[-empyre-] say what: what language should OCCUPY speak?

Fri Nov 18 14:30:50 EST 2011

I actually just came from an Internet & Democracy talk at UC Berkeley and
walked past the Occupy circus as it was preparing for the Occupy Cal GA
group-think.

 I commended the group to watch the All Watched Over By Machines Of Love
and Grace, I actually had a speaker completely counter my recommendation
and I think only one person in the audience had seen it. Curtis is cutting
pretty deep in an Internet-company town like the Bay Area.. its not real
popular round these parts

I must say, I think the Occupy thing is becoming more like a Jonestown
group-think, ritual suicide than anything, its this idea of throwing
yourself onto the wheels of demonical machine

the people's mike is a great idea when there is no mike, but when there is
one, its just ritualistic and cultish, it also enforces a kind of concision
or soundbite mentality that you get on TV

I've been involved in Occupy Oakland and Occupy Berkeley, on demo's,
meetings, online etc, I've been in arguments with Black Bloc anarchist
types and also faced the ferocity of the police

the police are violent, but at least they are predictable. The Occupiers
are amatuers and by the time all the left get on board, it will be
completely sunk, and the US will have a Tea Party President

I think the only hope for this kind of franchise activism is if it is
co-opted and taken over my mass, grassroots movements like immigrants &
workers who can bring organization and discipline and weed out the agism,
sexism, racism inherit in the white-male anarchist core that want democracy
for the 99%, but for themselves, only when it suits them

Decolonizers Guide to a Humble Revolution- A Humble Book Release Party @
Oakland Occupy (Decolonize)

Tiny - Posted on 14 November 2011
Sat, 11/19/2011 - 2:30pm - 4:00pm

Saturday, November 19th

2:30pm @ Occupy (Decolonize) Oakland @ 14th n Broadway (After the Mass
Labor Rally & March) Featuring Special Guests: Rebel Diaz!!! n more!

The Humble Book release party will be held at Occupy Oakland and will
feature migrante, indigenous, disabled, youth and  elder poverty scholars,
poets, writers, artists, organizers, revolutionaries, healers, and
story-tellers who contributed to the beautiful book:Decolonizers Guide to a
Humble Revolution

This will also be a celebration featuring multiple voices of poets,
performers and thinkers of color claiming decolonized space back form
Po'Lice and politricksters so the people can continue to decolonize this
Ohlone Land and with our bodies, our ideas and our resistance

*The Decolonizers Guide to a Humble Revolution, published by POOR Press, is
a book of art, words, poetry, stories, and scholarship on humilty, eldership,
care-giving, racism, poverty, herstories, and love created to share with
decolonize and occupy sites across Turtle Island.*

http://www.poormagazine.org/node/4156
-- 
Nicholas Roberts
US 510-684-8264
http://Permaculture.TV
http://permaculture.coop

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 2:21 PM, simon <swht at clear.net.nz> wrote:

> **
> Dear <<empyreans>>,
>
> What struck me first about Occupy Wall St. were its theatrical
> possibilities. Then I heard about the chorus effect. Because authorities
> prohibited the use of PAs and megaphones, machinic amplification of the
> voice, principals mounting addresses to the crowd had their voices
> crowd-machined, vocal migrancy: the front rows, whatever percentage they
> are - a forum? or form of chorus? -, repeated each phrase so that the
> people at the back could hear. What was being said was more clearly that
> all will be heard despite the efforts of city authorities and rather than
> that any particular message that all manner of things will be heard.
>
> Might one see, I am still following Guattari here, OCCUPY as a refrain?
> The definition of a functional space?
>
> In tribal societies this definition occurs through dance, rhythm, chant,
> tattoo. Enacted. And bodied forth in time.
>
> In New York as in Auckland the refrain becomes the theatre of property, of
> appropriation. Props to the occupation for taking up property.
>
> What detaches in the refrain is the world, but a world taken-with, a
> mobile property - evading the grid of proprietary exploitative relations or
> homogenizing network of practices -, a partial subject caught up in a
> nomadisation of space: an aesthetic emergence, the demands of which are
> none other than those of durational performance. For as long as possible.
> (Or topic of time a trope of space from last month's soft_skin as slow as<http://www.john-cage.halberstadt.de/>.)
> (OCCUPY might also be called ectopian and perhaps sidestep the charge of
> colonialism, a charge seeming inevitable given as the land is not ours.)
>
> Interesting to read Adam Curtis in regard to OCCUPY (here<http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/10/dream_on.html>),
> where he looks for a political vision - Tournier's, actually, after telling
> his story of repeated betrayals of visions because they are just ideas - to
> the point even the history of betrayal is exhausted -, where he looks for a
> political alternative, OCCUPY is a functional imperative. Actually performs
> this imperative. Durationally. With the potential for exhaustion - or
> consubstantial with the void - such as described by Deleuze in Beckett's
> plays for TV.
>
> These descriptions may serve, it's not impossible, as indexes to the
> languages of OCCUPY:
>
>    1. form exhaustive series of things
>    2. dry up the flow of voices
>    3. extenuate the potentialities of space
>    4. dissipate the power of the image
>
> Because we are tired of things, what things? Let me tell you. Because we
> are tired of not being seen, say what? ... Because we are tired of where we
> are placed, where? Place may migrate. Because we are tired of spectacle,
> see? And the voice migrates.
>
> A friend visiting OWS notes a change. The number of homeless in the park
> has increased in proportion to protesters. The tone of the refrain has also
> altered, from a come hither to a more familiarly urban fuck off. The
> spectacular aspect has changed with the spatial: the homeless more
> jealously guard not so much their territories as the byways and paths
> circulating amongst them, between tents; the footpaths too around the park
> are now no place for performance. My friend has been visiting regularly to
> engage people who happen to be around in Urban Play, a form that has
> emerged from his Creative-Therapeutic practice (Urban Play<http://developmentaltransformations.academia.edu/Departments/Drama_Therapy_Healing_From_Trauma_Preventing_Harmful_Behavior/Papers>).
> He was accused of performance art.
>
> I am waiting for myself to add that the tone may alter, even sour, but the
> refrain continues. And I want to drag this peroration back to the prop in
> hand. It insists - with the void. So I will ask:
>
> The financial crisis allegedly has affected different national economies
> in different ways. What then are the differences? And do these differences
> relate to others closer to the month's discussion, to the art problem? Are
> there refrains here? Resonances?
>
> I wonder if I ought to have been rebuked for talking about 1984 in New
> Zealand. Or is what we are witnessing, victimised if not quite traumatised
> by, now a dark precursor to a new dispensation, a new thought, or
> neoliberalism's after-image dying in the light?
>
> Was it just ideas? or were we simply playing?
>
> Best,
>
> Simon Taylor
>
> www.squarewhiteworld.com
> www.brazilcoffee.co.nz
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
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