything is the same as before, just much more so, and all of a sudden, everything appears much clearer."(7) Yet, "perfect vision" may not be the last word when it comes to putting a name on the year that we're in. The Chinese name for 2020 is "The Year of the Metal Rat,"(8) which evokes the image of a mutated robotic rodent that gnaws at the foundations of our global order. The United States, one day in the future, may remember 2020 as "The 4th Year of the 45th Dynasty," and there is not much comfort to be found in that name either. But what other names can we already think of, now that most of 2020 lies behind us?(9) For inspiration, a short selection of years that were more special than others is included below.(10) (A few of the entries are just movie titles... sorry for that ;-)) 1978: The Year of the Three Popes 1888: The Year of the Three Emperors 1066: The Year of the Three Kings #1 1483: The Year of the Three Kings #2 1936: The Year of the Three Kings #3 1992: A Year of Kings(11) 1991: The Year Punk Broke 1965: The Year We Were Nowhere 1978: In a Year With 13 Moons 2001: A Space Odyssey 2010: The Year We Make Contact 1816: The Year Without a Summer 1848: The Year of Revolutions 1914: One or Several Wolves? -333: bei Issos Keilerei 2000: Y2K 1968: "1968" 1971: WTF happened in 1971?(12) My own pick for 2020 would be: In a Year of Leaky Abstractions. Notes: (1) https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/making_time_saf.html (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_time (3) The concept of linear time and history has been challenged on many fronts, from post-colonial studies to quantum mechanics. It has also been experimentally abandoned in practice (see, for example, https://www.blackquantumfuturism.com), and some of the findings look rather promising. (4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnal_year (5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_consuls. In fact, the Roman reign over time has never ended, and left us with one of the most broken naming schemes in existence: the names of our months, where ancient emperors are followed by cardinal numbers that are all off by two. To _mix_ names and numbers is never a good idea. (6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity (7) not attributed to anyone in particular (8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_zodiac. We are dealing with a lunar calendar here, so the Chinese year "2020" would be the one that begins on January 25, 2020, and ends on February 12, 2021. (9) I am aware that this question is both premature (history is usually written from a safe distance) and misguided (history is usually written by the winners). But maybe that's the point here. (10) Obviously, any such list, and one could make much better ones, will show, by omission, that most historical events refuse to align with the Earth's revolution around the sun. That's why we also have The Day the Music Died, Ten Days That Shook the World, The Week of Blood, The Summer of Love, The Years of Lead, The Greatest Hits of the 80s, and The Short Century. But whatever calendar units we choose: putting names on them will always remain a hopelessly heliocentric approach to human history. Science and/or fiction may eventually come up with better ideas. (11) according to Brian Springer's film Spin: https://0xdb.org/0114512/00:00:31 (12) https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2009/msg00016.html. I personally suspect that this is off-by-one, and 1972 ("The Year We Left the Moon") was the year in question – but maybe that's just my own preference. Images: https://thegermanissue.com/jpg/XX_XX.jpg [via https://pad.ma/documents/BKZ/100] https://thegermanissue.com/jpg/20_20.jpg [via https://pad.ma/LBT/00:00:16]

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3 colors
by w 18 Oct '20

18 Oct '20

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Kulturfragen
by w 29 Sep '20

29 Sep '20

Helen Pluckrose on gender, race and identity politics: https://ondemand-mp3.dradio.de/file/dradio/2020/09/27/helen_pluckrose_ueber… Btw, I was recently informed that wearing a wrist watch signifies "White Supremacy Culture." Doe.

