the revolution will be commercialized

by Jeff S-L (Az)

"revolution is not a moment in the future; it’s a line we trace in the present."

From Woodbine1882:

"Distress. Existential, metaphysical, planetary. If our time resonates with that of other civilizations in the process of collapsing, we have to also note that the collapse we are experiencing is so much worse than that of say ancient Rome. Whereas the inhabitants of these eras witnessed and aided in the passing away of a certain order to the world, the catastrophe we live today is not just a crisis of a world, but of the world.The extent of what we face, as we watch species, languages, and coastlines disappear before our eyes, while we watch ourselves disappear a little more and more with every selfie, is a devastation so total, so encompassing, that we can literally say we have utterly lost the world. Unlike us, the Romans could probably know that even if the structuring, knowledge-giving ground of the empire, or the gods, wouldn’t be there, the literal ground they walked on would in fact still be there. We can’t really say the same."

"Faced with the catastrophe, there are those who get indignant, those who take note, and those who get organized. History depends on those who get organized. Revolution is not a moment in the future; it’s a line we trace in the present." - Woodbine1882

synthetic_zero

Any change in determining conditions is never a complete re-coordination of components, but rather a complex adjusting of variable elements according to intrinsic properties and extrinsic force. So it is with base materiality and so it is with any of our scaffolded sapient worldviews.

This blog has been a lot of things for me: an extension of my personality, a platform for sorting of interests, but more concretely it has always been a tool for inquiry and expression. Since 2009 i have explored a variety of obsessions: from speculative theory, fringe politics, evolutionary science and ecology to architecture, art, depth psychology and popular culture – with all sorts of confessions, carnival events and human encounters in between. However situations change. I have changed.

These past few months have been tumultuous with regard to my conceptual grasping of the world and its entities. Step backs and switch-backs and revisitations have led to intensive thetic mutations and shifting political sentiments. Living and ‘managing’ routines, needs and psyches in the context of rapid dissolution and continuing reorganization of the world-flesh by anarchic forces of production (hyper-abstraction) and pseudo and mega wish-fulfillment(as a multitude of egos amplified exponentially) has brought me to the brink. Nothing I think I know makes sense in light of what I am experiencing. Its time to cross the threshold.

I am no longer driven to pursue individualized intellectual processing. On my own I am a mere glitch. Nothing but a momentary capture of language and associations. But with others I become more: we become. As an assemblage our powers are increased and new capacities emerge. And it is only in the ‘we’ that the Eaarth and its woven sublime can be adequately disclosed. Knowledge tokens and bio-understandings are always (co)enacted and disclosed socially, as intact ecosystems. Only thru collaboration between elements and materials do new configurations occur. The Madness of one becomes tempered by the madness of the more-than-one so that whole worlds (as multiplicities and spaces with differential dimensions) can be devoured, transformed and rebirthed. 

So moving forward (and backward and sideways perhaps) I will be focusing most of my energies on a new joint project - involving Arran (from Attempts At Living) and lurking-linker extraordinaire Dirk (dmf) and guided by a shared concern with evolving more sophisticated speculative and praxis-oriented responses to the continued collapse of contemporary ecological, socioeconomic and ideological realities. Below is a basic outline:

synthetic_zero

about: Synthetic_Zero is a project designed to explore the challenges and opportunities of being & becoming human after nihilism. The collaborative approach pursued here is intended as an experimental response to the various crises, disjunctions and unequally distributed realities of contemporary life. At different moments this website will act as research tool, culture hacking platform, and crucible for critical discussion – with all sorts of confessions, carnival events and mutant encounters in-between. We seek to salvage and explore the various speculative and pragmatic opportunities afforded by established disciplines and traditions of inquiry (from philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, psychiatry, social work, and ecology) while simultaneously assembling insights and sensibilities from across the spectrum of human expression and engagement (from art, literature, architecture, urban design, indigenous politics, and various social movements). Our intention is to cultivate more flexible and adaptive modes of relating and existing. There are many ways to live among ruins and here we will explore most of them.

Archive Fire will continue to function as a space for personal reflection and individual explorations in rhetoric, style and self-expression - while all new formal and para-academic content will be shared at synthetic zero and will command most of my attention.

Thank you to all the readers, participants and the many supporters of this blog over the last 4 years. I hope you enjoy the new direction/focus here and please check out what Arran, Dirk and I are up to over at syntheticzero.net. Until then…

Coexistence and the Work of Revolution

In “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse”, anthropologist David Graeber asks an extremely important question:

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

What is revolution? This might be the core political question of our time. In contemporary conditions where all hitherto categorical distinctions (between nature and culture, subject and object, etc.) and conventional boundaries (between human bodies and machines, between nation-states and corporations) are bleeding into each other or melting away, what resources are we to call upon in order to begin forging more humane and positive political commitments?  The very context of our lives and social actions has never been so ambiguous and massively distributed, and yet so manipulated, managed and massaged. Where do we begin?

