[-empyre-] sample from today
Maria Damon
damon001 at umn.edu
Wed Nov 12 12:12:08 EST 2014
Peter Lamborn Wilson
sorry to be pedantic :-)
On 11/11/14 5:28 PM, Ana Valdes wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
> I read Hakim Bey (William Lambert Wilson) at the beginning of the net
> when Autonomedia started and we all believed the myth "information
> want to be free". He was a big inspiration for me as well and I think
> his theory of the TAZ, temporary autonomous zones, is an interesting
> contribution to a new geography based more on the imaginary than on
> political borders.
> Ana
>
>
> Enviado desde Samsung Mobile
>
>
> -------- Mensaje original --------
> De: Murat Nemet-Nejat
> Fecha:11/11/2014 18:22 (GMT-03:00)
> A: soft_skinned_space
> Asunto: Re: [-empyre-] sample from today
>
> Ana, well not always. Remember Conrad's /The Secret Agent/? But
> anarchist had less power than institutional power to wreak
> destruction and, as far as I know, none of them was a suicide bomber,
> the tool that gives the modern terrorist the ability to influence
> minds far beyond their numbers.
>
> Interestingly, Hakim Bey regards himself an anarchist and now lives
> some place, I think, upstate New York in "retirement." His books on
> Sufism, its subversive position within Islam, had a great influence on
> my work.
>
> I always wandered the adoption of "Hakim Bey" as a /nom de guerre
> /since Hakim Bey is the name of the uniformed Turkish police officer,
> played by Orson Wells, in the film /A Cask for Demetrius/.
>
> Ciao,
>
> Murat
>
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:04 PM, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com
> <mailto:agora158 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
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> I had a discussion with Murray Bookchin once, he visited us, the
> anarchist collective I lived with at that time, in Stockholm. We
> translated into Swedish his book about Ecology. He was a true
> individualist anarchist, he was very suspicious about us, about
> how we manage to live together work together and spend free time
> together :)
> He defended the right to wear weapon and to defend himself against
> anyone wanting to harm him. For us his these about citizen militie
> and armed vigilantes to watch the autogestionated societies was
> unthinkable.
> You are totally right, the anarchists nihilists from the end of
> the 19th century and beginning to the 20th century were considered
> today's terrorists :) But their agenda was less bloody ;(
> Ana
>
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat
> <muratnn at gmail.com <mailto:muratnn at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Ana, in the United States, the Libertarians have an idealized
> version of 19th century America, a De Toquevillean paradise,
> where "freedom" prevailed. In my view, all these are
> different, but very related, expressions of alienation. What
> is the cause of these splintered explosions of violence? At
> the heart, it seems to me, is the fall of the Soviet Union. In
> the preceding bipolar world, where there was an overarching
> threat of a world war/nuclear explosion, these alienations
> (always there) were suppressed, very often with the tacit
> consent of the governed. After the fall, the overarching,
> unimaginable, maximal threat gone, the tacit contract of the
> cold war is gone. Previously suppressed (or unheard) voices
> begin to speak with potentially, often violent, centrifugal
> force. Ironically, a lot of the violence, which the majority
> of us experience virtually, is primarily the result of
> increased freedom; second, the exponential advance in digital
> technology that makes these expressions--often of alienating
> violence we choose to call terror(ism)--visible to us. One
> should remember "terrorist" is a word (an ism) coined by
> politicians starting in the 1970's.
>
> I wonder how "terrorist" is different from "anarchist" which
> was the word of choice a hundred years ago. Do they, in subtle
> ways, mean different things? Perhaps, "anarchist" (along with
> had, in 19th century, a philosophical structure underpinning
> it. Some political thinkers/actors openly embraced it (read
> /The Parisian Arcades/ or /The Possessed/). Whereas, in our
> day, no one, no group embraces the term terrorist; but tries
> to rationalize it, often calling the opposing party the real
> terrorist. In that sense, terrorism is a violence with no
> human face, no intellectual rational; it is a convenient term
> for those actors of "rationalized violence" (states or
> would-be states) to distinguish themselves from it.
>
> We all in this thread have been asking how an individual,
> particularly as an artist or a thinker or an actor, can react
> in the face of the pervasive omni-visible, often virtual but
> potentially actual violence. In my view, the best an
> individual can do is to analyze and develop a _consciousness_
> of the machinations of this violence, the methods, the
> techniques it uses to impose itself on the rest of us.
>
> Ciao,
>
> Murat
>
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Ana Valdés
> <agora158 at gmail.com <mailto:agora158 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
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> Thank you Murat! I feel that the apocalyptical utopies
> from Boko Haram and ISIS trying to shape their own
> worldorder are signs of our time. ISIS is invoking the
> Caliphate, the go back to Al Andalous, a kind of golden
> age where Paradise loomed with it's fruits and rewards.
> Boko Haram want, regarding to their narrative, go back to
> the Africa from before colonization, a continent where
> mighty empires lived in harmony with the Earth.
> The fact they impose their new order with terror and
> harshness is a kind of symbolical and pagane cosmogony,
> they want take distance from "our" gods, for them
> education in Western terms is an abomination, the suicide
> bomber who killed himself yesterday killing 50 students is
> a true representant of their philosophy or beliefs. For us
> is education normalization, progress, development,
> enlightenment, for them is education a deadly sin.
> Ana
>
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 12:46 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat
> <muratnn at gmail.com <mailto:muratnn at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Ana, the "kind of new structure without visible
> heads[, a] new kind of feudal contract... inhabited by
> people without voices" is actually exactly what the
> largest modern states are striving for, China, the
> United States, Russia: to give enough food and
> trinkets and spectacles and popular wars to the
> population so that, at least passively, they support
> you, always the implicit threat of violence
> ("punishment" or withdrawal of goods) against those
> who want "to have a voice." This is a kind of
> "benevolent feudalism," la familia of an idealized
> Godfather-like Mafia. In the United States, the
> financial institutions and a small number of
> corporations are our invisible citizens, who
> supposedly, as "job creators," are feeding the rest of
> us and can keep us at least passively happy..
>
> One should not forget the place of digital technology
> which, it is becoming progressively clearer, is the
> tool that enables the concentration of power and
> wealth (therefore, the production of supportive
> mythologies) in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
>
> Ciao,
>
> Murat
>
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 12:01 AM, Ana Valdés
> <agora158 at gmail.com <mailto:agora158 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned
> space----------------------
> 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
> <mailto: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
>> <mailto: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
>> <mailto: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
>>> <mailto: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
>>> <mailto:jvmckenzie at wisc.edu>> wrote:
>>>
>
>
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