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The War Is Coming
by sebastian＠rolux.org 10 Sep '20

10 Sep '20

The War is Coming For Ghayath al-Madhoun and his million Arab poets 1. I decided to leave Syria the day a stray bullet passed in front of my eyes. That day I realized my homeland was not my homeland, my blood not my blood, and my freedom belonged to a freedom fighter who didn't think to ask my permission before he shot me: a lack of courtesy we encounter often in war time. 2. If they are going to kill me, better to kill me in a foreign language. 3. On the road from Damascus to Berlin I met an old soldier from Dara'a who couldn't carry his nightmares anymore. I wrapped them and put them in my suitcase; at the airport I paid the fine for excess baggage. 4. Whoever is not afraid to cross the border carries the war on his back. 5. Swap your best shirt for a bulletproof vest, your poems for the first chapter of the Koran and your house in Athens for a throne atop Mount Aigaleo so you can survey from on high the coming war. 6. This war is trite and pedestrian, filled with similes and ornate adjectives, its history is written in the font Comic Sans, violence so limitless the war doesn't know where to put it, one grave for every thousand corpses, one shadow for every thousand survivors, it's an indelicate war, barrels vomiting explosives, steel cylinders filled with accessories for washing machines and car parts, the death that disseminates is an earthy death, this war is rightfully ours because in it we have buried all our loved ones. 7. On the 7th of January 2014, the United Nations stopped counting Syria's dead. This decision certified mathematics as the science of quality, not quantity, of living labor, not shapes, of time, not space - in other words, mathematics is the science that studies the material relations among all countable objects. 8. By the end of 2015, according to Facebook, 311 friends of mine had died since the start of the war. I decided to shut down my account: death must have a beginning, middle, and end. I can't spend my life in its wake. 9. I, Ahmed, son of Aisha, although nothing more than a humble migrant, wish to apologize on behalf of the Syrians to Greek men and women for filling their televisions with our deaths as they eat their dinners and wait for their favorite shows, I wish to apologize to the municipal authorities for leaving our trash on their beaches and polluting their shores with tons of plastic, we are uncivilized and we have no environmental awareness, I wish to apologize to the hotel owners and tour operators for damaging the island tourist industry, I wish to apologize for shattering the stereotype of the miserable migrant with our mobile phones and clean clothes, I wish to apologize to the coast guard who have the thankless task of sinking our boats, to the police for standing in disorderly lines, to the bus drivers who have to wear surgical masks to protect themselves from the diseases we carry, I also wish to make a most humble apology to Greek society for exceeding the capacity of their detention camps and for sleeping in their squares and parks - finally, I wish to apologize to the Greek government who had to request additional funds from the European Union in order to pay the purveyors who stock the detention camps, as well as the bus drivers, the police, the coast guard, the tour operators, the hotel owners, the municipal authorities, and the television stations. 10. "Don't worry," said the bullet, "I'll go in and out." I explained to her that I couldn't allow it since when she left she was bound to take some of my memories - like the face of the girl I loved in the fifth grade, the voice of the imam the first time my father took me to pray, the smell of the freshly baked bread in my grandmother's house, the fingers of my teacher as she taught me to write the word الحرب and Van Basten's final goal in the Euro of '88. 11. It's well known that no organization can buy arms on the black market without American authorization. This is one of the reasons I never managed to understand the difference between enlightenment and genocide. 12. If you don't want to be canon fodder, if you don't want the war to catch you with your pants down, put on that thinking cap, double down the class struggle, get organized, triple down the class struggle, fight, fill your pockets with rocks, stick to your guns. Out with the Left! Bring back the Spartacists! Out with the NGO's! Bring back Garibaldi's brigades! Out with the Humanists! Bring back the Italian Autonomists! The slaughter is about to begin.

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Bernard Stiegler : Retourner le confinement en liberté de faire une expérience
by w 11 Aug '20