In The Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote:

“In all revolutions there are members of the privileged class who make common cause with the revolutionaries, and members of the oppressed class who remain faithful to the privileged. And every nation has its traitors. This is because the nation and class are neither versions of fate which hold the individual in subjection from the outside nor values which he posits from within. They are modes of co-existence which are a call upon him. Under conditions of calm, the nation and the class are there as stimuli to which I respond only absent-mindedly or confusedly; they are merely latent. A revolutionary situation, or one of national danger, transforms those pre-conscious relationships with class and nation, hitherto merely lived through, into the definite taking of a stand; the tacit commitment becomes explicit. But it appears to itself as anterior to decision.” (p.423)

Here Merleau-Ponty accepts the conditions in which political bodies are both determined and self-determining, however haphazardly such agency might seem. It is the gathering up, positioning and self-organizing power of individuals in situ - the ‘taking a stand’ in the world – that links their imaginations and motivations to lived contexts and affords them the opportunity to transform pre-reflective conditionings into explicit revolutionary commitments. In this sense, the work of being and becoming human is always a revolutionary act in that what is latent or merely possible in us, and circulating throughout our dynamic modes of existence, is always in the process of being expressed and assembled. The very act of becoming and being human contributes the co-invention of worlds. And so political situations are always ecological and cosmological.

Transcorporeal politics, then, is fundamentally about developing, tinkering with and contesting distributed modes of generation wherein social assemblages and agentic bodies of all ontic varieties are engaged and politicized at the different levels of material and expressive organization appropriate to their functioning. Each complex matrix of possibility is a composite of material flows, associations and proximities affording different political moves, tactics and forms which includes but are never limited to symbolic representation and discursive exchanges. We always co-determine our world with other humans and non-humans (and in-humans) through reciprocal but often uneven exchanges of properties, powers and capacities – setting the very conditions for what then becomes possible. And within this simultaneously wild  and contingent field of compound possibility what we do, as one kind of being among others, affects the capacities and sustain-ability of a myriad of other entities, communities and tangible networks. The work of the revolutionary thus becomes the engagement of whole worlds: an ecological praxis enriched through sapient and sensitive explorations which flow into deliberational alterings of the very modes of our relative becoming. Revolution is co-evolution always and forever.

[[ hat tip to Adam Robbert and Jeremy Trombley on the Graeber piece ]]

Ecologies of Imaginal Space

"If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.

The first step toward re-imagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination – an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment.

To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the waters in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say they cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars." [source]

-- Arundhati Roy

“This is not about getting back to nature.
It is about understanding we’ve never left.”
-- Sierra Club poster

Things Will Not Be So Easy

I truly enjoy how hollywood makes profit by projecting the fears of its own established cultural elites. I don't even mind when such profits are made by making a caricature of the very real and raw impulses motivating many of us who are increasingly organizing to confront those elites - impulses rooted in an organic sense of complete disgust with a mainstream that is fundamentally a manufactured pseudo-civilization with corporate oligarchs and govern-mental disfunction firmly at its core.

I just watched the following trailer for the new film "The East": "a story centered on contract worker who is tasked with infiltrating an anarchist group, only to find herself falling for its leader." The film features actors Ellen Page, Alexander Skarsgård and Brit Marling, and directed by Zal Batmanglij. The film premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2013.

The film's co-writer and star Brit Marling said the following in relation to the film: "Multinational corporations are outside of the purview of any nation-state. These are the entities that are shaping and running the world... The modern anarchy movement is about rebelling against the corporate structure."

Check it out:



Any comments?

#darkestbeforethestorm 

First Nations Rising?

"When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is, for the people and for each segment of the population, the most sacred of rights and the most fundamental of duties." 

- Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 24 June 1793

Hundreds of First Nations people gathered yesterday for Idle No More, a national day of protest against the Canadian federal government's Bill C-45 (the so-called "Jobs and Growth Act") which intentionally attempts to supersede and violate long-standing treaty rights in oder to promote 'ecnomic growth' and private business interests.

The omnibus legislation contains changes to the Indian Act and the Navigable Waters Protection Act impacting all areas of land and water, and effectively removing all legal grounds for First Nations communities to determine what happens within their territories.

