[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]

[dollyoko at thing.net]

Greetings all

Thank you Alice for adding some links to current discussions on patchwork
to the mycelial mat.

There is much to read/read into there, so I've begin with a derive through:
https://xenogothic.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/identity-politics-and-patchwork/
to see what spores alight in my imagination.

The talk of 'safe space' sent me back in time to my experience with
Italian squatted social centre movement / centri sociali, and in
particular Forte Prenestino in Rome in 1999-2001.
https://www.forteprenestino.net/

Experiencing how people created and maintained (and, lest I be tarred with
with the brush of nostalgia, still do, through various evolutions) these
centres for deep social experimentation and collaborative creativity (from
hack labs to experimental theatre to organisational methods) inspired me
deeply. The first book I read in Italian (actually it's in Milanese
dialect so was extra hard) was Marco Philopat's Costretti a Sanguinare,
which documented his lived experience of the direct lineage of English
punk and DIY to the setting up of one of the first squatted social
centres, Virus, in Milan.
http://www.orrorea33giri.com/marco-philopat-costretti-a-sanguinare-libro-punk/

I realise that the movement has changed over time, but I'm wondering if it
might be useful to think about this kind of small scale/scalar/networked
social experiment as mycelial? ( as might be comparable even smaller
experiments in building intentional 'queered' fam/community such as those
by the Invisible Committee in the French village of Tarnac -
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/comite-invisible-the-coming-insurrection
)

Certainly the movement wasn't homogeneous, and although in the main it
drew breath and blood from the wells of anarchism and autogestione
(self-management), there were deep differences between some nodes/spores.
I experienced this directly one night during a festival at Forte
Prenestino when another centre decided that the Forte community had sold
out. All of a sudden Molotov cocktails came hurtling over the moat. I was
in one of the front rooms doing some kind of net performance I think, and
it was scary (for me, the Romans seemed unfazed). The drawbridge was
raised (literally!), but not before the entrance fee jar had been stolen.
The following day Forte people held a large and very long convocation in
the fort's piazza, deciding how to deal with the situation. (If my memory
serves me well) eventually a consensus was reached: they would exclude
that squat from participating with all the other centres in the next huge
protest marches in Rome. This was around the time of the bombings by NATO
in Yugoslavia, and masses of people were in the streets every week or 2.
To have to walk alone/social banishment was seen as the most fitting
response/punishment.

I've really drifted here, but  I think what I am heading towards is seeing
if there might be some commonality between patch/work and anarcho
movements such as centri sociali, fungal connectivity, hostile spores (of
course, here I could head down another rabbit hole about Electronic
Disturbance Theatre's Floodnet DDOS tool - used first as a Digital
Zapatismo solidarity action, and the Pentagon's counter attack via
'hostile Java applets' - but that is another tale -
https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/DigZap.html ), and the impossibility
perhaps of 'safe spaces'.

Spore spaces?

The patchwork posting via Alice also contained some thoughts on the
suicidal university, including a fragment of an interview by Matt Fuller
with the late Mark Fisher for MUTE. Mark's observation about the 'dead
ritual[s]' that neoliberal managerialism has imposed on educators makes me
think about mycelium learning. What forms might this take? There was some
reseach about slime mold's capacity to learn a while back.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/the-brainless-slime-that-can-learn-by-fusing/511295/

Warp jump from slime intel back to the Zapatistas, whose words have
proliferated  (sporally?) across continents, and, as they might have it,
across galaxies:

"But there are those who do not resign themselves, there are those who
decide to be uncomfortable, there are those who do not sell themselves,
there are those who do not surrender themselves. There are, around the
world, those who resist being annihilated in this war. There are those who
decide to fight.

In any place in the world, anytime, any man or woman rebels to the point
of tearing off the clothes that resignation has woven for them and that
cynicism has dyed grey. Any man, any woman, of whatever colour in whatever
tongue, says and says to himself, to herself, "Enough already"--Ya Basta!

Enough already of lies. Enough already of crime. Enough already of death.
"Enough already of war," any man, any woman, says and says to himself, to
herself.

In whatever part of any of the five continents any man, any woman, eagerly
resists the Power and constructs his own, her own, road that doesn't imply
the loss of dignity and hope.

Any man or any woman decides to live and struggle for his part, her part,
in history. No longer does the Power dictate his steps, her steps; no
longer does the Power administer life and decide death.

Any man or any woman responds to death with life. And responds to the
nightmare by dreaming and struggling against war, against neoliberalism,
for humanity....

For struggling for a better world all of us are fenced in, threatened with
death. The fence is reproduced globally. In every continent, every city,
every rural area, every house, the Power's fence of war closes in on the
rebels whom humanity always thanks.

But fences are broken. In every house, in every rural area, in every city,
in every state, in every country, on every continent the rebels, that the
history of humanity repeats along its entire course to assure itself of
hope, struggle and the fence shakes.

The rebels search each other out. They walk towards one another. They find
each other and together break other fences. In the rural areas and cities,
in the states, in the nations, on the continents, the rebels begin to
recognise themselves, to know themselves to be equal and different. They
continue on their fatiguing walk, walking as it is now necessary to walk,
that is to say, struggling...."

http://www.struggle.ws/mexico/ezln/1996/ccri_encount_aug.html


---------------------------------------------
> speculative networks:
>
> there's been some discuss (twitter/wordpress/othrrr places) about
> patchwork/weaving, focusing on seccession/Deleuze + Guattari's
> ontology/smooth space/plane of immanence/spinoza's substance or nature.
>
> would b interested in what (specifically Ken) makes of it.
>
> here r some resources on it:
> https://xerosones.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/patchwork-a-minor-introduction/
> https://xenogothic.wordpress.com/2018/06/20/6638/
> https://xenogothic.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/patchwork-qa/
> https://xenogothic.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/patchwork-101/
> https://xenogothic.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/identity-politics-and-patchwork/
> http://www.christianhubert.com/writings/smooth_striated.html
>