11 Aug '20

Bernard Stiegler: «Retourner le confinement en liberté de faire une expérience» Aussi paradoxal que cela puisse paraître, lorsque j’appris au mois de février 1983 que j’allais être libéré dans les jours suivants d’une peine de réclusion que je purgeais au centre de détention de Muret [Haute-Garonne], passé le premier moment de la joie de me savoir bientôt revenir auprès des miens, j’en vins presque aussitôt à me demander comment j’allais maintenir ce qu’il y avait de meilleur dans la situation carcérale qui avait été la mienne depuis quatre ans et huit mois que j’explorais ce que j’appelais la vertu de la prison. Ayant eu l’année précédente deux permissions de sortir, j’avais tout de suite compris que la libération pouvait tout aussi bien devenir une aliénation plus grande – plus grande que celle qui m’avait conduit en prison. Durant la période carcérale, et avec le soutien de Gérard Granel [philosophe, 1930-2000], j’avais méticuleusement élaboré une discipline extrêmement stricte, laquelle, au fil des ans, m’apporta des satisfactions de plus en plus intenses – évidemment au prix de peines, mais il en va toujours ainsi (comme dans l’escalade ou le marathon). Commencer par la lecture d’un texte de Mallarmé Je compris très vite que, pour ne pas souffrir du vide absolu qu’impose la détention, il me fallait travailler intensément. C’est pourquoi je parvins en quelques semaines à établir un programme quotidien grâce auquel dès mon réveil ou presque, je me dirigeais vers ce que Karl Popper a appelé « le troisième monde », « qui est surtout le monde de la pensée scientifique, de la pensée poétique et des œuvres d’art ». A cette époque, je prenais toujours cette direction en commençant par la lecture d’un texte de Mallarmé : cela mettait les idées en place. Je finissais la journée avec Proust, et entre les deux, j’étudiais en lisant le matin et en écrivant l’après-midi (avant tout à partir de mes lectures). Il est bien connu que la neutralisation, la suspension ou l’interruption (on dirait en grec l’épokhè) de la relation à ce que Popper appelle le premier monde et le deuxième monde (les états physiques du monde et les états mentaux du sujet) favorise ce que dans le langage de la psychanalyse on appellerait la sublimation. J’expérimentais cela jour après jour, sans aucune échappatoire possible, et cela devint une extraordinaire aventure dans ce troisième monde – étayée par l’encadrement universitaire de l’UFR de philosophie de Toulouse le Mirail, et grâce au télé-enseignement (par courrier postal, et non par vidéo). Ce ne fut possible que grâce à Granel, aux soutiens que je reçus de ma famille, à l’intelligence du directeur de la maison d’arrêt, et parce que j’étais seul en cellule. Il n’y avait alors dans les prisons ni téléphone ni télévision – seulement la radio, les journaux (pour qui pouvait les acheter) et les livres (empruntés à la bibliothèque ou apportés par Gérard). La radio me permettait de suivre l’actualité brièvement (j’écoutais le journal de 12 h 30 en déjeunant), et les livres me donnaient accès au troisième monde dont je tentais de me nourrir pour devenir capable d’un jour revenir aux premier et deuxième mondes. Le confinement actuel, quant aux conditions dans lesquelles il pourrait être fructueux, est comparable à celui que j’ai connu en détention, malheureusement d’abord en cela que très peu de détenus bénéficient de leur période de réclusion, et ce parce que, pour la plupart d’entre eux, les conditions ne sont pas réunies, à commencer par le fait qu’ils vivent dans la promiscuité (sauf en centres de détention), que souvent ils ne savent pas lire, que désormais la télévision est dans les cellules, etc. – outre qu’ils ne sont pas accompagnés par un ange gardien tel Gérard Granel. Cet état de fait n’est cependant en rien une fatalité. L’exécution de la peine peut être l’occasion d’une chance autant qu’il est possible – tout comme une maladie peut être une chance, ainsi que l’enseigne Georges Canguilhem en citant Ludovic Dugas puis Frédéric Nietzsche : « La maladie est (…) une expérimentation de l’ordre le plus subtil, instituée par la nature elle-même dans des circonstances bien déterminées et avec des procédés dont l’art humain ne dispose pas : elle atteint l’inaccessible. » (Dugas cité par Canguihem). « La valeur de tous les états morbides consiste en ceci qu’ils montrent sous un verre grossissant certaines conditions qui, bien que normales, sont difficilement visibles à l’état normal. » (Nietzsche cité par Canguilhem). L’invention d’une nouvelle façon de vivre Le confinement (carcéral, sanitaire ou guerrier) est une sorte de pathologie sociale, et lorsqu’il s’impose, il convient de le retourner en liberté de faire une expérience – laquelle peut procurer d’extraordinaires surprises portant en elles un potentiel salvateur de bifurcation, et engendrer ce que Canguilhem appelle une normativité – c’est-à-dire l’invention d’une nouvelle façon de vivre. Mais tout comme la maladie, cette expérience peut détruire, annihiler, tuer : cette possibilité en est le prix. Pour la plupart des détenus, le confinement carcéral est une catastrophe, qui les enfonce toujours plus terriblement dans la fatalité. Et cependant une telle expérience, pour autant précisément que l’on en puisse faire une expérience, et non un châtiment, peut être d’une richesse sans pareil. Le confinement en cours devrait être l’occasion d’une réflexion de très grande ampleur sur la possibilité et la nécessité de changer nos vies. Cela devrait passer par ce que j’avais appelé, dans Mécréance et discrédit (Galilée, 2004), un otium du peuple. Ce devrait être l’occasion d’une revalorisation du silence, des rythmes que l’on se donne, plutôt qu’on ne s’y plie, d’une pratique très parcimonieuse et raisonnée des médias et de tout ce qui, survenant du dehors, distrait l’homme d’être un homme. Préserver en particulier la virginité du matin de toute intrusion médiatique est essentiel : le matin peut alors devenir une fructification du vierge, du vivace et du bel aujourd’hui pour autant qu’il soit conduit avec ce que les stoïciens appellent tekhnè tou biou et Foucault « technique de soi ». Lire cet entretien de 2016 : Bernard Stiegler : « Je propose la mise en place d’un revenu contributif, qui favorise l’engagement dans des projets » C’est un tel apprentissage, c’est-à-dire un effort – qui devrait venir au cœur des réflexions de ceux qui devront à l’avenir trouver les voies d’un après-Covid-19. Lorsque, avec Patrick Braouezec, nous avons proposé d’expérimenter un revenu contributif sur le territoire de Plaine commune [établissement public territorial dont il est le président, en Seine-Saint-Denis], c’était une façon de soutenir un tel otium du peuple, et sur le mode des intermittents du spectacle qui ne trouvent des emplois intermittents que pour autant qu’ils cultivent un tel otium, c’est-à-dire une fructification de leurs singularités. Un confinement d’ampleur biosphétique Je pense ici tout particulièrement à la génération de Greta Thunberg, en direction de laquelle, avec Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, nous avons créé l’Association des amis de la génération Thunberg, et avec laquelle nous tentons de créer une école itinérante cultivant un tel otium en vue d’« étonner la catastrophe », pour citer Patrick Boucheron citant Victor Hugo, et inventer ainsi une nouvelle normativité. La génération Thunberg fait l’expérience du confinement d’ampleur biosphétique qui caractérise la fin de l’ère anthropocène dans laquelle nous tous nous sentons enfermés, et où nous tentons de vivre toujours plus près du désespoir. Le désespoir est aussi une expérience, dont il peut être beaucoup appris (n’est-ce pas le sens de Pâques chez les chrétiens ?), pour autant qu’il en soit pris soin comme de ce qui peut, dans certaines circonstances, devenir une forme sublime d’énergie. Published on April 19 and August 7, 2020 in Le Monde (Article réservé aux abonnés) https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2020/04/19/bernard-stiegler-retourner…

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Sixteen Beaver / Society of the Friends of the Virus Volume 4
by Caspar Stracke 10 Aug '20

10 Aug '20

(by way of Sixteen Beaver) Society of the Friends of the Virus Volume 4 / LIFE IS NOT A COMMODITY LANGUAGE IS NOT A COMMODITY EARTH IS NOT A COMMODITY HEALTH IS NOT A COMMODITY KNOWLEDGE IS NOT A COMMODITY AIR IS NOT A COMMODITY WATER IS NOT A COMMODITY LAND IS NOT A COMMODITY ... A COLONY ... THE COMMODIFICATION/COLONIZATION OF LIFE LANGUAGE EARTH MUST BE BROUGHT TO A HALT, PROLIFERATE THE STRIKE* Here is Volume 4: http://centreparrhesia.org/vol_4_society_of_the_friends.pdf <http://centreparrhesia.org/vol_4_society_of_the_friends.pdf> *The notion of strike invoked here, as well as other points emerging in this volume have been elaborated or engaged with in previous volumes. All of them can be found here: http://centreparrhesia.org/ <http://centreparrhesia.org/> ______________________________________ Videos from Previous Assemblings We are hopeful to have more soon, but the most recent video we have shared in the link below is our meeting on 'milpa' (as it is practiced and nurtured by comrades in the Yucatan) as a way of thinking concretely around convivial tools which can hold together social infrastructures of community. To view visit: http://16beavergroup.org/assembling/ <http://16beavergroup.org/assembling/> Testing Assembling - Movement 18 - Valiana Aguilar and Ángel Kú on Milpa and the Social Infrastructures of Community with Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy Also, to have a sense of the questions that were present in the context of struggles in Beirut before and during the pandemic, which the recent explosions are expression and exacerbation of, you can watch Movement 9, in which our friends Haig Aivazian and Göksun Yazici shared notes on the situtaions in Lebanon and Turkey respectively. _______________________________________________ 16 Beaver Group Exodus: 16 Beaver Street Contested: New York for more info visit: http://www.16beavergroup.org <http://www.16beavergroup.org/> to subscribe: general-join(a)16beavergroup.org <mailto:general-join@16beavergroup.org> to unsubscribe: general-leave(a)16beavergroup.org <mailto:general-leave@16beavergroup.org>

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the current thing
by w 01 Aug '20

01 Aug '20

The current thing is now online at: https://the.current.thing.net Kudos to Caspar and Keith! Go and buy a print copy! Edition of 500. I get two.

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The Virus Is Our Idea of Ourselves
by sebastian＠rolux.org 30 Jul '20

