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March 18 2012

OCCUPYING THE PLACE LEFT RIGHT AFTER THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION

what if Adam Curtis is right? [here] that the failure of the Left has more to do with the Right stealing all its best ideas than with anything intrinsically wrong with the Left itself. The Right showed that those ideas could work. Look at the success of the network! And of course the victim mentality of the Left bears witness to this. But then the Left didn’t fail, it lost. It lost the Revolution.

perhaps it has taken until now to realise this. Now in the new life political action appears to have we are in fact seeing the residues of a counter-revolution, the fallout from the Right’s decision to backtrack on and relinquish the good ideas it stole – from freedom, self-determination, fair competition, democracy to neoliberalism, market-led social policy, monopolistic trade, corpocratic control: the clampdown on the network that was the Counter-Revolution.

We never knew we had it so good until then! Now no wonder there is protest.

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January 26 2012

lynching, piracy, decapitation, abject media = subjection … and excerpts from Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84

this is an ad for lynching

:

 

occupy lynching?

while nearby: piracy -

while art means action now

and action means decapitation

- the ritual slaying of Ronald McDonald

 

this is an ad

for

Rachel Lee’s

article at CTheory

advertising AFFECT

FEELING

EMOTION

intensely &

“ahead of the game”

which could be the following:

is at least what the following wants needs likes follows shares and

adverts to in a culture of “distracted tactility” [Rachel Lee after Michael Taussig, 1991]

“This reminded Tengo of a certain event, something from the distant past that he would recall now and then. Something he could never forget. But he decided not to mention it. It would have been a long story. And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words.”

- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011, p. 72

The concepts of time, space, and possibility.

“Tengo knew that time could become deformed as it moved forward. Time itself was uniform in composition, but once consumed, it took on a deformed shape. One period of fime might be terribly heavy and long, while another could be light and short. Occasionally, the order of things could be reversed, and in the worst cases order itself could vanish entirely. Sometimes things that should not be there at all might be added onto time. By adjusting time this way to suit their own purposes, people probably adjusted the meaning of their existences. In other words, by adding such operations to time, they were able – but just barely – to preserve their own sanity. Surely, if a person had to accept the time through which he had just passed uniformly in the given order, his nerves could not bear the strain. Such a life, Tengo felt, would be sheer torture.

“Through the expansion of the brain, people had acquired the concept of temporality, but they simultaneously learned ways in which to change and adjust time. In parallel with their ceaseless consumption of time, people would ceaselessly reproduce time that they had mentally adjusted. This was no ordinary feat. No wonder the brain was said to consume forty percent of the body’s total energy!”

- Ibid., p. 275

my bookmark reads: strike!

TRIPLE DIP – STRIKE

“They’re both policemen now. Not too long ago, my uncle even received official commendation as an outstanding officer – thirty years of continuous service, major contributions to public safety in the district and to improvement of the environment. He was featured in the paper once for saving a stupid dog and her pup that wandered into a rail crossing.”

“The ones who did it can always rationalise their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

- Ibid., pp. 292-293

I am a part of this world, and this world is a part of me.”

- Ibid., p. 855

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November 26 2011

Occupy is a Revolutionary Subject or Still Life

- Balthus, Still Life, 1937

Occupy Wall Street as a Node of Resonance

The node of resonance analysis seems to me flawed because it takes the image from network theory. Receptive as well as resonant nodes imply a mechanical reduction: they are parts of a mechanism, not machines productive of transversal subjects.

Occupy has the power to effect change | Peter Hallward

Peter Hallward’s piece ignores even Judith Butler’s view of a material transformation effected by Occupy – which is at least suggestive – in favour of advocating a conventional protest movement, involving civil disobedience and non-compliance.

The tactics of occupation: Becoming cockroach

This is where the former analysis actually works, since it points out the difference between Occupy and a protest movement: the former does not Move! Here also the strength in the Cockroaches article is stasis. There is no movement.

What doesn’t happen when we stop? is the question. Not the more familiar: What happens? Or: What happens now that we have stopped here?

So: What or who cannot be excluded? Not: How can I be included?

Which points to Occupy as a simulation. There is an indication, several stories, an anecdote or two, that the Zuccotti Occupation began from an artistic reappropriation of the Tahrir Square Occupation. It was recognisable. People knew how to respond. And there was a sort of romance: maybe we are like Egyptians, fighting an overtly oppressive system.

It involved – and involves still, stillness being all – the putting into play of an aesthetic for which no further instructions were required. Simply occupy! It is this aesthetic phenomenon that the above analyses are trying to reduce to discourse, to analyse, to trace the outlines of, the etiology, the teleology, the origins and ends, and curlicuing, ornamenting out of sheer imaginative will, and failing to analyse, failing even to depict. Because such traditional forms of analysis are afraid of simulation, fakes, the hyperreal, or virtual.

Imagine a serious person finding value in the politically fake! There is an art to writing of such things.

What I would like to point out is that not only is Occupy not a movement, because it does not move, not only is Occupy a simulation, or fake, or play politics (!), but that in the bodies it immoblises it puts its own status – and stasis – at risk.

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November 21 2011

reoccupation syndrome

spring back

fall forward

in this way you can be having revolution

and regressing

at the same time

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November 15 2011

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