Fincher's Tattoo

David Fincher's new film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo expresses a profound sense of female competence. Not only does Lisbeth Salander transform victimization she embodies the greatest virtues of the dark pathos of feminine power. If you haven't seen it you should go now. @brightabyss

#thegirlwiththedragontattoo

dispossessed

via Ashley Wood 

atmospheres unknown

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.”

- Henry David Thoreau

Letter From Orwell

A letter from George Orwell to his publisher as he was finishing 1984:

h/t mishearance

War Is a Racket

In 1935 retired U.S Army General Smedley D. Butler published a book entitled ‘War Is A Racket’ in which he lays bare the economic profiteering and commercial nature of publicly funded state warfare. In the book Butler was shockingly frank about his experience as a career military officer in the midst of a frenzy of wealthy elites clamoring to make profit from all sides of some of the earths most devastating conflicts.

The work is divided into five chapters:

1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits?
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!

In an often cited quote from the book Butler says:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Butler then summarizes the main points of his book in the following key passage:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

read the entire book: Here

Daniel Dennett - The Evolution of Purposes

Intro:

Before there was life on Earth, there were no purposes, no reasons. Things just happened. How could purposes emerge from such purposeless conditions? Looking back at the evolution of life on the planet, we can now see - if only dimly - the patterns that led to the exquisite functional organisations of matter that living forms exhibit. We human beings are the only living things that can represent these reasons, and comprehend them, but that does not make them illusory.

Recorded at the Carillo Gantner Theatre, Sidney Myer Asia Centre at the University of Melbourne on 15 November 2011:

Ted Bundy 1989

One of the reasons this website has been 'dark' for weeks now is I have started a new project in my professional life related to psychiatric institutions and the policies and practices that animate them. As a result of this new challenge I have returned to the writings of Foucault, Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, but also to media and more popular writings on madness, abnormality and so-called psychotic individuals. I find my best work is done when it is informed by my indirect curiosities. Right now I'm trying to think the relations between flesh, fantasy, deviance, desire, compulsion, moral schema and social influence - and how these mix with institutional efforts to control and regulate the affairs of human life.

Below is an interview with Ted Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell, 1946-1989) the day before his execution on the electric chair, January 23, 1989, for the multiple kidnappings, rapes and murders of young women in the 1970s. Bundy was interviewed by (the self-righteous) Christian apologetic Dr. James Dobson from Raiford Prison in Starke, Florida.

Here Bundy talks at length of the influence of pornography, violent media and images on the evolution of his most deviant desires and murderous behaviours. It is a fascinating confession of a man who came to self-interprete his life through the lens of what seems to be a heightened moral sensibility.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space

From Michael König:

Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by Ron Garan, Satoshi Furukawa and the crew of expeditions 28 and 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011, who to my knowledge shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km. All credit goes to them.

WATCH ON FULL SCREEN

Shooting locations in order of appearance:

1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night
2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night
3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia
4. Aurora Australis south of Australia
5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night
6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
7. Halfway around the World
8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night
11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night
13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
14. Views of the Mideast at Night
15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night
17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
18. Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night

[ h/t Tim Morton ]

The Story of Broke

From The Story of Stuff Project:

"THE STORY OF BROKE - The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working. But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this ‘dinosaur economy’ on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money. The Story of Broke calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more—that can deliver jobs AND a healthier environment. It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better."

Watch More : Here

Gandhi and the Politics of Non-Violence

The video below is a teach-in presented by Professor Snehal Shingavi @ #OccupyAustin. His talk goes into the history of the India Liberation movement and critically examines the role Gandhi played in it. If we want to effectively call upon the mythos of the Mahatma to affect social change we need to seek honesty and build a space of understanding that compares and illuminates key tactics and strategies against ruling classes, instead of moralistically dismissing those tactics deemed “violent”. Dogmatic pacifists please take note!

'Gandhi and the Politics of Non-Violence'

by Professor Snehal Shingavi at #OccupyAustin:

You Are Not A Punk Rock Band

Dear Grunge,

You are not a Punk Rock Band. Just saying.

Not a bad thing, because i actually dislike Punk - although Rock and I are on speaking terms, which is cool since, you know, what happened 'that night' with Jazz at the lake house.

But I just wanted to put that out there. 



Yours truly,

Folk.

Operation DarkNet

"Pedophiles connecting to a concealed child pornography site got an unwelcome surprise last week, courtesy of the hacktivist group Anonymous. Lolita City, a child pornography site run on over a concealed “darknet,” has been taken down by Anonymous members, and account details of 1,589 users from the site’s database were posted as evidence.

The takedown is part of Anonymous’ Operation Darknet, an anti-child-pornography effort aimed at thwarting child pornographers operating on on the Tor network. Anonymous’ attack was focused on a hosting service called Freedom Hosting, which the group claims was the largest host of child pornography on Tor’s anonymized network. 'By taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites,” Anonymous claimed in its statement. “Among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date, containing more than 100GB of child pornography'."

The Life Of The Buddha

"If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism." -Albert Einstein

The following documentary (50mins) covers the life of Siddhartha Gautama, a young prince from India who went out to find the reason for Dukkha [suffering] of human life. He later found the reason of Dukkha and teached a way to live life. He was later known as the Buddha, the founder of "Buddhism".

[ see also the short doc The Buddha (20mins) ]

Bernard Stiegler on Man & Technics

Bernard Stiegler (b.1952) is a French philosopher currently at Goldsmiths, University of London and the Université de Technologie de Compiègne. He is best known for his major work Technics and Time. Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery.

