Posted in Uncategorized on January 23, 2013 | 3 Comments »
A fire broke out last night at the Queen's Nails Gallery on Mission Street in Bernal Heights, and the blaze was caused by an art project that went very, very — very — wrong.
According to the Queen's Nails Facebook page, the gallery was in the process of "placing 50,000.00 matches into the wall so Claire Fontaine can burn the map of the US."
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged micro-politics, militancy, power, state, the state, war machine on May 3, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
from redbird prison abolitionAccording to a level 5 prisoner participating in the hunger strike at Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP) there are forty-eight (48) prisoners who have refused nine meals and should be officially recognized as on hunger strike. Warden Bobby has not returned calls requesting information about the hunger strike.
Posted in Uncategorized on June 3, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Posted in Ideas, Uncategorized, tagged freedom, neo-liberalism on May 18, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Neo-liberalism thrives off a reversal that seems to paradoxically eliminate the “liberties” of classical liberalism.
‘Freedom’, or more specifically personal development, is only encouraged in neo-liberalism if it fosters competition. You are ‘free’ to enjoy hobbies like home-brewing or gardening but even those self-entrepreneurial activities come at a cost — they count against you in the event you lag behind (at your job, in school, or in the more amorphous area of social and cultural capital), marking your penchant for unnecessary luxuries that distract you from the more important aspects of competitive life — demonstrating that you’re not doing your share in upholding the common principles of pure competition.
Of course this isn’t new, but I think a succinct characterization of the “anti-freedom” of neo-liberalism. If this adequately sums up neo-liberalism, would neo-liberals on principle oppose everything that is non-competitive? Maybe the most stalwart defenders, but it seems to me that they still have many other commitments they’re beholden too, entitlements or ‘freedoms’ that should be held sacred and therefore free from pure market logic. Or are there people who would ‘sell you the shirt off their back’ or ‘sell you the noose to hang them with’ as the attages go?
Posted in Ideas, Uncategorized, tagged biopower, butler, direct action, foucault, zizek on May 17, 2010 | 2 Comments »
In his response to Butler in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Žižek challenges Butler’s notion of re-signification. Žižek notes that it’s not that re-signification is never effective, it’s just that both the two imaginaries on the left – the democratic welfare state imaginary and the ‘really-existing-Socialism’ – have been all but exhausted (325). Rather than resignify the symbolic coordinates of a particular identity, Žižek argues that one should transform the universal ‘principle’ that structures the existing symbolic order. Žižek is not shy in suggesting why he thinks a full-scale re-structuring is necessary because “it is the very focus on the notion of Real as impossible that reveals the ultimate contingency, frailty (and thus changeability) of very symbolic constellation that pretends to serve as the a priori horizon of the process of symbolization (221). On the next two pages, as well as in the last chapter, Žižek reiterates that his political project is one of hegemony, however. To be more explicit, one part of Žižek’s strategy is to sacrifice all attachments and identifications in an ethical act so the ethical figure is not required to compromise her desire, draining the Symbolic’s ability to hold the subject hostage – mirroring the famous line from David Fincher’s Fight Club “It’s only after you’ve lost everything are you free to do anything” (Revolution 249-53).
While I agree with Žižek that the constitutive Real provides a possibility for going beyond resignification, his strategy of hegemony sidesteps the Foucaultian conception of productive power. An analytics of power changes if the productive effects of power are taken into account. In a post-sovereign society, there is no longer a singular referent for all relations of power. The production of power is relocated to a multiplicity of sites. Instead of relying on a naïve humanism that would assume essential aspects of human rationality, desire, and sociality, productive power allows one to create a social topology that accounts for reproducing life (HS 92-100). Additionally, productive power shifts the terms of debate away from freedom and repression. Freedom implies that social, political, economic and cultural forces inhibit an otherwise unfettered subject. Instead, productive power proposes that different potentialities are to be increased or restricted as they are produced (increasing efficiency or productivity at performing certain tasks, added responsiveness to certain discursive pronouncements), but in a manner that is always radically circumscribed by its conditions of possibility because they rely on their conditions of possibility for their reproduction. Put another way, freedoms are produced, not liberated.
Posted in Uncategorized on April 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
The copy of “Invisible Governance” I ILL’d came from the University of Chicago.
On the inside cover, a glued sticker reads:
The University of Chicago Library
Given in honor of
His Excellency H. Kamuzu Banda
Life President of the Republic of Malawi
University of Chicago 1931
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Agamben, eric hazan, Tiqqun on April 18, 2010 | 8 Comments »
A kind NYC blogger did a quick-dirty translation of the Agamben/Hazan discussion on Tiqqun. It was later taken down. I can’t speak to the quality of the translation, some things are obviously wrong (for instance the translator remarks that FC is male when in fact she is female…). I also do not know why it was taken down.
A few quick notes – the re-publication of the Tiqqun texts by La Fabrique weren’t without controversy among those who formerly made up Tiqqun, we see some of these issues arise in the panel. Additionally, I’m not sure why or who it was in the audience who kept on pushing Agamben on perceived issues of ‘praxis’ (so much so that he got up and left). The second half of the video (the exchanges between people) seems to be missing now, too. I don’t know if it was taken down in order to make the debate no longer public (which is reasonable if the issues could be settled between friends) or other reasons.
So without any further ado:
