[-empyre-] sample from today

Tue Nov 11 16:01:51 EST 2014

Thank you Gabriela for your interesting description of the non-violent
answer to the state violence installed in Mexico. I was in Yucatan when I
did my field work in social anthropology and met many zapatistas and
indingeous working in the caracoles, the free zones kept by the zapatistas
at that time.
It was same years before I was in Gaza and it strucked me Gaza and Mexico
and Italy shared a common denominator: a weak state left the citizens
vulnerable and frustrated and the field was overtaken for organizations who
cared for the everyday life. It explained how the drug cartels when the
Colombian Pablo Escobar was alive cared for the citizens in the small towns
and got a lot of support from the people.
In Mexico it was the zapatistas who built up a feeling of community and
started to autogestionate or selfgovern the territories abandonned by the
state.
In Gaza was Hamas who took care of the police and the daycare.
Hakim Bey explains it with his TAZ, Temporary Autonomous Zone, where he
uses the examples of the camorra in Italy and the zapatistas as well to
explain territories separating themselves from the central state, far from
them, a kind of new structure without visible heads. A new kind of feudal
contract. The "Non Places" in Marc Augés terms, in the middle of nowhere,
inhabitated by the people without voices.
Ana

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:51 AM, Gabriela Vargas-Cetina <
gabyvargasc at prodigy.net.mx> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>  Dear all,
>
> Thank you for this month's discussion and thank you for bringing in what
> is happening in Mexico to this very difficult but very needed
> conversation.  Here in Mexico the news have been emotionally draining for
> most everyone, and now that our President has left to go to China for
> diplomatic talks, many Mexicans are asking for his resignation.  The
> newspapers have been commenting here in Yucatan how people even from the
> wealthier strata of regional society are going to the marches and protests
> over the murder of the students.  I guess we are all trying to perform out
> our grieving in some way, collectively, so as to feel safer and feel we do
> have control over our spaces and lives.  A very important thing that is
> happening is that most everyone is chanting repeatedly "no more violence"
> and "no to violence": Apparently the burning of the door of the National
> Palace was done by a soldier from the Mexican army in order to justify the
> intervention of the police against the crowd of protesters; at least that
> is what even the major newspapers say.
>
> I would like to suggest here that the performance of violence and violent
> performances are now giving way to the performance of non-violence, but
> this is arguably a different kind of performed violence.  The installations
> using empy chairs, cards, mementos and photos of the students, public
> performances of those marching throwing themselves to the ground and
> remaining motionless for many minutes, the holding of signs on cardboard or
> cloth, and the chants hostile to the government are all part of so-called
> non-violent demostrations, but they are in fact violent, and they are meant
> to shake our government officials and public peace keepers to the bones.  I
> am not sure these tacticts are working, since neither our politicians nor
> the rest of the world seem to pay any attention or be in the least
> disturbed, but they are bringing about a new, publically-constructed
> collective understanding of non-violent protest.  And it is also a way to
> re-construct some feeling of being safe.
>
> I find it interesting that the collective performance of non-violence is
> meant as a violent act, and that it is expected to stop the physical
> violence of the killings and forced disappearances that sadly mark everyday
> life today in much of Mexico.  To my mind, it is a reinvention of passive
> aggression, this time in collective forms.  But all in all, perhaps it is a
> good step in a good direction.
>
> Thanks again for this discussion.
>
> Gabriela Vargas-Cetina
> Merida, Yucatan, Mexico
>
> -- http://antropuntodevista.blogspot.mx
>
>
> On 11/10/14, 4:19 PM, Ana Valdés wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
>
>  Maybe Mexico is too near the US to be worth some alert in Google? :(
>  Ana
>
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 7:51 PM, Diana Taylor <diana.taylorny at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>  Yes of course you did-- I was referring to the Google news feed
>> reported by Alan. I thought THAT was interesting in its omission. Apologies
>> if you thought I was referring to your posts Ana!
>> Diana
>>
>> Diana Taylor
>> University Professor
>> Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish, NYU
>> Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics
>>
>> On Nov 10, 2014, at 3:51 PM, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>>   Some quick answers: Jon, check the archives of -empyre and you can
>> read Alicia Migdal's quotations of Agamben and its Homo Sacer.
>>  And Diana, two days ago I posted to the list the links with live strem
>> to the protests in Mexico when the news of the killed 43 students reached
>> us. And Alicia and me discussed it in the list.
>>  Ana
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Jon McKenzie <jvmckenzie at wisc.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>  typographic t/error:  "the neutral observer of vita contemplativa"
>>>
>>>
>>>  On Nov 10, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Jon McKenzie <jvmckenzie at wisc.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>  I’m enjoying the engagement here, troubling as the topics have been.
>>> The posts by Alan, Johannes, Ana, Reinhold, John, Eric and others have been
>>> very provocative, and the different speeds and tenors of post-communication
>>> is breath-taking.
>>>
>>> I’ve tried to respond in a slow way, for I think/believe/feel that
>>> absolute terror is both unprecedented and yet everyday, as it connects to
>>> the slow terror of economic, environmental, and cultural
>>> progress-gone-awry.
>>>
>>> In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk distinguishes vita performativa
>>> from both vita contemplativa and vita activa. His figure for Western
>>> theoretical man, the neutral observer of vita activa, is one of suspended
>>> animation, all head (capital) and no body (Diogenes). In the Art of Life,
>>> he traces modernism’s attempts to kill the Man of Logos.
>>>
>>> The most surprising thing I’ve discovered through our conversations is
>>> the uncanny resonance between videoed beheadings and Bataille’s Acephale.
>>> The significance of this reverb is as legible as a tarot card.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Are pictographics permitted on this list?
>>>
>>> Like graphe, the term “performance” is polymorphic enough to stretch
>>> from acts of violence (those we call real, actual, unmediated, etc) to
>>> violence enacted within theatrical and artistic contexts (those we call
>>> artificial, representational, mediated etc.), while also opening up
>>> unsettling practices in-between. In "Prison Theatricality in the Romanian
>>> Gulag,” Ruxandra Cesereanu describes Cold War prison performances in which
>>> guards forced prisoners to reenact the torture of saints and other scenes
>>> of blasphemy in grotesque living tableaus. More mundane and profound is the
>>> realization that all techniques, performances, experiences are generated
>>> via practice, repetition, alternation, fine-tuning, etc. that is, are
>>> emergent via graphe.
>>>
>>> So by performances I mean actual and enacted acts and the blur from
>>> which this distinction emerges, for each act of terror, torture, rape is at
>>> once unique, singular, immediate and at same time multiple, citational,
>>> mediated by the material environments and symbolic contexts through which
>>> it unfolds, those of victim, perpetrator, witness, etc. This holds long
>>> before cameras, poets, and speculators arrive (assuming they’re not always
>>> on the scene: where I’m coming from techne operates in physis along the
>>> lines Deleuze and Guattari staked out as machinic phylum, graphe meets
>>> autopoesis).
>>>
>>> And once media technologies do arrive, they can’t be assumed as external
>>> to the performance of violence, merely exploiting the situation, repeating
>>> the event, etc. Images and cameras, audio and sound systems themselves
>>> carry force, both physical and performative force, to do things not only to
>>> witnesses but also to victims and perpetrators. At US prisons at
>>> Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, cameras and images were part of the
>>> psychophysical interrogation regime, used to humiliate, intimidate, and
>>> psychologically torture detainees, as well as to document and produce
>>> “actionable” intelligence. Videos posted online by ISIS and its precursor
>>> organizations serve as warnings to other groups and populations, as
>>> provocations to the international community, and also as recruitment tools
>>> for seasoned and new jihadists. Electronic terror is built atop public
>>> electric utilities.
>>>
>>> To miss the tele-pathy (pathos, suffering, passion at a distance) of
>>> anachronistic (wars on) terror is to miss the most proximate of events and
>>> all the affective networks in-between, here, for instance, on this
>>> listserv. Triads of victim, perpetrators, and witnesses multiply, morph,
>>> recombine, and rotate over time and at different scales. Whether one misses
>>> the tele-pathy or not, it’s bound to reverb, if not return.
>>>
>>> “Homo sacre data body” is a term coined a decade ago to tune in the
>>> reverb by mashing up Giorgio Agamben and Critical Art Ensemble. If
>>> Agamben’s camp signals the democratization and generalization of homo
>>> sacre, CAE’s data body doubles the physical body with a virtual double
>>> composed of information stored in networked databases. Ideally, homo sacre
>>> data body is ubiquitous yet intimately customizable. Facebook meets
>>> Acephale. The intersection of homo sacre and data body can be a drone
>>> strike, a care package, or getting hauled away by border officials. Its
>>> thumbprints are your passport, ID cards, passwords, and cookies.
>>>
>>> Homo sacre data body emerges as a microcosm of hypergraphe, the
>>> metasisizing of graphic violence and graphic media, producing the vast
>>> intermittent images of contemporary terror. The society of spectacle of
>>> scaffold is as much temporal as spatial, as much rhythm and break as stage