Below are clips from the film The Ister:

See also:

The Theater of Individuation: Phase-shift and Resolution in Simondon and Heidegger

by Bernard Stiegler

We know very well that where Heidegger says that time is the veritable principle of individuation, Simondon responds that there is no principle of individuation, but the process of individuation.

Read More: Here

The Rhythm of Data

Data representation is becoming more and more interesting. In this simple but brilliant video, Alexander Chen shows how he transformed a time-based representation of the NYC subway system map into a model for a string instrument. Each intersection entails plucking, and the length of the plucked string is inversely proportional to the note’s height. Chen's own description of the project is below:

Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA's actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli's 1972 diagram. More details at: chenalexander.com

Conductor (2011) by Alexander Chen. Video capture.

Manuel DeLanda on Aristotle and Deleuze's Realism

From the European Graduate School:

In this lecture, Manuel De Landa discusses metaphysics, universality, particularity, generality, singularity, realism, mathematics, and social science in relationship to Leonhard Euler, Kurt Gödel, Henri Poincaré and Michel Foucault focusing on a priori truths, virtual capacities, affects, differential calculus, necessity and contingency. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011.

Žižek on Ironic Distantiations

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis.

Thank You #OWS!

“It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel the disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat worthy to do! . . . 

Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declareth all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate.”

- R.W Emerson, from "The Transcendentalist, a Lecture Read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842."

Process, Contact and Simultaneity: Riffing Off Shaviro

In a recent post responding to Graham Harman’s Cosmos and History article on Thomas Metzinger Steven Shaviro provides a sympathetic reading of Harman’s critique of Metzinger’s more reductionist tendencies as well as certain conclusions Metzinger draws about the essence (or lack thereof) of the human self.

My knowledge of Metzinger’s work is anemic, but if what Harman and Shaviro say about Metzinger’s arguments against the existence of “self” is accurate I would tend to agree that a description of the layered, embedded and processual nature of human cognition and self-consciousness contributes more to explaining what the self actually is (e.g., a distributed network of embodied and effectual activity) than explaining it away.

What interested me most about Shaviro’s post, however, was his lucid revisiting of his long-standing arguments against the “withdrawal” of objects in favor of a more Whiteheadian processual and eventual metaphysical vision. It is a fun day for me when someone as versed and insightful as Steven Shaviro re-ignites a bit of flame under the old ‘process vs. object’ debate.

To be clear, I think the debate almost always approaches a true non-debate from the standpoint of narratives and frameworks flexible enough to accommodate both process and object-hood, or interrelatedness and irreducibility, without dogmatically adhering to either side of such fantasized dichotomies. Entities simultaneously have a unique efficacy and irreducible substantially while being eternally vulnerable and open to the flow of atoms, energy, matter and information. And to privilege either of these facts is to make an undeniably human distinction based almost entirely on temperament. Moving equilibriums, temporal assemblages, open systems, processual events or, to use a term from Ian Bogost, “unit operations” are everywhere apparent and apprehendable: not just within the empirical (and complexity) sciences but also in our immediate awareness where things impinge, extend and interpenetrate our direct experience and lived bodies.

Shaviro then goes on to provide what, in my view, amounts to a definitive rehashing of the most salient arguments against conflating ontological contact with epistemological opacity in accounting for causality generally and how objects interact specifically. Bottom-line in the case of humans: visceral, sensational experience is not identical to “knowledge”. Likewise, encounters between objects can be direct but partial when those encounters result in the meeting of affective forces despite the lack of totality in the mutually responsive and 'translative' nature of those contacts (especially in the case of objects without central nervous systems). Contact and experience need not be encompassing to be 'direct'.

Below are excerpts from Shaviro’s post which get right to the key points:

“[A]ll “things” are “really” processes. But for me, this doesn’t mean that things (or Harman’s objects) are thereby “undermined” by something else that is more essential than they are. For the fact that objects are “reifications” of processes doesn’t mean that they are illusory, or even that they aren’t basic. For the endurance of things, or their establishment of an “identity,” as a result of “reification” (which I think would better be called, in Whiteheadian parlance, social transmission and inheritance) is something that is perfectly real in and of itself. Endurance is an accomplishment, a singular and specific achievement in every case.

Moreover, this endurance is not something that happens (as Metzinger seems to claim, at least according to Harman) in our perceptual process, but actually in reality itself, in the very things which we are in process of perceiving…

We are always in direct contact with reality — since we are a part of this reality, rather than being separate from it (i.e. rather than being “withdrawn”). We are not caught in some Cartesian or Humean mental prison, familiar only with our own sense impressions (or familiar only with our own languages, in the 20th century version of this line of thought). The point, however, is that this contact cannot be reduced to, or captured as, “knowledge"… [O]ur contact with other entities is not restricted just to relations of knowledge. Harman is right to say that my concept of a tree, however full and nuanced, will never be equal to the tree itself. But this does not negate the fact that the tree has “touched” me, and I have “touched” it, non-cognitively and unconceptually…

‘Phenomenal’ contact need not, and cannot, be reduced to “epistemic” contact. Contact among entities is ontological, not epistemological — and this other dimension, which Metzinger at least senses as a problem, is omitted entirely from Harman’s account, when he says that, because we do not actually know other entities, or even ourselves, therefore all entities must ‘withdrawn’ from one another — and even from themselves.” [underlines added]

I must emphasize here (in relation to Shaviro’s metaphor) that humans and other objects are never truly caught in a "prison" of translation, they are that prison. Affective entities are “prisons” (assemblages or apparatuses) situated in place, in the world, with 'doors' capable of being opened. As embodied matrices of capacity and relative depth, objects contact other objects or assemblages directly viz. all those inherent, onto-specific and characteristic sensitivities which define the limits of their constitutions. Yet, it is the relatively circumspect properties of specific sensitivities and capacity for response or adaptation which makes such contacts, exchanges, experiences or encounters partial. That is, interaction and causality are most often direct but partial.  [cf. my post Conjuring the Gap - re: what I call ontological intimacy]

There are more riches in Shaviro’s post than I can hope to plunder in this post so I suggest those curious go read the entire offering: here.

Jeffrey Sachs Message to Wall Street

Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Earth Institute and Professor of Sustainable Development, Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and the founder and co-President of the Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the United Nations Millennium Project's work on the Millennium Development Goals, eight internationally sanctioned objectives to reduce extreme poverty, hunger, and disease by the year 2015.

Sachs has been strongly criticized for past sympathies for privatization and neoliberal economic ideology, as well as his role in helping American business elites plunder the Russian economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sachs was an adviser to Eastern European governments in the implementation of so-called “economic shock therapy” during the transition from communism to a capitalist market system.

Since that time, and as a result of the overwhelming evidence that neo-liberal policies only advantage established economic powers, Sachs has increasingly advocated for more prudent regulatory practices and the building of an international system of aid and economic mutualism between wealthy nations and institutions and periphery populations in vulnerable geopolitical regions. Sachs now argues for what he calls in his most recent book, The Price of Civilization, a "mixed economy".

Sachs’ recent article in the Huffington Post is a surprisingly frank characterization of the #OccupyWallStreet movement, considering the fairly mainstream financial circles he operates within. Below are a few excerpts from the article, but I urge everyone to read the entire piece:

The protestors are not envious of wealth, but sick of corporate lies, cheating, and unethical behavior. They are sick of corporate lobbying that led to the reckless deregulation of financial markets; they are sick of Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal asking for trillions of dollars of near-zero-interest loans and bailout money for the banks, but then fighting against unemployment insurance and health coverage for those drowning in the wake of the financial crisis; they are sick of absurdly low tax rates for hedge-fund managers; they are sick of Rupert Murdoch and his henchman David Koch trying to peddle the Canada-to-Gulf Keystone oil pipeline as an honest and environmentally sound business deal, when in fact it would unleash one of the world's dirtiest and most destructive energy sources, Canada's oil sands, so that Koch can profit while the world suffers…

Here, then, Wall Street and Big Oil, is what it comes down to. The protesters are no longer giving you a free ride, in which you can set the regulations, set your mega-pay, hide your money in tax havens, enjoy sweet tax rates at the hands of ever-willing politicians, and await your bailouts as needed. The days of lawlessness and greed are coming to an end. Just as the Gilded Age turned into the Progressive Era, just as the Roaring Twenties and its excesses turned into the New Deal, be sure that the era of mega-greed is going to turn into an era of renewed accountability, lawfulness, modest compensation, honest taxation, and government by the people rather than by the banks.

Go read the entire article: here.

[ h/t Edward Berge ]

UPDATE OCT 21.2011:

Jeffrey Sachs at #OccupyWallStreet

Chris Hedges in Times Square, October 15, 2011

On October 15th Occupy TVNY met with Pullitzer prize-winning author and journalist Chris Hedges in Times Square, New York City where tens of thousands of people assembled on a global day of action. Chris shares his feelings on where the Occupy movement has come from and where it is heading.

Bennett, Bryant and Harman on Speculative Realism

Below Levi Bryant, Jane Bennett and Graham Harman delivered a series of interesting papers on ontology and speculative realism at The Center For The Humanities in New York on September 15th, 2011:

Speculative Realism
Levi R. Bryant, Jane Bennett, Graham Harman
Moderated by - Patricia Clough

How does the current “speculative turn” that has occurred in philosophy theorize the liveliness of objects? If speculative realism is staunchly non-anthropocentric, challenging Enlightenment notions of the subject, what are the ethical and political implications of such a stance? Join three preeminent speculative realist thinkers, Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman for an evening of conversation, theorization, and speculation drawn from their current writings. Patricia Clough will moderate the conversation. The related exhibition “And Another Thing” is on view in the gallery from September 14 to October 29, 2011.

Speculative Realism - Part One from The Center for the Humanities on Vimeo.

Speculative Realism - Part Two from The Center for the Humanities on Vimeo.

Monopoly World

This image has been widely circulated. As it should. If you are not shocked by the implications of what this image illustrates you might just be dramatically under-informed about how economic systems work. Occupy what?

click to enlarge

An Outside Jobs

On the occasion of getting an email from a reader asking what my thoughts are on Steve Jobs death and the accompanying public lament I only have this to say:

Billionaires don't make the world better.

Striking The Root of Wall Street Corruption

[ h/t @xenophrenia ]

Striking The Root of Wall Street Corruption from Sean McDaniel on Vimeo.

#OccupyWallStreet

Olbermann reads collective statement of Occupy Wall Street

#OccupyWallStreet

Trapped

ARE our prisons becoming the mental asylums of the 21st century? Living under brutal conditions and without access to medications and therapy we lock away people instead of helping to heal them - and by extension ourselves and our societies more broadly.

The 7 minute video below is a stark look at our current "justice" systems:

[ h/t Integral Options Cafe ]

Stock Trader Speaking Truth About the Coming Economic Collapse

Independent trader Alessio Rastani shocked BBC news anchors and the whole financial community on Monday (Sept 26/11) by speaking the truth about the looming economic crash in Europe and eventually around the world. The video below went “viral” within 24 hours and already has over 2 million views.

Particularly interesting was Rastani’s statement that “governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs does.” I’m still amazed at his candor considering he makes his living within the system he is so brutally exposing.

Martin Luther King Jr Speaks Zeitgeist

"Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and/or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambiance, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era."

