Life Drawing–that erases the received reality

I’m convinced that drawing is the mother of all the visual arts, and while that usually entails, figure, landscape… representational work. I’m interested in working outside of those boundaries. What we’re trained to see–is too politically constrained, that artist’s renderings of ‘realism’ recapitulate and reinforce multiple levels of the status quo, & claim by default to being the one and only and forever reality. When the ‘IS,’ when what we have, our political status quo, is hell bent on the way to ending human life on this planet.
I’m thinking… how to explore different modes of drawing–life drawing, that don’t ‘draw’ on geometric space or figurative realism… yet are as intensely involved in that visual transformation from eye to paper as traditional techniques?

This is an aesthetic dimension of my interest in the place of art in late capitalism. How… is something I’m working out my art, rather than theory.

End of Sovereignty: Bare Life and the Coming Civil-War?

This speaks to my anarchist heart. Yes and yes and yes–oh, and so much more! (see my comment following this post, for how this connects with my art!
Agamben at one point choses to explicate this notion in reference to the included/excluded people within and outside politics:
It is as if what we call “people” were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, an exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve-court of miracles or camp-of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated.6
Isn’t this the state of exception of migrant immigrants everywhere, a multiplicity outside the law, outside sovereignty, the inclusive excluded of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated?
And THIS:

“And in a different yet analogous way, today’s democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life. Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West into account will be able to stop this oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth.7”
And THIS is why NONE of the candidates, of either party, will move us one footstep beyond square zero!

…is why not one of the U.S. presidential candidates, of any party, will move us one single step past ground zero!

The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

…the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence.
– Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer

When one actually thinks about it, rather than just spouting rhetoric from some ideological mythology of the Left or Right the problem of immigration in our world is about Sovereignty. It’s about the emerging war against boundaries, limits, and finitude in politics, science, philosophy, the arts, and gender. In politics it’s about immigration, migration, and the sense of breakdown of nations and their paranoiac reactionism against imaginary and perceived threats to their own integrity and sovereignty. Same in the sciences we see explorations emerging in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information and communications converging to form a global network society that will break free of political and social constraints and provide a larger framework and platform for such politically motivated notions as transhumanism that…

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American (U.S.A) Elections: to vote or not to vote?

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The U.S. is a world power. Our politics is not just about those within our gated borders. Presidential elections insulated from the consequences of our global exploitation and the MILLIONS who suffer and die because of U.S. policies and actions, are exercises in a kind of mass psychosis, a manufactured, hallucinate dream. We give all the candidates a free pass on this… “maybe we can pressure Bernie to do a little better on Israel” “So what if Hillary fucks war criminal Henry, she’s a woman!”
You want your vote to matter, make it matter for everyone! Until we do–it really doesn’t matter. Better not to vote, cause for the planet and most of the humans and animals, a collapse of the U.S. political system would be the real “lesser evil.”

This election reminds of those big protests in Israel a couple years ago. Israel’s occupation and brutality … like it didn’t exist. It was all bout jobs, economic inequality… la la la. Peas in pod.

Americans (U.S.A) don’t get it. The economy–all the good stuff Bernie stands for, bull shit, without including the rest of the picture, the rest of the world. It’s all one thing. A spectacle! The U.S. military occupations, the endless wars, the support of murderous regimes like the Saudis, Israel… all part of the same system that’s given so much power to so few, that’s fueled income inequality. If all of that isn’t tackled and dealt with, neither Horrible Hillary’s pitchy patchy incremental shit, or Bernies fake socialism are gonna be nothing but window dressing.
A great, tragi-comic farce.

Firefly Action Medical

Source

ABOUT:

We are a group of people in and around the Philadelphia area. We are trained street medics, nurses, EMT’s, wilderness first responders, artists, herbalists, trauma counselors and generally people interested in the health and well being of our communities. Members of this collective have been involved with providing medical support at direct action, activist camps, street protests, and disaster relief situations. Please take a look at our Points of Unity to learn more about our values and the ways in which we organize.More resources for taking care of yourself and others coming soon!

POINTS OF UNITY:

+ We affirm that demystifying and democratizing health care skills and reducing our dependence on profit-driven medicine and police-involved emergency response is vital to building long lasting movements for Liberation in our lifetime.

+ We acknowledge that the idea of “safety” is relative and complicated

+ We believe in building interdependent ways of being with one another that do not replicate the oppression that isolates us in the first place. We see our work as acknowledging and resisting intersecting systems of oppression — both in the world and in our relations with one another.

+ We believe in the principles of harm reduction and practice and support diverse forms of healing that are consistent with each individuals understanding of their own needs and values.

+ We believe our liberation is tied to that of others and we take on this work in solidarity with collective resistance.

+ In all these above points we stand in solidarity with the evolving international traditions of street medics.

CODE OF CONDUCT:

1. We do no harm. We make every reasonable effort to give treatment that will not negatively affect the health or wellbeing of our patients. If no such treatment is available, no treatment whatsoever is given.

2. We work only within our own individual scope of practice, while trusting and respecting the abilities of the other medics in their work. We explicitly inform patients of our own qualifications and limitations.

3. We obtain clear and explicit consent from our patients and anyone affected by our care for every action we take as medics, including any physical contact or while performing any procedure. If a patient in an emergency situation is unable to offer consent for treatment, as through a lack of consciousness, we strive to take whatever action we believe is most essential to their wellbeing. We respect patients’ right to refuse any treatment, advice or transport to any medical facility.

4. We maintain our work areas as Safer Spaces, and actively challenge the perpetuation of any form of social domination or oppression. This includes, but is not at all limited to sexism, racism, transphobia, ableism, classism, ageism, and other forms of oppression. We cultivate an awareness of our own privilege and work to create a welcoming, safe and comfortable space for all, while directly calling attention to any actions of other medics that perpetuate oppression.

5. We respect and actively protect the privacy of our patients’ and the confidentiality of their treatment to the greatest extent possible. Without our patients’ consent, we do not allow photography, videography, audio recording, or any other non private record of our patients’ care.

6. We practice exceptional sanitation and hygiene in our work as medics and in our working areas. This includes using appropriate protocols of Standard Precautions and Body Substance Isolation (BSI) in caring for patients through gloves and other means, as well as thoroughly washing and/or sanitizing hands, surfaces, supplies and containers when they may be contaminated. If a medic suspects that they may currently host any readily transmissible disease, they do not act as a medic until the risk of transmission is abated.

7. We maintain a continuity of care for all of our patients. We do not leave or cease caring for any patient until a treatment is completed, except to transfer the patient’s care to another medic of equal or greater qualification – or to prioritize the immediate and urgent care of a different patient in emergent need, when no other assistance is available.

8. We organize ourselves horizontally, without institutional hierarchies of command, experience, credentials, ability or level of involvement. Every medic has equal power in all decisions affecting them.

9. When acting as medics, we remain neutral. The primary role of a marked medic is to provide care for the injured or ill. We do not attempt to direct the actions or personal choices of anyone else for any tactical or political purpose. We do not participate in any ideological or political action while marked as a medic..

10. While working as a medic, we recognize our responsibility to maintain a positive and calm atmosphere.While on duty, our interactions with patients’, other medics, and passersby are guided by trust, respect and solidarity, in the same way that those qualities are essential to our own standing in the community. Rather than telling others to do something, we ask them. We request rather than command. Patients in our care are treated respectfully and are spoken to or with. We do not gossip about or judge any patients in our care.

11. We all benefit from an orderly, clean working space, and we all contribute to keeping it in that condition. If we reorganize any materials in a medical space, we make every reasonable effort to inform the other medics of those changes.

12. We do not use intoxicating substances while on duty and we do not tolerate the use of intoxicants or smoked tobacco in any medical space.

13. We are all capable of learning and improving our skills, and recognize that we all make mistakes. Each of us remains accountable to any guidance or correction, and we receive the input or critique of other medics respectfully, with good faith that our common goal is to provide the best possible care.

14. We understand that when anyone is marked as a medic, they are considered to be on active duty, and their behavior is accountable to this code of conduct. Should we wish to act outside of the principles in this code, we remove all markings or other indications of our role as a medic beforehand. If any medic acts outside of this code, they may be held accountable to the other members of this group, local medical protocols, and to the respective community.

This is the world, our only home

Refugees Don’t Need Your Pity

In a world where 1 in 7 people are displaced, your kindness is just condescension.

BY ANNA BADKHEN Read the article HERE

Dispossessed is an identity of disempowerment, but it is a powerful identity. Borders may temporarily hold back the flow of humans adrift, but in a world where we are so tightly and dizzyingly interwoven, physical boundaries are far less obstructive than the lasting confinement of imposed narratives. Such is the double-edged power of stories: They can hold us together — and they can distort, isolate, and divide. The dispossessed: The tag’s impediment persists even after the bearer has crossed a border or town limits, settled in, become a neighborhood cop, a high school teacher, a daughter’s girlfriend, or a boat captain living next door. Unless the world finds compassion for this new communality, learns to make sense of one another’s voices, its humanity will perish.

Art and Revolution

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In a better world, there would be no need for artists to sign their work. Material support would not be tied to a competitive system, and confirmation would come from performing and making and doing, without the destructive, enervating conflict that comes from confusing satisfaction with one’s work with social approval and economic status. On that level, the distinction between craft and art would vanish—as the satisfaction that comes from work well done would fall equally to all who contribute to the benefit of the community. Art would not be a specialty of a few—but a gift nurtured and shared by everyone. Those more dedicated and gifted would serve to teach and empower others.

The capitalist systems of exclusion that corrupt the arts and those who are called to them—the gatekeeping function of galleries, critics, investors, and yes—schools of art, which combine to work from earliest childhood to destroy the seed of the imaginative impulse before it can germinate—which works to marginalize, impoverish or reduce to servitude all but the smallest number of those who survive the culling—having lost its economic and political purpose, would crumble and disappear.

Aroused from the drug of the Capitalist nightmare, every artist, poet, dancer, actor, musician… would be a revolutionary

Fight Climate Change!

Support the Experimental Farm Network!

The Experimental Farm Network (EFN) aims to fight global climate change and ensure food security far into the future by facilitating collaboration on plant breeding and other agricultural research.

Founded in 2013 by Nate Kleinman & Dusty Hinz, the EFN is presently composed of over 200 participants: farmers and gardeners, plant breeders and researchers, amateurs and professionals alike. The network is not-for-profit, based on open-source principles, and dedicated to social justice.

All are welcome and encouraged to join. Read more, and learn how you can donate! HERE

Mouse Melons (Cucumis melo. subsp. agrestis) from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, an entire nation threatened by inundation due to sea-level rise caused by climate change. — Mouse Melons (Cucumis melo. subsp. agrestis) originally from the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, grown by EFN in 2015. Maldives is an entire country threatened by inundation due to sea-level rise caused by climate change.

EFN exists because our agricultural system is broken. As a society, we no longer grow crops primarily for human consumption, but as commodities. We don’t farm in harmony with the environment, but in ways that harm it. We’ve stopped breeding plants for resilience, taste, and nutritional value: instead we genetically engineer and patent them to maximize corporate profits.

To take back our food system, we’ll need to marshall an army of volunteers to counter the power of the multinational corporations. We’ll need to develop more agricultural cooperatives and strong regional economies like those that thrived before industrialization. And we’ll need to develop carbon-sequestering perennial staple crops (including grains and oilseeds) and more sustainable growing systems & practices in harmony with the natural world.

Harman on Latour’s Politics

This article made me think, how the material reality of the house where I live (I’m remembering the Ox, the communal warehouse where I lived) shapes our lives in ways that are beyond what we intend or choose. The material reality we make or choose, makes us. This made me think of our kitchen. My increasing dissatisfaction with how we use it. Our shared and progressively less shared and more individually fragmented kitchen–how the physical kitchen, by it’s small size, its limited storage, shapes this fragmentation into a less and less communal space. In the Ox, a dozen people could work, sit around and schmooze, clean up and cook, all in the same room. The huge work table and ample space not only made this possible, but it invited it, and the space of the Ox itself–a space with its many rooms and open areas, good for music and hanging out, needed to be filled–and that in turn, required a degree of cooperative action for cleaning and care–which when resisted, made us (FORCED us!) to be aware (to different degrees) of our mutual dependence (and how unready we were for this, having come from the dominant culture) in ways that living in an apartment, didn’t. Living in a house divided like this–like most middle and working class housing– people can comfortably settle into their habitual, individuated lives; can see in this how a shared house, arranged for isolated non-extended ‘family’ units–needs a high degree awareness–and experience with more communal living–to resist being re-formed into something closer to the cultural norm–the divided and alienated consciousness suitable for capitalist exploitation.

Larval Subjects .

My way to Speculative Realism was through Harman’s was through Harman’s Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. It’s difficult, after all these years, to convey the sense of excitement I felt when reading this book. I had felt it before, my first year of graduate school when reading Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology (I actually dreamed about that book). There I felt as if an entire opaque world of theory opened up to me that both allowed me to understand the thought of figures such as Lacan but, more importantly, that allowed me to put that theory to work and comprehend the world around me. Harman, of course, is a consummate stylist. There is a certain charm and style to his writing that is difficult to put your finger on. Often it occurs in the margins, when the reader comes across offhand asides that he makes such as…

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Revolution: organizing for the long haul

An interesting question: when all our ideas about how to maintain long term stability are modeled on capitalist institutions (the symbiotic relationship between non-profit and profit being the most obvious), how do we organize for the long term in ways that will break that mold? Put another way: how does a revolutionary movement remain revolutionary when the struggle is going to be multi-generational?

Do we assume they will be temporary but reoccurring, splintering off into more conventional affinity groups (like Occupy),

or can we create forms of self-renewing continuity that are not dependent on existing institutions, but exist in the interstitial spaces abandoned or not yet occupied by the machinery of capitalism–and having the power to resist assimilation and occupation?

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55 Days of Occupy Philly: 54, 55… The beginning is near

11/29/11 Day 54
Rain. CoCo, Friend’s Center

I’ve posted these for the 55 days of Occupy Philly on Dilworth Plaza, from the first day of OWS, the days of planning for OP, to the first day of our camp on October 6, 2011 to November 30, the night of our eviction.

To view all posts to date, click: 55 Days of Occupy Philly.

Still on Dilworth. Two more days before Social Security.

Sunday—four rows of 25, — people sitting on steps

from 5 PM (time named in eviction order)… somewhere around 11:00, people disassembled. Crowd went from 500 or so (?) to about 100—OWS people from New York arrived—electric energizers! Plastic Pail drumbs—danced for hours. Straw vote to ignore Gwen-of-Labor’s warning that cops wanted drums to stop—unanimous. Congo line to Northwest corner, across to Thomas Paine—back down JFK & 15^th –danced in the street past the cops.

About damn time we stoped letting the cops tell us what to do. Not to bed till after 3:00 AM. The damn orientation at 8:30 next morning—turned out to be about conditions of bail. Call in twice a week, don’t get arrested before trial or risk revoking bail and contempt of court.

Friday
12/2/2011
Day 55
The end came Wednesday. November 30. Up all night Sunday. Again eviction day. Bowled over by a horse. Last night—GA at the Friends Center… so, it goes on.

…not with a bang, but a whimper

Soon they will come, the police. The city workers with their trucks. Our city of tents, our fights–all of it will disappear. Scrub away our presence, uproot the trees. Pile up the marble slabs we slept on.

My mind drifts back in time. I am fishing on Lake Michigan with my father in his boat. This is shortly before he will die. My parents had bought a retirement cottage not far from Grand Rapids. The light on the water, that silvered turquoise water, the peaks of the waves glisten in the sun–even the Voice is lulled to somnambulant slumber. I think of my mother–of that last summer, the summer before her final illness, while she is still herself–sitting on the porch–martini hour–watching the sunset over the lake, the jet skiers droning and whining like gigantic mechanized insects, a moment I want to go on forever. A tableaux receding into the distance, like the light of stars that no longer exist.