30 Jul '20

The Virus Is Our Idea of Ourselves by Claire Fontaine "Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, 'I would prefer not to.'" [1] "In The Undercommons if we beginc anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you." [2] In the midst of a global crisis with no solution in sight, the strategy of total refusal appears irresponsible. No matter how explicitly corrupt and dangerous for itself and the planet the current political organization of everything is: according to most voices in the media we need constructive proposals, seemingly impossible reforms, demented trust, and a good dose of fear and submission. For many of the subjectivities who rebelled in this climate for the past forty years, organization has proven increasingly complicated and claims have become less and less federating; precariousness and fragmentation have been blamed for creating dis-homogeneous experiences. This has allowed repression to hit harder and working conditions to worsen. The dismantlement of the welfare state and workers' rights has gone ahead whilst subjectivities were inexplicably adjusting to the disaster. Struggle has come to define the psychological trouble brought by this new condition in which fighting for one's rights is an almost ungraspable possibility. Internalized violence doesn't only come from one's vulnerable socioeconomic condition, but from the burden of the political defeat that causes it. The return of fascism under so many forms wouldn't be understandable without taking into account the lack of society's anti-bodies against it, brought along by the depression and self-hatred of all the generations of rebels that have seen their physical and emotional world crumbling down under gentrification and mass unemployment. Debt is one of the tools of this oppression; another is widespread poverty (even amongst the employed population). Though being rather common strategies for governance, what is new is that nowadays they are experienced as deeply individual, depending on personal failures, shameful and non-federating. People of all classes sense that they have personal responsibility for an order of things that is destroying them as human beings. They resent what is ruining them but also fear the internal crisis of the power structure that is harming them, fearful that worst conditions can arise; whenever racism kills, poverty strikes, or climate change proves the impossibility of capitalism, they feel guilty and complicit rather than angry. This phase of capitalism has managed to render integration to the productive chain as far more desirable and urgent than anything else, including health, mental balance, human relationships, and a meaningful life. The mass of the constantly excluded pressing outside the gates of whatever we ourselves are included in, the anxiety of losing one's place is more intense and real than any solidarity toward the people in need can be. The deep awareness of being disposable is poisonous. This has allowed work to become more and more invasive in everybody's lives and the general perception of professional experiences to be toxic, dissocializing, competitive, and selfish. Having a job is now a lonely and scary business. And yet in the past few months work has been presented as massively unessential: the COVID-19 measures made it clear that key workers are a tiny overexploited percentage of the population; all the others can just sit back and relax or do their chatter on zoom, and the world will keep turning. In this deep financial crisis, jobs have also become increasingly hard to find and badly paid, but the superstition still stands that working is the only way to provide for one's individual needs and only means to exist as a person; any other condition is considered a befallen one. Because the dream has become precisely what makes the dream impossible, and here capitalism shows its devilish genius: by longing for vast depopulated spaces, powerful cars, expensive lives or just having enough to live in unaffordable cities without having to work several jobs, people run the rat race and don't fight. The objective failure of the economy at keeping society together and preserving class solidarity simply to reproduce the species isn't experienced as a scandal but internalized on a subjective level as the anxiety of being stuck with others that we don't understand. The separating effect of neoliberalism and the psychological weakening of the isolated individuals is not an accident or a side effect: it's vital for this stage of the productive process, where our mental balance needs to be cannibalized in order to secure adhesion to the unacceptable status quo. Limiting social interactions to the chosen ones isn't seen as impoverishing but as hygienic. Self-isolation during the pandemic had something familiar, both for the social classes who have been practicing it for a long time and for many others who can't do so: not only viruses go through the body but also power relationships. The social Darwinism of Boris Johnson's herd immunity theory is in reality the secret murmur of all the liberalist policies, it's the muteness of the stock market's graphs, it's the bureaucracy of any office, the biopower and the necropolitics that we have normalized, although they are bankrupting our lives. Survival cannot and should not be the horizon of any politics. And yet very violent explosions of conflicts have taken place in the past years amongst the populations that cannot participate in the dream of a life made of material comfort, human separation, and electronic interactions. They weren't professionally characterized or homogeneous in terms of class, they were disorderly, transversal, intersectional, critical of the social pact that excluded them. They were human strikes. Women have, through the women's strikes and the #MeToo movement, highlighted the paradoxes of integrating themselves within the professional world which is ecologically unsustainable, economically and emotionally criminal, and informed by toxic ethics. (Rape as a culture goes further than the violence against women: it's the way we, as a civilization, relate to every living source of energy and nourishment.) Indigenous and nomadic populations, who have seen for centuries their way of life definitively and unmistakably rendered impossible, now witness the achievement of a long cycle of colonization as both extraction and genocide. War, the construction of pipelines and walls, the deforestation and the depletion of any form of subsistence outside of waged work, generates profits and kills the unexploitable. Their environment being their livelihood, for some people it only takes intensive agriculture to be wiped out. And then there are black lives: a site of extraordinary manifestation of systemic violence in all its forms. In the United States the black workforce has been kept, since desegregation, in a state of informal slavery, through exclusion, daily racism, and all sorts of institutionalized abuse, including mass incarceration and killings. Black Lives Matter has been possibly the most educational movement of the century for white people of all classes because, even more than the Black Panthers, it has taught everyone that whiteness cannot be reformed. Demanding that one's life matters for others is beyond a political claim. Life isn't naked before being stripped of its value by society and produced as repugnant and excludable. The looting that took place after George Floyd's death was deemed as politically unacceptable by many, but the truth is that a certain level of outrage cannot be translated into orderly words – it's beyond political because it points to what politics doesn't cover: the naked life deprived of any protection. Only smashing the surroundings can echo the infinite damage done to broken people and broke households by a broken system. The lack of integration is blamed on patriarchy, racism, colonialism, but one is still left with the fact that wanting to change the (unchangeable) condition of being a woman, a Native American or black comes down to self-hatred when the reason for one's discrimination is one's physiological and human condition. The deepest impoverishment comes from the lack of alternatives when faced with this blackmail: the only reformist path available for these people would be to become their own enemies, pretending that it's possible and acceptable to enter the very system that has exterminated and rejected most of them. And the system cannot be reformed because it thrives on this rejection, on the unpaid housework, the slave labor, the pillage of natural resources. For capitalism, refusing a (symbolic, cultural, and economic) value to things is the only way of making profit from them. Because we cannot ask to mend the disaster, what is 'radical' now isn't the perspective that refuses reformism, our present condition of communal but not communized humiliation, our lack of political dignity orchestrated by a system of government that has found in our self-respect a new land to colonize and destroy. To trace lines of flight we don't need to become invisible, to cultivate opacity, to dive into conspiracy theory, we just need to stay illegible and unaffiliated and learn how to collude with each other's disaffiliation. Carla Lonzi wrote in 1975: "What I am is pathetically invisible and inaudible and I can't use it. Now I am sure that I am not making a drama of it, because it is in fact a drama, my decision of not falling into the trap anymore is taken [...]. I, who don't exist socially, can recognize another woman who doesn't exist socially and so on. But my consciousness isn't recognized by culture so this chain of recognition between non-existing is valid only between us. I don't see the possibility of a different man because it is unthinkable to give up the social identity that he has for one that doesn't exist." [3] If the man/woman relationship offers the most tragic example of the impossibility of being recognized as a political subject even inside intimate interactions, it's because the occultation of the economic aspect of it is done through the ideology of love. In fact, not only is exploitation possible, authorized, even foundational of the social structure of our society, but it provides the model for heterosexual love. The love of the advertisements, the pop songs, the Hollywood movies is informed by the paradigms of conquest, enclosure, and private property. The mental balance of subjects resting on their relational life, the fact that entire parts of the population are simply dehumanized and represented as naked life threatens our own self-esteem: human fabric is what makes worlds because worlds happen when we can say "we." The nonsense of patriarchy, the darkest mystery that supports its economic metabolism, is its sexual desire and supposed affection for women, who are in fact objectified, despised, and constantly discriminated against in every single social class. From our houses where we have performed remote work we have experienced again the different intensities of gendered multitasking. We saw Deborah Haynes on July 1st being shut down by Sky News because her son barged into her home office, where she was broadcasting live, asking for two biscuits; from the studio her male colleague commented laconically "We'll leave Deborah Haynes in full flow there with some family duties." In 2017 Robert Kelly was subject to a similar incident on the BBC: his two toddlers bolted into the room while he was on air but his wife promptly grabbed them and the interview went on. Last March he was consulted as an authority in the matter of smart working on the Today show. The profile, titled "'BBC Dad' reflects on viral work-from-home moment: 'Mostly fun, sometimes weird'" reads: "Robert Kelly, who inadvertently became a viral star in 2017 when his two children barged into a live interview he was giving, reflected on his family's internet fame in an essay published by an Australian think tank." [4] If a husband, a friend, someone had come to prevent Deborah Haynes's son from insisting on-camera for his biscuits, she wouldn't have felt the humiliation and neither would we. But she was alone, that's why her child needed her, and that's why she could be shut down. The virus has helped us understand why self-abolition has become an appealing and more realistic perspective than either the feminism of equality or the one of difference. Maya Gonzalez and Marina Vishmidt have explored the idea of self-abolition in the specific case of gender and the eccentric position that women hold within the productive/reproductive system of society. Sharing the work of care will never be an option under patriarchy, no matter the policies: the simple fact that the conversation is taking place at a personal and at a political level, that the care of children should be and isn't a task for men and women alike, is the sign that we are living under a regime that doesn't value human life whenever it isn't immediately productive, and as such is self-hating therefore unreformable. The only processes to revalue life are revolutionary, because only in the struggle, as Silvia Federici states, do we belong to ourselves. Our expropriation runs deep and the refugees' condition is a mirror and an allegory of it. Human masses excluded from all service and benefits of contemporary civilization are growing. According to the UN Refugee Agency, in 2020 at least 79.5 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 26 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18. The time has come for the hypocrisy of the humanitarian ideology, through which capitalism preserves its progressive and civilizing image, to be unmasked: human rights are not being protected because there have never been any rights outside of workers' rights, the ones that had been fought for in productive places, where strikes could actually cause quantifiable economic losses. All other struggles have been of a revolutionary nature and they have demanded a change of civilization, a change of paradigm of perception and understanding reality, the revolution of the current system of value. As long as private property, with all its psychological and physiological ravages will be interpreted as a "reasonable" or "necessary" distribution of the sensible, we won't be able to think. This means that for now millions of subjectivities cannot exist; they are in the limbo of naked life and can't access any symbolic status, any political revolt. There is no rationality on the side of the world governance that can bind us to any loyalty in front of this. There is no identity based on institutional recognition that will allow us to transform the current state of things. We need to struggle as whatever singularities. We need to go on strike from our production and reproduction of subjectivity, we call the strike that will modify both the political situation and ourselves in the process, the human strike. It can be quiet, imperceptible and deeply transformative, irreversible. We can abolish the meaning of being black or being a woman as we abolished the one of being a slave. We won't be complicit in our oppression. An Italian feminist slogan says "We don't believe what they say about us," we must negotiate the terms of how we are perceived and valued. The same must be done with every form of identity, the ones that burden us because they carry a stigma and the ones that separate us from others because they are privileged: they both need to be dismantled, they are both forms of submission. The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the lack of value that human life has under our current political regime, the toxicity of our daily living conditions, and how easily our solitude and surveillance can be enforced by different governments. Fred Moten writes in The Undercommons that "the coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that we've already recognized that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?" [5] Now these findings are in our hands and we no longer need to respect what doesn't respect us. We need lines of flight that help us to become complicit in our dispossession rather than our submission, to transform it into a communal force, shape a reality that is never represented and never will be: that reality is illegible because it's yet to be written. [1] Herman Melville, Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, 1856. [2] Jack Halberstam, "The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons," introduction to The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, by Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), p. 8. [3] Carla Lonzi, Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978), pp. 1172–1173. [Translation by the authors.] [4] Scott Stump, "'BBC Dad' reflects on viral work-from-home moment: 'Mostly fun, sometimes weird,'" Today, NBC, March 17, 2020 [March 13, 2018], https://www.today.com/parents/bbc-dad-revisits-his-family-s-viral-moment-on… r-t124934. [5] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, pp. 140–141. // via https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/claire-fontaine-idea-ourselves/

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by w 22 Jul '20

22 Jul '20

THURSDAY 07/23/20 2PM EST Phantom Threads: Restoring The Thing BBS This event is organized by the New Museum’s digital art affiliate Rhizome to mark the launch of a restoration of The Thing BBS, which will be presented as part of First Look: New Art Online. It follows on from an event exploring the community and culture of The Thing BBS on Tuesday, July 21 at 2pm. To receive access instructions and a reminder, please RSVP here: https://www.newmuseum.org/calendar/view/1676/phantom-threads-restoring-the-… Founded in New York City in 1991, The Thing was a Bulletin Board System–a forum where users could post and exchange messages–focusing on contemporary art and cultural theory. Among the tens of thousands of BBSes that flourished from the late 1970s to the 1990s, The Thing was notable for its design and community dynamics. Considered by its founder Wolfgang Staehle to be a kind of social sculpture, The Thing included features such as an anonymized chatroom, and it was a hub for online experimental writing. This history is little known, because most of the messages posted on The Thing BBS have been lost or otherwise inaccessible for many years. During his tenure as Rhizome’s digital conservator, Ben Fino-Radin began a research project to locate missing archives from The Thing BBS. He succeeded in securing a WordPerfect file containing a screen dump of more than 400 pages of messages saved by a hacker named Blackhawk, former sysadmin of The Thing. With the support of a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities. Rhizome has undertaken a project to recover, make accessible, and study this material. This event marks the launch of a web-based interface to offer access to many of the recovered threads from this research process, which will be copresented by Rhizome and the New Museum as part of First Look: New Art Online. Following Tuesday’s event “Consensual Hallucinations: Early Online Writing from The Thing BBS Archives,” this event brings together Rhizome’s Preservation Director Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome Software Curator Lyndsey Moulds, and Ben Fino-Radin, director of Small Data Industries, for a conversation about the philosophical and practical questions that arose in process of offering access to the archives of The Thing BBS.

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