Monday, October 3, 2011

We Are The 99 Percent

The socioeconomic basis of a society should not be manipulated by obscene wealth, political access and superior legal representation.

OCCUPY WALL STREET!

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

The Beach Beneath the Street — McKenzie Wark



“It was as romantic revolt rather than social critique that situationism survived in this country. Its principal anglophone representative was the writer Alexander Trocchi, whose novels of disaffected hipsterdom (notably Cain's Book) owe more to William Burroughs and the Beats than they do to, say, Bakunin. Today, Trocchi's influence is felt in the obsessive pamphleteering of the poète maudit Stewart Home, who revived Rumney's London Psychogeographical Association in the early 90s and continues to pledge his allegiance to ‘non-Debordist situationism’. And a vestigial folk memory of situationist dérive (‘street ethnography’ Wark calls it), as it was practised by Debord and his lettrist comrade Ivan Chtcheglov in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 50s, is preserved in the literary peregrinations of Iain Sinclair and Will Self, where psychogeography is parlayed into a kind of Blakean metropolitan mysticism.

“The British situationists of the late 60s thought Debord and the others had taken a wrong turn. SI apostate Christopher Gray, whose band of London-based provocateurs King Mob included the future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, opined: ‘What they [Debord et al] gained in intellectual power and scope they had lost in terms of the richness and verve of their own everyday lives.’ The SI, Gray argued, ‘turned inward’. ‘Cultural sabotage’ and ‘drunken exuberance’ had been replaced by theoretical austerity.

“But that turning inward didn't prevent the Parisian situationists from exerting the most profound influence on the French student movement in May 1968. More than 300,000 copies were printed of a pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student Life, written by an SI cadre named Mustapha Khayati. And it was a protégé of Debord's, René Viénet, who was responsible for some of the more memorable of the graffiti that appeared all over Paris during that tumultuous month – including the one Wark has taken for the title of his book.”

@The Guardian

Basic Income

“...The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet-unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact...

“From the point where it takes only 1,000 hours per year or 20,000 to 30,000 hours per lifetime to create an amount of wealth equal to or greater than the amount we create at the present time in 1,600 hours per year or 40,000 to 50,000 hours in a working life, we must all be able to obtain a real income equal to or higher than our current salaries in exchange for a greatly reduced quantity of work...

“Neither is it true any longer that the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be. The present crisis has stimulated technological change of an unprecedented scale and speed: 'the micro-chip revolution'. The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has been to make rapidly increasing savings in labour, in the industrial, administrative and service sectors. Increasing production is secured in these sectors by decreasing amounts of labour. As a result, the social process of production no longer needs everyone to work in it on a full-time basis. The work ethic ceases to be viable in such a situation and work-based society is thrown into crisis...” — André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason

@Basic Income Earth Network

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Labyrinths of Information

“WHOEVER tried one day to enter Internet knows that one would not have to speak about ‘autoroutes’ of information but rather about labyrinths: gigantic tangle of lanes and dead ends, libraries and coffees, the network is composed of thousand paths which often finish in dead ends. Internet resembles more the labyrinth of a medieval city, without true architect, than with the beautiful scheduling of a motorway. Admittedly, as the motorways have done it for fifty years, Internet will play a major role in the future of the communications between the men. But it will not be of races along straight lines but about voyages buissonniers, virtual, motionless, which returns there still to the labyrinth, show of voyage.

“For a long time, the major metaphor to indicate progress was the straight line, better means of saving energy. And it is undoubtedly for that that the word of motorway came to mind when it was a question of naming the networks multimedia in gestation. But this metaphor is anachronistic and misleading: in the universe of information reigns complexity; it is not a question any more of saving energy but of producing and of transmitting information. And in this paradigm, the simple one is not best. The Master word of the modern society will become that of labyrinth. All, in our companies, takes the form of it. Initially, data processing is labyrinthian: the microprocessor is like a labyrinth of chips; the succession of binary instructions of the data-processing programs must be read like a succession of choice to borrow such or such path.

“The video games also consist in them traversing a labyrinth without falling into the multiple traps which are hidden there; they, in their most recent versions, are even connected on the networks and make it possible to play with partners, in labyrinths of labyrinths. More still, if one thinks of it well, the majority of the elements of the modern life return there. The city is a labyrinth; the networks of capacities and influence, the flow charts, the university courses, the careers in the company, are also made by it of a succession of traps and choices binary. The genetic engineering is still presented in the form of a creation of a series of coded labyrinths. The fingerprint is a specific labyrinth to each individual. Until the psychoanalysis which indicates the unconscious one like a monster tapi at the bottom of a labyrinth and which is given as object to include/understand the dreams where the sleeper is confronted with the choice distressing of a path to take in a maze of interdicts. It is necessary for us thus to learn how to think labyrinth.

