ARCHIVE - Connor's blog

ARCHIVE - total resistance/posthuman complicity

2007-11-13T17:02:57-08:00

The military only has the port rented for another 5 or 6 days, we can hold out.

Use the city, not your body

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barricade

ARCHIVE - corpus - george katsiaficas on negri and the social cyborg

2007-11-13T16:44:10-08:00

From "The Subversion of Politics"

From the Fetishization of Production to the Production of Fetish

Negri developed the term "social factory" to include as "producers" women in the home and students in schools and a vast number of other people. For Negri, the "collective work experience" is more than primary; it is the only real activity of humans. He organizes his own theoretical schema according to his notion of production, and every arena of interaction is understood through that prism: "Production and society have become one and the same thing."⁶ In contemporary societies, he understands an extension of the principles of production: "Work and life are no longer separate." Negri's mentor Althusser saw theory as a form of production; Deleuze and Guattari portray the unconscious as the producer of desire;⁷ and now Negri tells us that revolution is a production led by "machines of struggle."⁸ Metaphors for revolutionary organizations have had interesting formulations: organs of dual power, vehicles for the propulsion of revolutionary consciousness, a transmission belt of revolutionary ideas to the working class, and now Negri's "machines of struggle," or better, his new formulation, "cyborg":

The cyborg is now the only model available for theorizing subjectivity. Bodies without organs, humans without qualities, cyborgs: these are the subjective figures today capable of communism.⁹

His choice of words reveals a fetishization of the labor process also present in his idea that human beings can so easily be emptied by the social economy of qualities that differentiate us from machines. Negri can only think in terms of this one dimension, so even his political strategy is transformed into a type of production:

Instead of new political alliances, we could say just as well: new productive cooperation. One always returns to the same point, that of production—production of useful goods, production of communication and of social solidarity, production of aesthetic universes, production of freedom.

His attempt to analyze all reality from within the category of production is part of his systematic reduction of life to work, of the life-world to the system, of eros to production. This is precisely the reduction of human beings that is made by the existing system. It quite escapes him that if revolutionary movements in the future were to adopt his categories, they would be rendered incapable of going beyond the established system. In essence, Negri makes the whole world into a point of production. In a society overwhelmed with the fetishization of commodities, is it surprising that production, the central activity of capitalism, is itself fetishized?

It seems sort of shrill appeal to an a priori or "self-evident" distinctions between "humans" and "machines" as a basis for a liberatory politics, but at the same time one can't help but realize how beneficial the breakdown of the "Enlightenment distinctions" can be to Apple and Microsoft.

ARCHIVE - corpus - Suheir Hammad and Sunset Park

2007-11-01T14:35:44-07:00

"The only trees in my neighborhood were the ones in the cemetary down the street" (Suheir Hammad 10/31/07)

After which she read a poem about the trees of Palestine, the trees of earth and memory which are destroyed by the wall being built by the IDF and and carefully constructed (and blockaded) roads through many of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Thousands of pines in the northern hills, date palms and olive trees further south, burned or cut to make way for Israeli fortress-communities - much like the oaks and beeches that once covered what is Brooklyn, Suheir Hammad's adopted home. Is the removal of trees always a spatial form of colonization?

ARCHIVE - The IDF "recuperates" poststructural theory

2007-10-27T21:23:08-07:00

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/917158.html

A very real form of appropriation from the "conceptual toolbox" of poststructural analysis. An IDF military theorist, who fought in every Israeli war since 1967 and basically engineered Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, utilizing poststructural idea(l)s to wage war on the people of Palestine.

What I really wanted to say, had there been anyone around me while I was reading this, was that I know what has happened here, with Naveh, is wrong, I just can't say why until I have a chance to think about it more. We have to clear Gilles, Felix and Paul (but not Michel) - they are the hands of heroes that strangle tyrants and not the other way around, no matter how fascinating such an inversion (which Haaretz has so diligently exposed) might be.

SO POSTMODERN

ARCHIVE - Trash and Recyclables Area

2007-09-30T20:17:19-07:00

We are in large concrete room with large, wheeled containers that are fitted against shelf of concrete, which we are standing on. The containers are probably for putting things in, and the wheels imply they can or are meant to be moved. Several doors larger than our persons on the wall behind us and across from us, and a large opening on the eastern wall probably meant to accomodate motor vehicles. The walls are bare concrete and there are square pillars, and the large concrete floorspace under the shelf we are on is partially marked with yellow lines. There are steps but not a ramp. There is what appears to be trash in the containers under the raised concrete area, though it would be easy for a body to fall into the containers and be taken wherever the trash is taken, if indeed anyone ever comes down here. There is graffiti high on the walls, higher than a normal person could reach. You could probably flood the space with water and swim in it if the floor-level door to the outside of the building was blocked, although as already noted there is trash everywhere.