>>> and spectacle. Theater and spectacle hook up with visualizations,
>>> algorithms, and 24/7 dataveillance. Coming and going, mobile biometrics are
>>> the happy form of tiny terror.
>>>
>>> To think and act on links between absolute terror and the globality of
>>> economic, cultural environmental devastation is to grapple with the
>>> emergence and dissolution of individuals and lifeworlds near and far and to
>>> struggle with one’s own performances as victim, perp, and witness.
>>>
>>> In puppet theory form, today’s installation of global performance might
>>> be called “The deaths of God and Man are trying the patience of Gaia.”
>>>
>>> Jon
>>>
>>>  On Nov 10, 2014, at 9:08 AM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>
>>>
>>> I want to thank Johannes for all the work he's done here, and all the
>>> guests current and future; it's an amazing and intense month.
>>>
>>> and from my current Google newsfeed (space and time displacements) -
>>>
>>> Suicide bombing at Nigerian school kills 47Sydney Morning Herald
>>> Military Plans 'Operation No Mercy' Against Boko HaramAllAfrica.com
>>> <http://haramallafrica.com/>
>>> Palestinian stabbed Israel soldier in attack near Tel Aviv train
>>> station, police say
>>> :Palestinians break through West Bank barrier to mark Berlin Wall
>>> anniversary RT
>>> Egypt jihadists vow loyalty to ISIS In this Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014 photo,
>>> smoke rises from explosions demolishing houses on the Egyptian side of the
>>> border town of Rafah as seen from the Palestinian side of Rafah in the
>>> southern Gaza Strip.
>>> Cyberespionage group targets traveling execs through hotel networks
>>> Russia Says Sanctions Hurting as Bank Moves to Defend Ruble
>>> Russian Military Encounters With West at Cold War Levels: Report
>>> Suicide bomber kills 47 boys in Nigeria school massacre
>>> Daily Mail - 1 hour ago
>>> Suicide bomber kills 48 at school assembly in Nigeria
>>> IBNLive - 1 hour ago
>>> UPDATE 3-Suicide bomber kills dozens at school assembly in Nigeria
>>> Reuters - 45 minutes ago
>>> ... * Suicide bomber dressed as student kills 48, injures 79. *
>>> Detonates device during school's morning assembly. * Angry locals block
>>> access to school buildings, hospital.
>>> Leaders of China and Japan hold first face-to-face talks amid tensions
>>> CNN
>>> Trending on Google+:Palestinians break through West Bank barrier to mark
>>> Berlin Wall anniversaryRT
>>> Opinion:Terror attack in Tel Aviv: Palestinian stabs, critically wounds
>>> IDF soldierJerusalem Post
>>> From Nigeria:Scores Of Insurgents Killed In Mubi By SoldiersNAIJ.COM
>>> <http://soldiersnaij.com/>
>>> Clashes with Israel Police settle down in Arab locales
>>> ISIS gaining followers but losing leaders?
>>> CBS News - 52 minutes ago
>>> CAIRO -- Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, a jihadi organization based in the Sinai
>>> Peninsula that has carried out several attacks targeting Egyptian security
>>> forces, has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
>>> (ISIS).
>>> African nations counter Ebola's tourism damageTimes of Malta
>>> Mali due to declare 108 Ebola-free after quarantineeNCA
>>> China's president praises Hong Kong chief's handling of democracy
>>> protests
>>> Los Angeles Times - 1 hour ago
>>> In a high-profile meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his
>>> support for the Hong Kong government's handling of the ongoing
>>> pro-democracy demonstrations even as student protest leaders seek to
>>> schedule direct talks with central government ...
>>> Opinion:Russian Forces Provoked West 40 TimesDaily Beast
>>> In Depth:Russia's 'close military encounters' with Europe documentedBBC
>>> News
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>  http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060
>> http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
>> http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
>> http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0
>>
>>
>>
>> cell Sweden +4670-3213370
>> cell Uruguay +598-99470758
>>
>>
>> "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
>> your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
>> long to return.
>> — Leonardo da Vinci
>>
>>  _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>
>
>
> --
>  http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060
> http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
> http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
> http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0
>
>
>
> cell Sweden +4670-3213370
> cell Uruguay +598-99470758
>
>
> "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
> your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
> long to return.
> — Leonardo da Vinci
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forumempyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.auhttp://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>

-- 
http://www.twitter.com/caravia15860606060
http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0

<http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/>

cell Sweden +4670-3213370
cell Uruguay +598-99470758

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
long to return.
— Leonardo da Vinci
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20141111/28125d2d/attachment.htm>