“For that, it is necessary to turn over to the sources: the labyrinth is one of the oldest figures of the human thought. It was, in the most moved back times, the best way of trapping time, of preventing the profaners from approaching a tomb or a crowned place. Something like a code of safe; a space and mental code, a ritual of passage. One found some, everywhere: in Egypt, in China, in India, in Tibet, in Greece, in Brittany, in America, in Africa. Sometimes with the same drawings to thousands of kilometers. They were stones, plants or simply engraved or painted on walls. In Egypt, they represented the path followed by the heart. In the Mediterranean, they were used as guides with ritual dances. In all the cultures, they symbolized the interior voyage of one man in the search of his truth, virtual nomadism.

“With modernity, the nomad leaves the place to the sedentary; the labyrinth disappears with the profit from the straight line. It takes refuge in the gardens of convents where it is nothing any more but one elegant way to make it possible faithful to make, with few expenses, a show of crusade, while circulating in a labyrinth of which center MIME Jerusalem. One also finds it in the English gardens like a virtual nomadism, parlour game always, this ludic time.

“And it is back today, for close reasons: as for the motionless pilgrim of the convents, the modern labyrinths transform the man into a virtual nomad, traveller of the image and show, who works and consumes in residence, travelling in networks of information, if it does not have the means of being this nomad of luxury, traveller of all the pleasures, who tomorrow will dictate his values with the middle class. Then, it will be necessary for us to relearn the secrecies of this old wisdom, to study all the strategies making it possible to draw them and not to lose itself there, founded on the intuition and the memory. It will be necessary for us to relearn to see the world starting from this metaphor. For example, it will have to be understood that time does not pass in a single direction but only it is spread out, like water in a labyrinth, with outward journeys and returns, spirals and dead ends, proximities remote and misleading distances.

“In this universe, the myths will have to say much; and initially obviously that of Crétois which made labyrinth the place of dissimulation of cruelty. Who will be Minos, the capacity which wants to hide its secrecies in the labyrinth? Who will be Thésée, which wants to reveal them? And does ARIANE, rebel it, which gives him the wire for the love of the life? And Maze, the brilliant inventor of the trap only able to thwart it? And Minotaure, the dream, the monster, the unconscious one, the enemy hidden in each man, that it is necessary for him to put at the day to destroy it? And Icare, démiurge, who, to escape from the labyrinth, use the wings developed by his father, wise Dédale, but which will go up too high and will fall? What will be finally the wax, size and limit of the human intelligence, because it enables him to fix wings has its shoulders and to escape the labyrinth by the top, at least as a long time as it does not try to approach too much the sun? Of Maze with Internet. Very far. And very near. Exactly like two points close to a labyrinth.

“Jacques Attali, former special adviser near the president of the Republic François Mitterrand, former president of the BERD, is to advise of State. Source: newspaper the World, Thursday November 9, 1995, p. 18

“Placed on the server of Synec-Doc. with the pleasant authorization of Jacques Attali and the newspaper the World.”

Text stream translated from the French through Altavista's Babelfish.

@synec-doc.be

Longshore Labor Dispute



“EGT Development is a joint venture of Japan-based Itochu Corp, South Korea’s STX Pan Ocean and St. Louis-based Bunge North America. Like so many corporations that promise good jobs to get what they want, EGT got a special state tax exemption and a sweetheart lease deal from the Port of Longview to build a $200 million grain terminal there. The government even seized adjacent land for the project. But as soon as the deal’s ink was dry and the ceremonial first shovel of dirt was overturned two years ago, EGT began running the project on the cheap.

“Despite high unemployment in Cowlitz County and the availability of hundreds of skilled union building trades workers, EGT imported the vast majority of its construction crews from low-wage communities out-of-state and did not pay area standard wages, leading to howls from the local labor community.”

@thestand.org

Crisis of Capitalism

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Billy Brag: Music Needs to Get Political Again

“In the Clash interview from 1976 that was reprinted in the NME ‘riot issue’, Joe Strummer boldly said ‘We’re hoping to educate any kid who comes to listen us, just to keep them from joining the National Front’. That certainly worked in my case. When Notting Hill went up in smoke, I didn’t get it, yet, a year or so later, the first political activism that I ever took part in was the first Rock Against Racism Carnival in London. I’d been drawn by the fact that the Clash were top of the bill.”

@Alternet.org

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Consciousness, Conspiracy and Coincidence

Towards an Eco-Psychology

Raging Against the Machine



“The computer has brought us convenience and amusement, but, like all technology, it's a mixed blessing. Far from smashing Big Brother, computers have given him more control over our lives. They have been a blessing for snoops, con artists and market manipulators. They have turned global communications into glitchy, virus-plagued networks. Along with some highly valuable resources, the World Wide Web has brought a time-wasting flood of trivia, trash, pornography and spam. We have burdened our children with the distractions of becoming computer literate before they are just plain old literate.”

Theodore Roszak (November 15, 1933 – July 5, 2011)
@Los Angeles Times

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Abdallah Oumbadougou—Ghaï Imidraï Imageren

Solidarity Economics

“A daring hypothesis: there is a global revolution underway. It is not led by any political party or vanguard. It has no military bases and its strategy is anti-belligerent. It mobilises millions of people all over the world. We know little about it. What we do know is that at the grassroots level of its mobilisations, organisation and popular education, there are thousands of movements and millions of people who have begun weaving collaborative networks of economic solidarity, creating channels and connections with the potential to bring together and strengthen local and global struggles. They are working collectively, from the bottom up, and democratically, building consensus while respecting reasoned dissent. We see these movements and their achievements everywhere, yet we know little about the power of this phenomenon, for at first they seem insufficient in number and size to change the world. And yet, I maintain: there is a global revolution underway.

“The great political discovery of the 1990s was the idea of weaving collaborative networks among groups, movements and organisations through which to coordinate and share, not only our solutions and victories, but also our problems and challenges, our strategies and everyday practices. We were creating axes of struggle capable of bringing together the local and the global, the long and short term, as well as diversity and unity. However, while these collaborative networks were crucial, we had not understood their full potential.

“Take the example of the World Social Forums; the WSF process is the tip of a giant iceberg hiding myriad collaborative networks and processes. The limit of the WSF process is that it has not gone nearly far enough in developing world social networks. The forums are important moments connecting thousands of actors, opening up a significant flow of communication of the diversities that are inherent to these networks. Afterwards, even if participants are somehow informed by the new, collectively acquired experience, the flows of communication and actions essentially return to the previously existing plateaus.

“While clearly important, processes and spaces such as social forums are not enough. Taking the global construction of collaborative solidarity networks as our strategic horizon means finding ways of promoting, reinforcing and expanding on such moments in more spheres of life and struggle. More than simply spreading information about proposals, and thus acting on the level of ideological debate, it is necessary to operate on political and economic planes, putting some of the proposals into practice. In other words, our daily economic practices must be part of the work of transforming global economic structures.”

@turbulence.org.uk

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Peter Brötzmann Quartet—Improvisation

Marzette Watts—Backdrop For Urban Revolution

Resignation

“Pseudo‑activity is generally the attempt to rescue enclaves of immediacy in the midst of a thoroughly mediated and rigidified society. . . . The disastrous model of pseudo‑activity is the ‘do‑it‑yourself’ . . . activities that do what has long been done better by the means of industrial production only in order to inspire in the unfree individuals, paralyzed in their spontaneity, the assurance that everything depends on them. . . . However, spontaneity should not be absolutized, just as little as it should be split off from the objective situation or idolized the way the administered world itself is. . . . Even political undertakings can sink into pseudo -activities, into theater. It is no coincidence that the ideals of immediate action, even the propaganda of the act, have been resurrected after the willing integration of formerly progressive organizations that now in all countries of the earth are developing the characteristic traits of what they once opposed. . . . By forgetting thought, the impatience falls back below it.

“This is made easier for the individual by his capitulation to the collective with which he identifies himself. He is spared from recognizing his powerlessness; the few become the many in their own eyes. This act, not unwavering thought, is resignative. No transparent relationship obtains between the interests of the ego and the collective it surrenders itself to. The ego must abolish itself so that it may be blessed with the grace of being chosen by the collective. . . . The sense of a new security is purchased with the sacrifice of autonomous thinking. The consolation that thinking improves in the context of collective action is deceptive: thinking, as a mere instrument of activist actions, atrophies like all instrumental reason. . . .

“By contrast the uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither signs over his consciousness nor lets himself be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give in. Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn't break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation. . . . Open thinking points beyond itself. . . .Whatever has once been thought can be suppressed, forgotten, can vanish. But it cannot be denied that something of it survives. For thinking has the element of the universal. What once was thought cogently must be thought elsewhere, by others: this confidence accompanies even the most solitary and powerless thought. . . . The happiness that dawns in the eye of the thinking person is the happiness of humanity. The universal tendency of oppression is opposed to thought as such. Thought is happiness, even where it defines unhappiness: by enunciating it. By this alone happiness reaches into the universal unhappiness. Whoever does not let it atrophy has not resigned.”

Theodor Adorno Study Guide
@www.autodidactproject.org

Killing Joke—Wardance

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“It is the schizoid’s ability to scramble and decode that Deleuze and Guattari associate with contemporary capitalism. Like the schizophrenic, capitalism can insert itself anywhere and everywhere as a decoder and scrambler. Although,

[o]ur [capitalist] societies exhibit a marked taste for all codes, codes foreign and exotic...this taste is destructive and morbid. While decoding doubtless means understanding and translating a code, it also means destroying the code as such, assigning it an archaic, folkloric, or residual function (245).

“Mobile, flexible capital is capable of inserting itself into any cultural milieu. In countries as different as Japan, Brazil, France, and Kenya, capitalism is able to take advantage of the local symbolic order (Harvey 1989). The forms that capitalism takes in these various countries reflect the symbolic order that the capitalist machine has plugged into. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari do not characterize the capitalist machine as monolithic or unitary, it does not have an ‘I’, an ego, or a unified identity. It works instead as a polymorphous destroyer of codes. It continually breaks down the cultural, symbolic, and linguistic barriers that create territories and limit exchange. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari assert that ‘[c]ivilization is defined by the decoding and deterritorialization of flows in capitalist production’ (244).

“It would seem that Deleuze and Guattari are making a move similar to Jameson’s by asserting that schizophrenia resembles and is associated with the logic of late capitalism. ‘Yet it would be a serious error,’ assert Deleuze and Guattari, ‘to consider the capitalist flows and the schizophrenic flows as identical, under the general theme of... decoding’ (244). Capitalism ‘produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars’ but the schizos are not salable. (245) Indeed, the schizophrenic is locked up in institutions, and turned into a ‘confined clinical entity’ (245). If the schizophrenic really exemplified the culture of capitalism, why aren’t schizos celebrated as heroes and heroines in contemporary capitalist society? Deleuze and Guattari conclude that:

schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit....Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death (246).

“As capitalism decodes and deterritorializes it reaches a limit at which point it must artificially reterritorialize by augmenting the state apparatus, and repressive bureaucratic and symbolic regimes. The schizophrenic never reaches such a limit. S/he resists such reterritorialization, just as s/he resists the symbolic and despotic territorialization of the oedipalizing psychotherapist.

“Thus, Deleuze and Guattari disagree with Jameson’s argument that schizophrenia reinforces and contributes to the hegemony of capitalism. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari see the schizophrenic as capitalism’s exterminating angel. For them the schizo is a radical, revolutionary, nomadic wanderer who resists all forms of oppressive power. They believe that radical political movements should ‘learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs’ (Seem xxi). Schizophrenic sensibilities can replace ideological and dogmatic political goals with a radical form of productive desire. This ‘desiring-production’ brings the unconscious into the real, and unleashes its radical world-making potential. Productive desire need not be solipsistic, and includes the ‘group psychosis’ induced by radical postmodern artistic creations and political movements. Neither is desiring-production limited to clinical schizophrenics. Desiring-production marks the schizophrenic potential in everyone to resist the power of despotic signifiers and capitalist reterritorialization.”

@Negations

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Propaganda Techniques Used by Fox News

“1. Panic Mongering
2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem
3. Projection/Flipping
4. Rewriting History
5. Scapegoating/Othering
6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness
7. Bullying
8. Confusion
9. Populism
10. Invoking the Christian God
11. Saturation
12. Disparaging Education
13. Guilt by Association
14. Diversion”

@Truthout

Rupert Murdoch and Media Corruption

“The bottomless cesspool that was Rupert Murdoch’s London tabloid News of the World is gone, but the ruthless corporate politics of its master still hold sway in the U.S. and Britain. Murdoch is the great vampire of media corruption and consolidation on both sides of the Atlantic. But he is not a solitary villain. ‘Murdoch was not the only media beneficiary when the FCC allowed him and others to consolidate their power and influence.’ All corporate media are truth thieves.

“‘Murdoch felt he had nothing to fear from politicians and that he was probably right to be so unconcerned.’

“If it can be said that there is one lord of world wide corporate media, that person is Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch’s News Corporation reigns supreme in television and print media in his native Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

“Americans are most familiar with News Corporation ownership of the Fox news cable channel, the New York Post, Dow Jones Inc., the Wall Street Journal, and Twentieth Century Fox film studio among others. The Murdoch organization is not just big, but has a distinct political point of view. Despite the claim of being ‘fair and balanced’ Fox news and other Murdoch outlets blatantly promote and protect conservative interests and politics.”

@Black Agenda Report

Monday, July 18, 2011

Skinny Puppy—Pro-Test



“Be a politician
Eroding all your freedoms
Down the rabbit hole cracks
Money markets fall
Through a looking glass
Time becomes too fast
All to benefit the rich

“So keep eating from the apple
Inches from the center
Shaken to the core
Until it doesn't matter
No one to turn to
Nowhere to run to
Better the bomb to blow it”

Sunday, July 17, 2011

A History of the Revolutionary Working Class—Documents by the People Who Practiced It

“Since capitalism arose in the world, workers have been banding together; at first locally in small groups, but increasingly workers realized that the greater the strength of workers’ organisation, the better able workers are to challenge capitalism. This section provides in-depth history of these efforts of organising workers regardless of race, ethnicity, gender—or border, the effort to organise and create collaboration and co-operation between workers the world over in order to win the world for those who make it run.”

@www.marxist.org

Friday, July 15, 2011

Meat Beat Manifesto—Edge Of No Control

The Theory of Communicative Action

“The rationalization of the lifeworld in Western modernity went hand-in-hand with the growth of systemic mechanisms of coordination already mentioned above, in which the demands on fully communicative consensus are relaxed. If large and complex modern societies can no longer be integrated solely on the basis of shared cultural values and norms, new nonintentional mechanisms of coordination must emerge, which take the form of nonlinguistic media of money and power. For example, markets coordinate the collective production and distribution of goods nonintentionally, even if they are grounded in cultural and political institutions such as firms and states. Modernization can become pathological, as when money and power ‘colonize the lifeworld’ and displace communicative forms of solidarity and inhibit the reproduction of the lifeworld, as when, for example, universities become governed by market strategies. ‘Juridification’ is another such pathological form, when law comes to invade more and more areas of social life, turning citizens into clients of bureaucracies with what Foucault might call ‘normalizing’ effects. This aspect of TCA has less of an impact on Habermas’s current work, which returns to the theme of improving democratic practice as a means of counteracting juridification and colonization. Democratic institutions, if properly designed and robustly executed, are supposed to ensure that the law does not take this pathological form but is subject to the deliberation of citizens, who thus author the laws to which they are subject (see sec. 3.4).”

@The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Science, Technology, Technocracy and Democracy

“One of the assumptions of the nineteenth century was that, with science, mankind could be freed from politics. Science was perceived as the reign of logic and reason, while politics was the reign of emotion and passion. Science was expected to achieve the Kingdom of Reason through different means. First, it would end poverty, and this was supposed to bring happiness and peace. Second, it would teach people how to think rationally, and this would lead to rational behavior in all spheres of activity. Third, social and political matters in themselves could be dealt with scientifically, and this would eliminate irrational disputes and produce the best of societies.

“However challenged by historical experiences and intellectual refutations, these assumptions had not faded away. They remain very much in force as myths and ideologies that justify the activities of scientists and of those that use science or its cover, for whatever goals they wish to pursue. With this view of science, politics is not suppressed in fact, but it tends to be denied as unworthy, irrational and undignified. It tends to be suppressed intellectually, and this is the way in which science and technology can become technocracy. We can understand this process better if we look closely at one of each of the means science was supposed to eliminate politics.

“One of the important realizations of the nineteen seventies is that science growth and technological development is not an endless frontier, but is approaching some limits that are already visible. These limits are being placed by the foreseeable exhaustion of natural resources and new frontiers to explore, and by the restrictions societies are starting to place in the ever-increasing expansion of the scientific and technological establishments. The decision not to produce the Super-Sonic Transport airplane in the US, the anti-climatic end of the lunar program, the campaigns against nuclear energy, the indecisions and difficulties with fusion energy, the resistance and limitations imposed in the US on the recombinant DNA research, all this represents a new trend and challenge to which science in America was not used to. In the preface to the recent issue of Daedalus dedicated to the ‘Limits of scientific inquiry,’ the present situation is compared with twenty years before, when such a concept, ‘so meaningful in the context of today's world, would seem inappropriate, even incongruous to a society overwhelmingly preoccupied with the problems created by the orbiting object called Sputnik.’ (Daedalus, 1978, 108)”

@www.schwartzman.org.br

Information Cartel



“When journalism is treated as just another widget in a commercial enterprise, the focus isn't on truth, verification or public good, but productivity and output. Spending years on a story, whether to investigate MPs' expenses or phone hacking, doesn't make business sense. If we are serious about wanting this type of journalism, we have to make it easier and more cost-effective to access information legitimately.

“Instead, journalism in Britain is a patronage system—just like politics. It is rare to get good, timely information through merit (eg by trawling through public records); instead it's about knowing the right people, exchanging favours. In America reporters are not allowed to accept any hospitality. In Britain, taking people out to lunch is de rigueur. It's where information is traded. But in this setting, information comes at a price.

“This is why there is collusion between the elites of the police, politicians and the press. It is a cartel of information. The press only get information by playing the game. There is a reason none of the main political reporters investigated MPs' expenses – because to do so would have meant falling out with those who control access to important civic information. The press—like the public—have little statutory right to information with no strings attached. Inside parliament the lobby system is an exercise in client journalism that serves primarily the interests of the powerful.”

@The Guardian

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Bunny Wailer

Situationist International Online



6. The acculturation process takes place within the social environment; if this environment does not exist, no culture can form. The more numerous and varied the contacts, the more intensely does acculturation flourish. Chambert de Lauwe was the first to point out this function of certain urban areas (especially old districts), which he termed ‘acculturation zones.’ He noted in particular that the culture-forming process is strongest in those districts where the population is looked upon as anti-social, and that the contact between different groups—a contact that gives rise to new culture-forming elements—is most intense in districts where there is evidence of social dislocation.” — from Constant A. Nieuwenhuis’ “New Urbanism” (Provo #9, 12 May 1966)

@Situationist International Online

Encyclopaedia Acephalica



“Factory Chimney: When I review my own memories, it seems that for our generation, out of all the world’s various objects glimpsed in early childhood, the most fear-inspiring architectural form was by no means the church, however monstrous, but rather large factory chimneys, true channels of communication between the ominously dull, threatening sky and the muddy, stinking earth surrounding the textile and dye factories.

“Today, when the truly wretched aesthete, at a loss for objects of admiration, has invented the contemptible ‘beauty’ of the factory, the dire filth of those enormous tentacles appears all the more revolting; the rain puddles at their feet, the empty lots, the black smoke half-beaten down by the wind, the piles of slag and dross are the sole true attributes of those gods of a sewer Olympus. I was not hallucinating when, as a terrified child, I discerned in those giant scarecrows, which both excited me to the point of anguish and made me run sometimes for my life, the presence of a fearful rage. That rage would, I sensed, later become my own, giving meaning to everything spoiling within my own head and to all that which, in civilised states, looms up like carrion in a nightmare. I am, of course, not unaware that for most people the factory chimney is merely the sign of mankind’s labour, and never the terrible projection of that nightmare which develops obscurely, like a cancer, within mankind. Obviously one does not, as a rule, continue to focus on that which is seen as the revelation of a state of violence for which one bears some responsibility. This childish or untutored way of seeing is replaced by a knowing vision which allows one to take a factory chimney for a stone construction forming a pipe for the evacuation of smoke high into the air—which is to say, for an abstraction. Now, the only possible reason for the present dictionary is precisely to demonstrate the error of that sort of definition.

“It should be stressed, for example, that a chimney is only very tentatively of a wholly mechanical order. Hardly has it risen towards the first covering cloud, hardly has the smoke coiled round within its throat, than it has already become the oracle of all that is most violent in our present-day-world, and this for the same reason, really, as each grimace of the pavement’s mud or of the human face, as each part of an immense unrest whose order is that of a dream, or as the hairy, inexplicable muzzle of a dog. That is why, when placing it in a dictionary, it is more logical to call upon the little boy, the terrified witness of the birth of that image of the immense and sinister convulsions in which his whole life will unfold, rather than the technician, who is necessarily blind.”

Encyclopaedia Acephalica (Edited by Georges Bataille)
@Athemita

Nomade—Los Angeles

Noam Chomsky on Reich Wing Media

Jerry Lee Lewis

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys and Coyote (with music by Steve Reich)

Woody Gutherie—All You Fascists Bound To Lose



@Exile On Moan Street

Cultural Genocide



@The Secret Of Existence

Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency

“There are several common examples of how people avoid responsibility in American culture. Conformity is one good example. Americans pride themselves on being autonomous individuals to the point of idealizing individualism. However, upon closer analysis, Americans find extremely creative ways of giving up their freedom. Americans conform through blind allegiance to various organizations and institutions including political parties and religious institutions. This is not to say that being dedicated to either of these are bad. In fact, often they can lead to very positive outcomes. The problem comes with blind allegiance where a person gives up their responsibility to critically think through the beliefs, perspectives, and values of the organization. When this happens, the individual’s values are no longer authentic.

“When a person gives their allegiance to an external belief structure, they may go in one of several directions. First, they often will become very rigid in their allegiance to the organization or structure to which they have committed. This type of conformity can be seen through various forms of fundamentalism—religious, political, psychological systems, etc.”

@Existential-Therapy.com

Jaybo—Glasgow Street Art

Monday, July 4, 2011

Alter-Globalization

”Alter-globalization (also known as alternative globalization, alter-mundialization — from the French ‘altermondialisme’ — or the global justice movement) is the name of a social movement that supports global cooperation and interaction, but which opposes the negative effects of economic globalization, feeling that it often works to the detriment of, or does not adequately promote, human values such as environmental and climate protection, economic justice, labor protection, protection of indigenous cultures and human rights.

“The name may have been derived from a popular slogan of the movement: 'Another world is possible', which came out of the World Social Forum. ‘The alter-globalization movement is a cooperative movement designed to protest the direction and perceived negative economic, political, social, cultural and ecological consequences of neoliberal globalization’. Many alter-globalists, unlike anti-globalists, seek to avoid the ‘disestablishment of local economies and disastrous humanitarian consequences’. Most members of this movement shun the label ‘anti-globalization’ as pejorative and incorrect since they actively support human activity on a global scale and do not oppose economic globalization per se.”

@Wikipedia

Keny Arkana—La rage

Fire In Babylon

Chinua Achebe and the Language of the Colonizer

“A powerful instrument of control used by the colonizing powers is the instrument of language. Language forms a huge part of the culture of a people—it is through their language that they express their folk tales, myths, proverbs, history. For this reason, the imperial powers invariably attempted to stamp out native languages and replace them with their own. As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin point out, there are two possible responses to this control—rejection or subversion. (The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 1995. 284) While Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is famous for advocating outright rejection of the colonialist language, believing that this rejection is central to the anti-imperialist struggle, Chinua Achebe has chosen the idea of subversion rather than rejection. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, his writing ‘displays a process by which the language is made to bear the weight and texture of a different experience. In doing so it becomes another language.’ In The African Trilogy, Achebe uses the language of the colonizer to convey the Igbo experience of that colonization. The idioms, proverbs and imagery of these books all invoke his Eastern Nigerian culture, forcing the reader to accept on Achebe’s (linguistic) terms, the story he has to tell.”

@School of English, Queens University–Belfast

Foucault's Critique of Ideology

“According to Foucault ‘the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which are neither true nor false’ (ibid.). This means that Foucault does not reject the truth regime on which capitalism is based because it is ‘false’ and that he is heralding an alternative which is the ‘real’ or superior truth. Far from it. Foucault rejects capitalist truth regime because of the effects it produces in terms of increase in subjection etc.

“Similarly Foucault does not reject capitalism because it is based on ‘irrationality; not at all. He rejects capitalist rationality in terms of its leading to increased subjection. Thus Foucault rejects ideology as an acceptable concept because he rejects the notion of universal rationality and with it the notion of subject (collective or individual). Foucault's genealogical method on the other hand aims ‘to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework’ (ibid. p. 59). This amounts to saying that there is no universality and different rationalities are constituted within a historical framework and in this respect Marxist rationality is no better than capitalist rationality.”

@Foucauldian Reflections

Hélène Cixous—The Laugh of the Medusa

“One of the most crucial insights of Freudian psychoanalysis is that the psyche has a social history, not just the Western or social psyche but the monadic modern individual, one in which its language is its history. What Cixous saw was a psychosocial-historical opportunity for a radical self-extrication from Western self-alienation, not just female oppression but Western heteronomy, or dissociative psyche, hence be the catalyst of the transformation for the social order; ‘at present, for historico-cultural reasons, it is women who are opening up…those who are locked up know better than their jailers the taste of free air. Thanks to their history, woman today know…what men will be able to conceive of only much later.’”

@Aaron Asphar's blog

Alienation and Resistance

“Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm. Their whole life is a continuous effort to suppress and abase nature, inwardly or outwardly, and to identify themselves with its more powerful surrogates—the race, fatherland, leader, cliques, and tradition. For them, all these words mean the same thing—the irresistible reality that must be honoured and obeyed. However, their own natural impulses, those antagonistic to the various demands of civilization, lead a devious undercover life within them.” — Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason

@Aaron Asphar's blog

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Words and Music Feed the Revolution

Pick of the Clicks: words and music feed the revolution

“Repression and a craving for change brought the people into the streets of Tunisia and Egypt. It is now doing the same in Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. Yet if a revolution is going to succeed it needs to be sustained.

“Fidel Castro, another man with considerable experience in the matter, claimed that what a successful revolution requires is ‘faith and a plan of action.’ The Egyptians’ and the Tunisians’ plan of action was quite simple: WE stay until YOU go. They also had faith.

“If Bahrainis, Libyans and Yemenis are to replicate their neighbours’ triumph, they will need to keep the faith. They will need to maintain morale and two things that will help make this happen are slogans and music.”

@Euronews

John Glenn

Lovely Jon mix for Soul Jazz Records


Killer schizophrenic mix from film buff and general music nut Lovely Jon!

Sounds Of The Universe continue with their Sotu Mix series which has included exclusive selections from Maxmillion Dunbar, Claremont56, Distal, West Norwood Cassette Library and DJ Haus (Hot City).

This is a rollercoaster ride of obscure cinematic ditties, hip hop, post-punk, freaky rock, soul and everything in between!
SOTU#6_Lovely Jon (June 2011) by Soul Jazz Records

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Culture Jamming

“Culture jamming is an intriguing form of political communication that has emerged in response to the commercial isolation of public life. Practitioners of culture jamming argue that culture, politics, and social values have been bent by saturated commercial environments, from corporate logos on sports facilities, to television content designed solely to deliver targeted audiences to producers and sponsors. Many public issues and social voices are pushed to the margins of society by market values and commercial communication, making it difficult to get the attention of those living in the ‘walled gardens’ of consumerism. Culture jamming presents a variety of interesting communication strategies that play with the branded images and icons of consumer culture to make consumers aware of surrounding problems and diverse cultural experiences that warrant their attention.”

@Center for Communication and Civic Engagement


@AlanSondheim.org

Libyan Rebel Soundtrack

Libyan band FB 17 in Misrata

“The English lyrics and Arabic rap of the album's title song blare out of car stereos, shopfronts and crackly radios on the frontline trenches: ‘No more silence, no more fear, no more lies, no more tears, no more violence, no more screams.’”

@The Guardian (Thanks Exile!)

May 18th 2011—Barcelona



@Solidarity

Friday, July 1, 2011

Here's Johnny

Fin DAC + Ben Slow, Brick Lane, London


thanks to www.unurth.com

Wobble

Dolphy

Situationism—A Primer

“In the face of this, I have come to believe that the role of cultural workers like myself—in education, publishing, the arts, even entertainment—is to generate and maintain an arena where alternative viewpoints may at least be articulated. Not in the name of some abstraction called Freedom, a word prostituted like so many others in the service of Power. Rather—just as certain biologists argue for the maintenance of species diversity among plants in order to preseve them for potential use by future generations—we should battle on the side of the obscure, the small, the powerless, the marginalized in order to maintain bio-diversity of memes, of ideas and aesthetic and imaginary realms.”

@This Is Yesterday

Dick Gregory: Race, Comedy, and Justice

Brian Jonestown Massacre—Revolution Number Zero

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Mighty Might—C.O.P.

This Is The Life (Trailer)

In Tunisia, Women Play Equal Role In Revolution

“Female voices rang out loud and clear during massive protests that brought down the authoritarian rule of Tunisian President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.

“Women in Tunisia are unique in the Arab world for enjoying near equality with men. And they are anxious to maintain their status.”

@NPR

Bombino—Tar Hani

Public Workers Strike in Britain Over Pensions



“Joining a growing wave of unrest in Europe over government austerity measures, tens of thousands of British teachers and public-sector workers walked off their jobs on Thursday to protest proposed changes to their pension plans.

“More than 10,000 schools were affected by the strikes, as were universities, social security offices, courtrooms, airport customs desks and other governent operations. Union officials warned that the strike could be the first of a series of walkouts here in the next few months, reflecting growing unhappiness over layoffs, salary freezes, tax increases and a persistently sluggish economy.”

@The New York Times

God is Here

US extends drone strikes to Somalia


US extends drone strikes to Somalia

First drone strike in Somalia reported to have wounded senior al-Shabab militants.
The US has conducted its first drone strike on Islamist militants in Somalia, marking the expansion of the pilotless war campaign to a sixth country.

Declan Walsh
@The Guardian

Colonialism in 10 Minutes: The Scramble For Africa

Gogol Bordello—Not A Crime

Fighting Wars With Music and Art

Katibe 5: Rapping Against Occupation from Cultures of Resistance on Vimeo.


“Out this week on DVD, director Iara Lee's new documentary, Cultures of Resistance, serves as a sharp reminder that at any given moment, a sobering portion of the world is embroiled in political turmoil. The film hops us from one fraught location to the next, showing the graphic truths of oppression, civil war, and industrialization. Lee's purpose, though, is not to send you into a permanent funk, but to highlight artistic forms of resistance and protest all over the globe.”

@Mother Jones

Nostalgia (for an age yet to come)

Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation.

Jacques Derrida

“Hauntology is probably the first major trend in critical theory to have flourished online. In October 2006, Mark Fisher—aka k-punk—described it as ‘the closest thing we have to a movement, a zeitgeist’. A mere three years later, Adam Harper prefaced a piece on the subject with the following caveat: ‘I'm all too aware that it's no longer 2006, the year to blog about hauntology’. Two months ago, James Bridle predicted that the concept was ‘about six months away from becoming the title of a column in a Sunday supplement magazine’. Only four months to go, then. My hunch is that hauntology is already haunting itself. The revival starts here.”

@The Guardian

The New Panopticon

“If Internet service providers or police agencies randomly monitor Internet users, then the Internet begins to share similar properties with the panopticon prison structure. The panopticon as a conceptual structure can be applied to any physical structure that provides the ability of those in a position of authority to monitor the ‘inmates’ without the ‘inmates’ knowing when they are being monitored. What is unique within the structure of the Internet is that it allows multiple layers of observation to occur such that the ‘inmates’ can become the observers of other ‘inmates’. In such a situation, no one knows who is the observer and who is the observed.

“This paper is an attempt to describe what the panopticon model is and to provide support that elements of the panopticon model inherently exist in the structure of the Internet. This paper provides examples of how Internet user’s privacy is being overlooked in order for certain corporations to provide declared necessary services such as security against terrorists and hackers, control over illegal content (pornography, pirated computer, music, and film files, and dangerous information on how to build bombs etc.). Still, it remains too early to say that any kind of organized conspiracy exists with the goal to strip Internet users of their rights and monitor every interaction.”

@Theory & Science