Crystal Lameman with the Beaver Lake First Nation argues that the Harper government has ignored its duty to consult with First Nations on the changes:

"In our treaty, it says that we will always be able to go to the land to subsist, but when you are pulling fish from the lake that have cancers hanging off of them, and that the migration pattern of the Woodland caribou are being affected, that's our basic human rights being violated."

Protests were also held in other Canadian cities including Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto.



 SAMSON CREE FIRST NATION PRESS RELEASE:

“Pipes will be lifted in support of Idle No More; this pipe ceremony will signify peace between two Nations and with the Creator. The presence of the pipe signifies the pipe laws of gentleness, compassion and mutual respect.”

The Cree of Maskwacis will be holding a pipe ceremony and peaceful demonstration on Hwy 2A at Maskwacis. For that purpose, a portion of the main highway between the Highway 611 West and Pe Sakastew Correctional Centre will be blocked between 11:15 am and 12:15 pm. 

Alternate routes will be posted for those travelers who are not able to stay and support the peaceful demonstration.  

We are taking this opportunity, coinciding with 12th hour of the 12th day of December 2012, to bring awareness to First Nations’ opposition to legislation proposed by the Harper government. 

We also want people to bring attention to the hunger strike started on Tuesday, December 11, 2012, by Chief Theresa Spence, Attawapiskat First Nation, a First Nation in northern Ontario, who has ‘vowed to ‘die’ for her people’. She has been quoted as saying: “I am willing to die for my people because the pain is too much and it’s time for the government to realize what it’s doing to us.”  

In the past term of office, the Harper government has introduced several pieces of legislation in the House of Commons and the Senate which will significantly impact the lives of First Nations’ people across Canada. Not only has this legislation been introduced without any real participation by the people affected by the legislation, it is being ‘fast-tracked’ through the House of Commons and the Senate.  

When First Nations people agreed to share their lands and resources with ‘newcomers’, First Nations could not have foreseen that, in time, not only would First Nations become landless, but that First Nations would have to conform to the ideologies, and world views of the ‘visitors’. That time has come to pass. Despite the adoption of the International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, by the United Nations and subsequent ratification in Canada, Canada is unilaterally passing laws governing the First Nations without the free, prior and informed consent of the First Nations people.

The bills before the House of Commons and the Senate directly undermines First Nations’ right of self-determination, and subjugates First Nations people to a legal and political system that has not served the collective interests of First Nations.  

In Samson Cree Nation’s letter to the Member of Parliament for Wetaskiwin, Samson Cree Nation lobbied the MP to reject the proposed legislation, bring these matters to the grass roots people, and to obtain First Nations support for legislation that will directly affect the lives and future of First Nations before endorsing it in the House of Commons.

#IdleNoMore

The Communist Manifesto

by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

(Full Version, English)

James Scott - The Art of Not Being Governed

From Yale University:

The author of several books including Seeing Like a State and Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Anthropologist and university Professor James Scott's research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. We talk with Professor Scott about his newest book, The Art of Not Being Governed. It is the first-ever examination of the volumes of literature on state-making that evaluates why people would deliberately remain stateless.

James Scott, is Sterling Professor of Political Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Co-director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University

Spread Anarchy, Live Communism?

The question of anarchism as a viable poltical stance has always bothered me. I tend towards a more communistic, collectivist political perspective, but perhaps what is called for under the contemporary conditions is something more deconstructive and wild? This remains an open question for me.

Audio from day two of the 2011 symposium The Anarchist Turn:

Spread Anarchy, Live Communism
By The Invisible Committee

LISTEN HERE:

Information about the symposium from the conference organizers:

For a long time, the word ‘anarchist’ has been used as an insult. This is because, at least since Thomas Hobbes, the concept of anarchy has been extended from its etymological meaning (absence of centralized government) to that of pure disorder – the idea being that, without a sovereign state, the life of individuals can only be brutish, miserable, and chaotic. This move was certainly functional to the ideological justification of modern sovereign states, but not to an understanding of what anarchy might be.

In the last decade, this caricature of anarchy has begun to crack. Globalization and the social movements it spawned seem to have proved what anarchists have long been advocating: an anarchical order is not just desirable, but also feasible. This has led to a revitalized interest in the subterranean anarchist tradition and its understanding of anarchy as collective self-organization without centralized authority. But the ban on ‘anarchism’ has not yet been lifted.

The aim of this conference is to argue for an ‘anarchist turn’ in political philosophy. We want to discuss the anarchist hypothesis with specific reference to the philosophical tradition in its many historical and geographical variants, but also in relation to other disciplines like politics, anthropology, economics, history and sociology. By bringing together academics and activists, past and present, this conference will assess the nature and effectiveness of anarchist politics in our times.