Courtesy of TheFifthGreatApe.

Evan Thompson on Life and Mind

Evan Thompson is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and a leading researcher in theories of "enactivism" and embodied cognition. Thompson has written extensively on cognitive science, phenomenology, and the philosophy of mind. He is the co-author of the groundbreaking work The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991), and his most recent book, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (2007) is a brilliant update on his version of the embodied mind thesis.

Evan Thompson: "Mind in life and life in mind" from eSMCs on Vimeo.

Protevi on Embodiment, Enaction and Deleuze

I'm rebooted this post in order to present each of the eSMCs talks on their own. Below is a stimulating presentation by Lousiana State University philosopher John Protevi delivered at the eSMCs Summer School seminar "The Future of the Embodied Mind" in San Sebastián, Spain, September 5th-9th, 2011. Enjoy. [ h/t New APPS ]

Deleuze’s contribution to an enactive approach to biology

by John Protevi

Abstract: I will preface my presentation with a brief outline of the three-fold ontology of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Deleuze’s formula is that (1) intensive morphogenetic processes follow the structures inherent in (2) virtual differential multiplicities to produce (3) actual localized and individuated substances with extensive properties and differenciated qualities. Simply put, the actualization of the virtual, that is, the production of the actual things of the world, proceeds by way of intensive processes. Various authors have shown how this scheme provides an ontology for dynamic systems theory.

I will then suggest three ways in which this schema can provide a conceptual framework for an enactive approach to biology, keeping in mind at all times the tradeoff between the effort necessary for learning a new vocabulary and new ontological scheme versus the benefits of adopting that new framework. My model here is the work of Hubert Dreyfus in making the vocabulary and ontological scheme of Martin Heidegger relevant for cognitive science.

First, I will discuss Deleuze’s notion of a “larval subject” accompanying “spatio-temporal dynamisms” (= intensive morphogenetic processes) in relation to the sense-making of autonomous systems, as laid out in Thompson’s synthesis of Varela’s notion of autopoiesis and Di Paolo’s notion of adaptivity.

Second, I will discuss Deleuze’s notion of “counter-effectuation” (roughly speaking the feedback from actual and intensive to the virtual) in relation to Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s notion of environmentally induced phenotypic variation (= “developmental plasticity”) as the leader in evolution.

Finally, I will discuss two notions associated with Developmental Systems Theory in Deleuzean terms: a) the heterogenous nature of the developmental system (intra- and extra-somatic elements) in terms of Deleuze’s notion of “assemblage” and b) the notion of niche-construction in terms of Deleuze’s notion of “territorialization.”

 from eSMCs on Vimeo.

you can find related videos & resources: here

Embodied Minds and Thinking Bodies

Cognition at the crossroads: 

from embodied minds to thinking bodies

by Michael Wheeler

 from eSMCs on Vimeo.

you can find related videos & resources: here

Welcome to Climate Reality Now

Happening Right Now:

24 Presenters. 24 Time Zones. 13 Languages. 1 Message. 24 Hours of Reality is a worldwide event to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis. It will consist of a new multimedia presentation created by Al Gore and delivered once per hour for 24 hours, representing every time zone around the globe. Each hour people living with the reality of climate change will connect the dots between recent extreme weather events — including floods, droughts and storms — and the manmade pollution that is changing our climate. We will offer a round-the-clock, round-the-globe snapshot of the climate crisis in real time. The deniers may have millions of dollars to spend, but we have a powerful advantage. We have reality.

24 Hours of Reality will be broadcast live online from September 14 to 15, over 24 hours, representing 24 time zones and 13 languages. Watch the Live Stream below:

LEARN MORE: HERE

Talisman Energy Funding Climate Science Denial at the University of Calgary

From the Ottawa Citizen:

A major Alberta-based oil and gas company helped to kick-start an elaborate public relations project designed to cast doubt on scientific evidence linking human activity to global warming with a $175,000 donation in 2004 channelled through the University of Calgary, a newly-released letter has revealed.

The donation from Talisman Energy was the largest single contribution to a pair of trust accounts at the university that received $507,975 in donations to produce a video and engage in public relations, advertising and lobbying activities against the Kyoto Protocol and government measures to restrict fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Read More: Here

Some context from Wikipedia:

The August 2007 Newsweek cover story "The Truth About Denial" reported that "this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks, and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change." "As soon as the scientific community began to come together on the science of climate change, the pushback began," according to University of California, San Diego historian Naomi Oreskes. The article went on to say that individual companies and industry associations—representing petroleum, steel, autos and utilities, among others—formed lobbying groups to enlist greenhouse doubters to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," and to sow doubt about climate research just as cigarette makers had about smoking research.

The Democracy of Objects

Just returned home to find out Levi Bryant's Democracy of Objects is now available online for free. For those of you who don't know, Bryant is a philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalyst at Colin College whose work focuses on object-oriented ontology and social theory. His popular blog Larval Subjects is an inspiring example of a public intellectual applying his trade in a open, accessible and endlessly thought-provoking manner. Do yourself a favor: read, consider and buy his book.

The Buddha

Watch the full episode. See more The Buddha.

[ h/t Leon - After Nature ]

Tom Sparrow on Sensation and the Elements

I’m still waiting for an acquaintance to unlock the secret chambers of my former CPU’s operating system to gain access to my documents (including forthcoming posts on Integral Ecology), but at least I’m getting around to a lot of desired reading while I wait.

Currently I’m enjoying a few amazing essays by Tom Sparrow. Sparrow is a philosopher currently teaching at Slippery Rock University. And I couldn't be more excited about his forthcoming book, Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology. He blogs at Plastic Bodies.

Below is an extraordinary passage from Tom’s essay, “Bodies in Transit: The Plastic Subject of Alphonso Lingis”, where he is riffing off some core ideas in Lingis's work - talking up elementary life and sensuality as a fundamental mode:

“The elements that give life to each one of us by offering themselves as the very stuff of our existence are sensuous material—luminosity, tactility, and sonority bathe our sensitive bodies. As the real source of our nourishment, they lend us sensibility and illuminate our world. Through the elements, the affective quality of sensuality—the unbearable or ethereal modes of bare life—is able to condition our “spontaneity.” No one can spontaneously wrest their psyche from a depressive state or truly induce a rapturous joy within themselves without the influence of some external power. Sensibility is not formal in its pure state, as Kant thinks. It does not come from inside and project itself outward; it does not derive from some transcendent location, over and beyond the sensuous manifold. The perceived sensuous manifold is always immersed within a sensuality which generates a creature whose sensibility emerges with its ripening.” – Tom Sparrow, p.113

I’m enthralled by Tom’s developing aesthetic/metaphysic and intend to follow is project intensely. I have also discussed his work previously here and here.

Cross-fertilize Tom’s words with those of Lingis on “the elements” below:

“Life lives on sensation; the elements are a nourishing medium…The light is not just transparency which the gaze slips through on its way to distant surfaces; our gaze delights in the vivacity of the light itself. It assimilates in its languor the soft depths of the dark. The sonority is not just a succession of sense data which the hearing identifies as signals and information-bits; the ears are contented with the resonance of realm beyond realm as with a content. The touch lets go of things to relish the terrestrial and solar warmth. The earth extends its indefinite expanses before the steps of the nomad who is not scouting for any retreat, moved by his appetite for open roads and uncharted deserts. Erotic sensuality is not a hunger…It surges in a vitality that lacks nothing, is fed and sheltered and contended, a vitality that greets the earth, the skies, the day and the night with the ardor of kisses and caresses.” [Alphonso Lingis]

[ Lingis quote courtesy of Adam Robbert of Knowledge Ecology – a blog any thinking primate needs to follow ]

Debunking the "Ethical Oil" Myth

Author and activist Naomi Klein debunks 'Ethical Oil' at the Tar Sands Action.
Klein was arrested at the White House with a delegation from the Indigenous Environmental Network on Friday, Sept. 2, 2011, during the two weeks of sit-ins to halt the tar sands pipeline. They were among 1,252 people arrested:

Unintended Consequences

Every new invention changes the world -- in ways both intentional and unexpected. Below historian Edward Tenner tells stories that illustrate the under-appreciated gap between our ability to innovate and our ability to foresee the consequences.



Edward Tenner is an independent writer, speaker, and editor analyzing the cultural aspects of technological change.

“everything is affective”

Below is Steven Shaviro riffing on affect and politics – taken from Adrian Ivakhiv's recent post updating us on the symposium exploring Shaviro’s book Post-Cinematic Affect:

“For we do not live in a world in which the forces of affective vitality are battling against the blandness and exhaustion of capitalist commodification. Rather, we live in a world in which everything is affective. What politics is more virulently affective and vital than that of the American Tea Party? Where is intensive metamorphosis more at work than in the “hyper-chaos” (as Elie Ayache characterizes it, following Quentin Meillassoux) of the global financial markets? It is not a question of a fight between affect and its “waning” or exhaustion (whether the latter is conceived as the actual negation of the former, or just as its zero degree). Rather than being on one side of a battle, affect is the terrain itself: the very battlefield on which all conflicts are played out. All economic and aesthetic events today are necessarily aesthetic ones, both for good and for ill." [also see here]

Adrian has also commented extensively on Shaviro’s book in a previous and highly stimulating post entitled, "Post-Cinematic Affect in the Era of Plasticity". Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for Adrian’s book exploring cinema, affect and ecology (Ecologies of the Moving Image). My brain drools just thinking about it.

UPDATE: From a physicist's viewpoint...

“From a physicist's viewpoint, though, biology, history, and economics can be viewed as dynamical systems. Each system consists of many individual parts that interact with each other. In economics there are many agents, such as consumers, producers, governments, thieves, and economists. These agents each make decisions optimizing their own idiosyncratic goals. The actions of one agent affect other agents. In biology, individual organisms - or from a more general perspective, individual species - interact with one another. The actions of one organism affect the survivability, or fitness, of others. If one species changes by mutation to improve its own fitness, other species in the ecology are also affected.”

– Per Bak and Maya Paczuski, 1994

Properties, States and the Ubiquity of Change

From Larval Subjects:

In Book I of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius writes,

A property is that which not at all can be disjoined and severed from a thing without a fatal dissolution: such, weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow to the wide waters, touch to corporeal things, intangibility to the viewless void. But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth, freedom, and war, and concord, and all else which come and go whilst Nature stands the same, we’re wont, and rightly, to call accidents.

A property is something that is intrinsic to the thing such that it really is in the thing. Within the framework of my onticology I quibble with this a bit because I hold that what is really in things is powers or dispositions, not qualities or properties (the latter of which I call “local manifestations”). The weight of a rock is not in the rock itself, but is a relational property that emerges in relation to where the rock exists. This weight or local manifestation is different on the planet earth and the moon due to the different masses of these planets. Moreover, this weight or local manifestation differs with the speed at which the rock moves. Most qualities or local manifestations are, I believe, relational in this way. They are not in the things themselves, but rather emerge in and through the relations the entity entertains with other entities.

art by Vitor Bosshard 

And I, of course, side with Lucretius in that properties, or what Levi calls 'qualities' above, are not 'other than' the emanating substantiality of the thing itself. The complex strata of material and expressive potencies (or what Tom Sparrow might call "sensations") that constitute an object-assemblage's substantial being are identical to its intrinsic properties, with no remainder. [also see here]

However, I'm not at all convinced of an ontological split between "properties" and "states" - considering the vulnerability and openness of actual object-assemblages. Object-assemblages always exist under particular conditions. And their existence is contingent upon the "cooperation" between conditions, existing affective forces and their assembled properties. Indeed, every actually existing entity persists through relations that not only augment or amplify or otherwise change its properties and capacities - it's potency - but also afford those capacities, and provides the context in which the properties of object-assemblages can be expressed in the first place. That is to say, 'thingness' is always a relational affair with coalescing properties (what i call elements) forming temporal (temporary) object-assemblages (matrices) through intensive and material-energetic processes. In my thinking "powers" or "dispositions" are animated by a collaboration between both the qualities or properties inherent in the material composition of onto-specific entities and the ever-present conditions in which they exist. So, no, properties are not in things, they are those things as they exist in relation.

In the context of Levi's example, then, I also argue that the weight of a rock is not "in the rock" itself, but instead, for me, is a compound event/actuality that emerges in relation to both the rock's constituent properties and capacities (its potencies) and its relational situation within the wider field of affective forces. Both the intrinsic properties of an object-assemblage and particular background conditions must be present for weight to occur.

But Levi continues:

Setting this aside, what is really interesting in this passage is Lucretius’s discussion of states. In effect, Lucretius observes that the social position of women, the proletariat, minorities, kings, the wealthy, is not a property of these entities, but a contingent state that can pass away or be changed.

And I argue that the properties of kings and proletariats, for example, do enter into the contingent dynamics of particular states. It is the specific material, relational and historical combination of the properties of kings, weapons, energy supplies, horses, ecosystems, castles and such flowing into and augmenting or amplifying each other that generates the particular "state" of affairs of any given situation. Each object-assemblage contributes its own affective potencies and material vibrancies to the compositional character of the larger field or matrix of action in their own onto-specific ways, while simultaneously being vulnerable (capable of being changed in unexpected ways) to the emergent dynamics loosely contained within. It is this inherent dynamism of actual occasions that allows change (social or otherwise) to not only be possible, but in fact inevitable.

Agency, Substantiality and Potent Alliances

DMF on the agency of objects:

I'm all for seeing the world of objects as having their own physical capacities but I think that they are truly alien and have nothing like interests, hell I don't even think that most of the objects/processes that make up our own bodies, even at the level of our kluged non-conceptual neurofunctions have interests/intents...

Without a doubt I share Dirk’s hesitation about granting ubiquitous “agency” to non-sentient beings. Yet, I’m not sure that proponents who argue for the general agency of things are in fact seeking to project “intentions” as they are traditionally or commonly conceived. I believe such theorists are in pursuit of a more mutinous reevaluation of the efficacy of things.

That said, I think we might resolve some of the hesitation about the agency of objects by relaxing (or stretching?) what we mean by both ‘agency’ and ‘intentionality’. For example, we could ask, “does a machete have intentions?” Within a certain frame of reference we might reply, “of course not”. A machete doesn’t have the requisite capacities (e.g., plasticity and recursivity) to expressively ‘want’, ‘desire’ or be interested in objects outside its bounded substantiality. So in a traditional sense a machete is not a will-full entity. However, a machete does have certain irreducible (onto-specific) properties that define its intrinsic boundaries and capacities. And these assembled “physical capacities”, as Dirk calls them, are affective - that is, they make differences in the world in terms of where they came from, how other entities or assemblages encounter them (e.g., passively or actively), and the relations they enter into. That is to say, a machete brings with it a material-affective substantiality with capacities (to cut, to threaten, etc.) unique to its individual existence. Such inherent substantial capacities are precisely  to what I call potency. [see here] And it is this general potency of existing entities which theorists refer to when they talk about a thing’s “agency” (e.g., Bennett’s “thing-power”). A machete’s potent capacities are a kind of rudimentary agency.

So it’s not a matter of, say, my spleen having individual “intentions”, but about my spleen expressing inherent capacities and properties irreducible to (but simultaneously enmeshed within) its functioning in my body. Likewise for machetes. Machetes have a potent materiality specific to their actual existence and irreducible to the relations they enter into – despite the crucial relational character of their temporal consistency.

Now this is where it can get very interesting for social theory. No object is an island, and no potent assemblage exists in a vacuum. Every existing entity is implicated (to varying degrees) in forces and relations with a multiplicity of other processes, flows, networks and objects that express rudimentary forms of “agency” or potency in their own right. This implicate primordial mix of differential properties constitutes the generative matrix within which both individual objects and ‘societies’ of entities become possible. Thus, at a fundamental level, what we encounter are a series of inter-acting and intra-acting potencies capable of coalescing into various contingent assemblages (what Latour calls compositions) and ecologies expressing differential degrees of affective force and distributed agency. These substantial matrices (or alliances, complexes, societies, ecologies, situations, contexts, etc., etc.,) of affective force and extensivity operate on all scales of reality.

Each object-matrix contributes its own agentic potency (material and expressive capacities) towards that alliance - thus creating novel material-energetic dynamics and amplifications of affective force hitherto not possible. No ‘virtuality’ needed; only relatively individuated matrices of affective potency colliding and catalyzing to generate unique combinations and assemblies of capacity.

Human agency and cognition is a great example of this: without the affordances of interobjective support, extended symbolic networks, social communication, group affective resonance, etc., humans would have very rudimentary “agency” with relatively unrefined cognitive capacities. It is because we are nurtured and connected beings perpetually implicated in ecologies with potent affordances that we can amplify our abilities and acquire relevant instantiated skills, historical understandings and communal participations. (see the growing 4EA paradigm for details).

To provide one (morbid) example of this analytic, we can understand how the irreducible proto-agency or potency of machetes combined with the agency or potency of humans, combined with the diminished potency of depleted ecological “resources” generated a matrix/situation or “regime of attraction” (Levi Bryant) where 800,000 people were murdered in Rwanda in 1994. Without the affective potency of machetes or the weakened potencies of humans, or the scarce potencies of Rwandan subsistence conditions, genocide may not have actually occurred. And without an acknowledgement of the irreducible “agencies” of all these elements we can’t truly understand what and how it happened, and how to decrease the possibility of it ever happening again.

So, without going too much into here, what fascinates me, first, is how objects/complexes/processual-units/matrices enter into specific, historical “alliances” or networks with other complexes to form complex, potent (“agentic”), novel, distributed and emergent assemblages with irreducible capacities and properties specific to those alliances - and then secondly, what worldly affects and effects (consequences) do specific matrices or assemblages and their alliances have on the evolution and cosmopolitical trajectories of humans and non-humans alike.

[ see also: The Dynamics of Affective Objects ]

James Hansen on Alberta Tar Sands Action

Dr. James Hansen is a giant in the scientific community and widely recognized as one of the first internationally respected scientists to begin recognizing the dangers and effects of global warming. Hansen has appeared in front of congressional committees and advised heads of state on numerous occasions.

Needless to say, when Hansen speaks both climate change denialists and the scientific community listen:

tarsandsaction.org  / StopKeystoneXL

Connolly, Bryant, Lucretius and the Wild

With any luck I will be have my new computer (finally switching to Apple!) later this evening – as my laptop gave up the ghost over a week ago. Being without internet access at home is an odd feeling for me. The good thing about being un-linked, however, is that I finished reading William Connolly’s A World of Becoming. I always enjoy Connolly’s writing and this book is a well-crafted rendering of the kind process thought I can certainly support. I’ll post more on this sometime soon.

Meanwhile, Levi Bryant has a great post up on reading Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura ('On the Nature of Things'). My favorite passage in this post (one which I entirely agree with) is his last:

With Lucretius, by contrast, we get nature as absolute interactive immanence where whatever comes to be is but one of the possibilities of nature. Within this nature there is no outside or other (there is no culture, for example, that is something “other” than nature), but rather there is just The Wild. Culture too is a part or manifestation of the wilderness. One cannot travel to the wilderness or wild because wherever one is they are already in the wild or wilderness. Our building of houses is no more unnatural than beavers building damns. And this conception of nature, without teleology or divinely decreed ought is the condition and mark of any genuinely emancipatory project.

Wherever you go, there you, as nature, are. The wilderness of being is immanent to itself – dynamically so. Go read the rest of Levi’s post here.

Four Horsemen - Official Trailer

We will not return to 'business as usual'. The Four Horseman is an independent feature documentary which lifts the lid on how the world really works.

Demand the movie now: http://eventful.com/fourhorsemen
Website: http://www.fourhorsemenfilm.com
Official Facebook: http://facebook.com/fourhorsemenfilm

Coming Autumn 2011.

Directed By: Ross Ashcroft

Featuring: Noam Chomsky, Max Keiser, Joseph Stiglitz, Prof. Herman Daly, Dr. Ha-Joon Chang, Simon Johnson, Michael Hudson, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, John Perkins, Tarek Al Diwany, Camila Batmanghelidjh, James Turk, David Morgan, Hugo Salinas Price and more...

Bridging Life, Time and Blogging?

I am conflicted. I feel as though I should apologize to all you anonymous and not so anonymous readers for my recent inactivity, while simultaneously wanting to extend my hiatus after the last 2 weeks or so spent traveling more or less off the grid. Time away from electro-digital entanglements has always reinvigorated my interests in blogging in the past but something is different this time around. This time I can imagine myself walking away (so to speak) from twitter, from wordpress, from tumblr, from blogger, from Google – from all of it.

This is a strange ‘sensation’. What perplexes me most here is how a few weeks away can influence my perception of my online activities so much. For a person who loves research and access to information as much as I do why would I now consider walking away from it all? Pondering this I can conjure three possible (and interrelated) motivations for this new attitude:

1. Deluge: being bombarded relentlessly with all sorts of information, updates, emails and comments is becoming increasingly hard to accept. It is simply no longer possible to read, respond, answer and/or engage with all of the bits and bytes showering my inbox and google reader on a daily basis. I was off the grid completely for about 10 days and I had 800+ new emails waiting from me – 200 of which were relevant and interesting enough to warrant engagement.

2. Inauthenticity: with the little time I have to freely interact with people on the net I find it increasingly difficult to have authentic communications, conversations and exchanges, let alone develop personal relationships. One of the main reasons I started spending so much time on the internet in the early 90’s was to be able to communicate with people who shared my interests, wherever they may be. As a frequent user and abuser of early chat rooms in my 20’s I met a wide range of often wonderful (but sometimes insanely maladjusted) people who shared my passions and interests - and who taught me so much on so many fronts. Accept for a few low intensity acquaintances this rewarding aspect of my online participation is now almost non-existent.

3. Incompetence: very much related to the first two problems, I believe, is my growing concern for the quality of my contributions. As time constraints limit my capacity to properly think through certain issues and then construct and review my posts I become frustrated by the lack of depth and clarity in what I write. I have so many concepts, arguments and original thoughts swirling around in/as my psyche yet only less than an hour a day to formulate and craft them into anything approximating an intelligible offering. I’m a person who thrives on transforming insight into praxis so constantly missing the mark in this regard is torturous.

In addition to a personal drive for quality it is also becoming harder to keep up with all the interesting posts and productive discussions happening on my favorite blogs/websites (see the sidebar list titled ‘rhizome’ for links to some of the best blogs in existence). This is increasingly frustrating because I feel compelled to weigh-in on the issues but usually unable to do so. If I take the time to read such posts (as I usually do) I’m then unable to respond. Moreover, I haven’t even been able to produce the bare minimum of posts and responses I’ve committed myself to generating - as evidenced by my lack of participation in the Integral Ecology reading group.

As a result of these difficulties I’m now reconsidering my future online. Seeing as though I’m unwilling to sacrifice family time, unable to decrease work responsibilities, or limit my activist involvements, and as I’m learning to embrace the necessity of sleep, what role can blogging and online activities have in my life? How does the (post)modern citizen bridge a full and rewarding life with an authentic and stimulating online presence?

In the next few days I’ll be posting some additional thoughts on this issue, hopefully along with the promised chapter summaries of the Integral Ecology book. I’d be especially interested in hearing from any of you who also struggle with these questions, or have successfully integrated online activities (blogging, etc.) with family and work life.

#confessions

de Certeau on Foucault: popular procedures and power

Michel de Certeau on Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish:

"In this work, instead of analyzing the apparatus exercising power (i.e., the localizable, expansionist, repressive, and legal institutions), Foucault analyzes the mechanisms (dispositifs) that have sapped the strength of these institutions and surreptitiously reorganized the functioning of power: "miniscule" technical procedures acting on and with details, redistributing a discursive space in order to make it the means of a generalized "discipline" (surveillance). This approach raises a new and different set of problems to be investigated. Once again, however, this "microphysics of power" privileges the productive apparatus (which produces the "discipline"), even though it discerns in "education" a system of "repression" and shows how, from the wings as it were, silent technologies determine or short-circuit institutional stage directions. If it is true that the grid of "discipline" is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also "miniscule" and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what "ways of operating" form the counterpart, on the consumer's (or "dominee's"?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order.

These "ways of operating" constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production. They pose questions at once analogous and contrary to those dealt with in Foucault's book: analogous, in that the goal is to perceive and analyze the microbe-like operations proliferating within technocratic structures and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of "tactics" articulated in the details of everyday life; contrary, in that the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of "discipline:" Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline..." (The Practice of Everyday Life)

Read More: Here

Black Holes, Event Horizons and Spacetime

Below is a Discovery Channel documentary about the relationship between Supermassive Black Holes and the evolution of the cosmos.

A black hole, according to the general theory of relativity, is a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape. It is the result of the deformation of spacetime caused by a very compact mass. Around a black hole there is an undetectable surface which marks the point of no return, called an event horizon. It is called "black" because it absorbs all the light that hits it, reflecting nothing, just like a perfect black body in thermodynamics. Under the theory of quantum mechanics black holes possess a temperature and emit Hawking radiation. Despite its invisible interior, a black hole can be observed through its interaction with other matter. A black hole can be inferred by tracking the movement of a group of stars that orbit a region in space.

Alternatively, when gas falls into a stellar black hole from a companion star, the gas spirals inward, heating to very high temperatures and emitting large amounts of radiation that can be detected from earthbound and Earth-orbiting telescopes.Astronomers have identified numerous stellar black hole candidates, and have also found evidence of supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. After observing the motion of nearby stars for 16 years, in 2008 astronomers found compelling evidence that a supermassive black hole of more than 4 million solar masses is located near the Sagittarius A* region in the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

The no hair theorem states that, once it achieves a stable condition after formation, a black hole has only three independent physical properties: mass, charge, and angular momentum.Any two black holes that share the same values for these properties, or parameters, are classically indistinguishable.The simplest black hole has mass but neither charge nor angular momentum.

The defining feature of a black hole is the appearance of an event horizon — a boundary in spacetime through which matter and light can only pass inward towards the mass of the black hole. Nothing, including light, can escape from inside the event horizon. The event horizon is referred to as such because if an event occurs within the boundary, light from that event cannot reach an outside observer, making it impossible to determine if such an event occurred.

“Get Rid of Yourself”

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Get Rid of Yourself from zoo on Vimeo.

Bernadette Corporation - featuring Chloe Sevigny and Werner von Delmont. (2003, 61 min)

Description:

Get Rid of Yourself is a video-film-tract addressed to those who anonymously embody the return of political activism within Empire. While its initial sounds and images were filmed during the riots in Genoa, 2001, these materials are pulled apart and recomposed in order to locate the intensity of a shared experience, rather than producing one more documentary version of the programmed and hyper-mediatized confrontation of the G8 counter-summit. Elaborating a complex and rhythmic form of address via sound/image disjunctions, cheap video effects and performance, the film declares its own exile from a biopolitical space-time where nothing ever happens. The crisis it announces is the sudden return of history, but this time without characters or a story, and of a politics without subjects.

Provisionally aligning itself with the so-called ‘Black Bloc’ movement – with the arrogance of its discourse as well as the force and style of their resistance – Get Rid of Yourself is an encounter with emerging, non-instituted or identity-less forms of protest that refuse the representational politics of the official Left. Edited in the aftermath of 9/11 – a period of doubt, reflection and heightened security measures worldwide – the film also attempts to measure the strange distance these events have crossed, and the increasing repression under which the feeling of ‘civil war’ has been buried in the meantime. A filmed essay that works by betraying its own form, Get Rid of Yourself tries to approach what is most open in an event, rather than capturing and completing it as something recognizable.