[-empyre-] Shadows in the Dawn

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all,

just to thank all the respondent, Alan, Simon and Jon to the small queries I put out. 

I appreciate learning about the sanctuaries, and am eager to learn more, in the spirit
of learning  Alan reminded me of:  yes, of course we were, back when we raised
ISIS and TERROR as a forum for discussion, trying to understand and learn, from the 
contributions. When I made my comment two days ago, I tried to express my
regret that I was forced to fabulate and conjure up all kinds of imaginings (not resistances)
to the images or the news or the reports we heard about.

though i travel back and forth, and am in touch with friends in Houston – and they did
tell me they heard of ICE [Homeland Security's  Immigration and Customs Enforcement] 
entering neighborhoods and looking for illegal immigrants or questioning folks they caught
 (caught doing what, working? walking the street, driving?i don;t even know the details) – 
I cannot act on that where i am now, where some of us could care less about a preposterous president of the US.
there are many preposterous politicians, and military men:

here's what Olga Danylyuk, back from fieldwork in Ukraine, told my DAP rehearsal group last night, 
testimony she collected from interviews:

[volunteer battalion 'Tornado' commander:]
"When you are ready to die - you have a right to kill. If you are ready to endure torture -  you have a right to inflict it on others. And this is justifiable’."

Olga then suggested that "the normalisation of war and justification of violence is the most dangerous transformation of civil society in the current political 
environment of proxy wars. Given that modern conflicts are highly mediatised affairs, the media is weaponised and, 
most crucially, feeds back into reality transforming things on the ground in turn. 
This convergence needs to be explored.... to present conflicting realities so deeply entwined>

This is part of an exhibition/performance project we are working on.

And global effects that you enumarate, Alan, are extrapolated
from news you read? Military actions or activities?  blocked immigrants (I thought sensible courts
had overturned that), effects on science (?), effects on the NEA: we shall see, and of course political
policies can be acted against and resisted. There are courts too, and some democratic processes
of course work just fine. I have also not fully given up on the Left, Simon.

I am reading Simon's very incisive and complex reflections of the french résistance ( as we
are here dealing with elections in The Netherlands, and Geert Wilders loss being thought of 
as key moment for tolerant societies and serious politics on continent, a defeat of right wing populism).
And my tiny ancestral state, the Saarland, just issued a rule disallowing Turkish politicians to hold rallies
in a german state; I am talking to friends from Turkey about their understanding of their governor,
and yes, I suppose we'd need to listen to how folks, not just the subscribers and artists-intellectuals here, are responding
to what is not so much "banality," but everyday survival processes, economic and political, and also health wise
and spiritual. Simon, the Arendt demystification is a very difficult topic, more soon. I think Arendt often gets 'misquoted',
with her reference to the banality of evil. Her bitter irony is uncderestimated. 

Thank you for telling us about your theatre, one would need to respond to this "weird decomposition" too, and how you can possibly escape meaning.

>.Its subterranean strategy is not to resist but to escape meaning, essentially decomposing meaning, distributing its essential elements, its languages, in an energetic matrix (exactly a /soil/), and spending its riches to make what is not  there, in an expenditure without hope or need of recompense--minus.>>

I am trying to grapple with, and understand this....


many regards
Johannes Birringer