Speakers: Miguel Abensour (Paris VII), Cinzia Arruzza (New School), Banu Bargu (New School), Chiara Bottici (New School), Judith Butler (UC Berkeley), Laura Corradi (Calabria), Stephen Duncombe (NYU), Todd May (Clemson), Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths), Mitchell Verter (New School), Stephanie Wakefield (CUNY), as well as writers such as Andrej Grubačić , Cindy Milstein, Ben Morea from Black Mask and alleged authors of The Coming Insurrection.

Learn More: Here

is survivalism the religion of the future?

Music video by Jay-Z & Kanye West performing No Church In The Wild feat. Frank Ocean & The-Dream (2012)

 

Slavoj Žižek: Catastrophic But Not Serious

...

Slavoj Zizek: Catastrophic But Not Serious from The Graduate Center, CUNY on FORA.tv

Location: New York, NY / Event Date: 04.04.11 

Summary: The Committee on Globalization and Social Change will launch with a special lecture by philosopher and critic Slavoj Zizek who will speak on "The Situation Is Catastrophic, but Not Serious." This alleged message of the Austrian military headquarters during WWI renders perfectly our attitude towards the ongoing crisis: we are aware of the looming (ecological, social) catastrophes, but we somehow don't take them seriously. What ideology sustains such an attitude?

[ h/t DMF ]

The End of Capitalism?

WOW. That is all I have to say about a recent post at Indecent Bazaar entitled, "The End of Capitalism". Therein the author lays bare the immediate political implications of trying to better understand the amazing complexity inherent to all social assemblages. The author (who are you?) calls upon important work done by J.K. Gibson-Graham and Manuel DeLanda.

I honestly could not articulate a better understanding of the multiplicity of social systems (and indeed all assemblages) at various scales, as well as the need for analytical specificity in terms of both general ontology and political practice.

Below is my favourite passage from the post, but please do go read the entire piece for yourself:

It is illegitimate and inaccurate to speak of capitalism in terms of a unifying entity (in the same way it would be to speak of the US as a Christian nation, or a heterosexual one) because such social descriptors erase and obscure differences. While feminists have long departed from “holistic expressions for social structure”, conceptions of capitalism as hegemonic, ubiquitous, systematic and so on are still prevalent and resilient. It follows from this virtually unquestioned view of capitalism as the dominant form of economy that noncapitalist and anti-capitalist sites come to inhabit the social margins in the realm of experiment (as recently illustrated over at Necessary Agitation). As J.K. Gibson-Graham contend: “it is the way capitalism has been ‘thought’ that has made it so difficult for people to imagine its supersession.” (There is little doubt that the archive of my blog unflatteringly reflects the same point). As the authors go on to argue, what needs to be fostered instead is a theory of “economic difference;” conditions under which the economy might be “less subject to definitional closure,” whose identity is not fixed or singular. The alternative of “theorizing economic difference, of supplanting the discourse of capitalist hegemony with a plurality and heterogeneity of economic forms” is akin to what Manuel DeLanda attempts in ‘Deleuze, Materialism and Politics’. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of double articulation (the selection of materials out of a wide set of possibilities—first articulation—and the arrangement of these loosely ordered materials into a more stable form—second articulation) with which to conceptualize the process through which material form and identity are generated, DeLanda extends this micro-macro distinction to strata operating at infinitely different scales (rather than only two levels of scale: ‘the molecular’ and ‘the molar’). According to DeLanda, “double articulation is, in its simplest version, the process of joining parts to yield a whole with properties of its own. Since most component parts are smaller than the whole they compose, the part-to-whole relation is a relation between small and large scales.” It would be a mistake, however, to treat the macro and micro as absolute scales. There are never only two scales operating in material or social processes: every entity that is perceived as an autonomous whole is itself populated by component parts, and those parts in turn have their own parts…. “A more adequate approach,” argues DeLanda, “would be to treat them as relative to a particular scale.” For this reason it is problematic to employ terms like ‘society as a whole’ in our theorizing, for the largest entities are every bit as singular and unique as the smallest. “In general, what needs to be excluded from a materialist social ontology are vague, reified terms like ‘society’ (or ‘the market’, ‘the state’, etc.) Only hacceities (individual singularities) operating at different spatio-temporal scales should be legitimate entities in this ontology.”

Yeah, I know, pretty damn awesome...

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:

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."

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.

Olbermann reads collective statement of Occupy Wall Street

#OccupyWallStreet

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.

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: