Tag: capitalism

What would a Free University look like?

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Years ago I lived in a communal house. Expenses were divided proportional to income. For those willing to to do this, a house or loft space with 6 to 8 people (more would be better), would free people with those academic skills our late zombie capitalism continues to marganialize (the better to control and confine what is taught to ‘productive’ job training)– to teach and mentor, especially in the arts (the most inclusive definition of what that means) as alternatives to preditory graduate programs designed as institutional income generators.

We need to seriously think about, plan and experiment with education outside the academy– for all the humanities, creating non-hiarchal, student participatory teaching models and measures of competence as alternatives to grades and degrees,  not modeled on existing institutions, but freely drawing on their rescources, becomeing predatory parasites of the predatorys at the top of the educational food chain.

This is not a utopian idea–this is what MUST be done if education in other than science and business is to survive outside the jaws of our corporate masters into the rest of this century. Whatever the personal sacrifices requiered (which more and more, means giving up nothing but the illusion of tenure and financial security), this is the cost of creative and intellectual freedom. It’s time and past tiime to renew the idea of the “free university,” not one modeled on existing institutions, but as decribed here–aa living cooperative communities.  It’s time and past tiime to renew the idea of the “free university,” not one modeled on existing institutions, but as decribed here–aa living cooperative communities.

Vanessa Place — Gone With the Wind

Vanessa Place Gone With the Wind.

In reading her her defense, it’s important to keep in mind that what a work is, and its intended goals, are always divergent: the work is always more than its intentions, or its interpretations. In this case, her stated purposes, however elegantly argued, can never be more than another one of an infinite number of possible interpretations, in this case, these stated goals are stripped of aesthetic insulation (not parody), and meant to participate in the ‘real world.’ There seems to be a not entirely explicit argument that the harm this work might cause is more than counter balanced by the unacknowledged (if not invisible) mastery it exposes… that is, exposes if you substitute her argument for the thing itself.
Many years ago (1971) there was a performance artist, Chris Burden who had a friend shoot him with a 22 rifle, I believe in the hand. His explanation was that shooting someone was ‘as American as apple pie.’
My reaction at the time was to ask how this would have been different had the friend been directed to shoot him in the heart, or had he himself gone out on the street, declaring this to be a performance, the central goal of which, was to erase the distinction between the aesthetic intention and its real world consequences. It seems clear to me, that in erasing the lines between the aesthetic and the real, subsuming the later in the former, we have annihilated human meaning on both levels, pretending to a god-like stance, as something akin to a pure act of nature, like an earthquake or lightning strike. In the face of this, those powerful lawyerly arguments sound to me as nothing more than defense of exactly this, on the grounds that, because the social conditions being appropriated are themselves presented to us as meta-human realities, it is justified to imitate them, even to creating the same kind of harm. Or maybe there is no implied justification, but rather, an assertion of art as pure nihilism.
I read her explanation. I am not convinced.

Riding the Escalator of Extinction

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The Great Disaster we’re all a part of isn’t the one in the headlines. It’s not a sudden catastrophe. A day of horror. An explosion on a street. Planes hurtling into high rises. It’s long and drawn out, incident after incident, law after law, arrest after arrest, murder after murder–none of which are the Great Disaster, but each are a part of it. More like a movement of tectonic plates–every tremor, every seismic event, is but the visible part of an imperceptible change of the landscape, of the shape of a continent. More like the melting of the Greenland icepack… we see the calving of the icebergs, as spectacular as they are, but not the rising of the oceans–which doesn’t happen in an hour or a day. I’m speaking of the end of this civilization… of all that’s been built on and dependent on the delusional machinery of capitalism and nation states that it created to serve it. We can feel it cumulatively… feel that everything is changing, the world as we have believed it be is already no more, but then… it looks not that much different than yesterday, or the day before, and we go about our lives, oblivious of the escalator of extinction we’re all riding together. inevitable as growing old… noticeable only when we look back a decade, or two or three, and see the marks of death written across our every feature.

Revolutionary Narrative

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Revolutionary Narrative… what makes a story that does more than rearrange the conventions we use to reinforce our assumptions about the world? How do we find our way to stories that refuse to confirm our expectations–but rather, shatter them with the unexpected–not simply of ‘incident’… of what ‘happens,’ but of the very structures of reality?

Someone I once knew challenged the merit of Joyce’s Ulysses because it doesn’t exist as a completed whole. His argument went something like this: in the thousands of minor and some not so minor differences in the existing manuscripts and proofs, there is no way to decide what a definitive, authorial edition would look like. What we have, then—is a collective assemblage representing no single aesthetic vision, and therefore, does not exist as a unity. Setting aside arguments for how collective, even accidental productions, might come together as unified systems—which is how I would have responded at the time—the more basic, and unexamined assumption here, is the idea of unity itself—that there can ever be such a thing as a ‘whole.’

There is no such thing as ‘a’ novel. Or poem. Or story or… as a single, aesthetically (or otherwise) coherent, systematically organized structure or system, such that every part relates to every other to create a unified, and unifying whole. And it is this, not because there are as many readings as readers, or because every possible interpretive translation (all interpretations are translations) is necessarily limited, that we can never comprehend a literary production as a whole—as convincing as these arguments might be—but because there is no such thing. It does not exist. That is not to say, Joyce’s Ulysses doesn’t exist. It does. In different versions, and each version is made of parts that are always greater than any hypothetical, always inconceivable whole. I say ‘inconceivable,’ not that we can’t conceive of the possibility of an aesthetic whole—but that it will be impossible to point to what that might actually be. Sort of like the way we talk about God. Imaginable in general, but inconceivable in the particular. Or for that matter, how we think of collectives of power… of the State…which has more than a little in common with the way we think of God.

Gaza, 50 Years Ago, as Today: It is the conditions that have become our Masters.

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…the process (capitalism, colonization… ) is itself as much actant as process. It’s not as though the former creates and realizes the latter, so much as the other way around. It is the conditions that have become our masters

Some thoughts on the Ken Knabb piece linked below–which is the best damn thing I’ve read on the current horrors in Gaza… even though (or maybe because) it was written 55 years ago. I think we make a mistake naming the State that has made itself the instrument of colonization, as though the former were the actant and the later a kind of verb–what the actant does, when the process (capitalism, colonization… ) is itself as much actant as process. It’s not as though the former creates and realizes the latter, so much as the other way around: it is the conditions that have become our masters, and to break from their control it’s not sufficient to name the primary instruments that are the means of of their mastery. We don’t need to create or posit an enemy, to demonize this group or that State, to recognize the horror of what they do, the injustice of the consequences is enough. If we are locked into a mental state where we must have victims and executioners, and assume that distinguishing the one from the other amounts to understanding the conditionis that create the injustice, we will never be free. To be–in Camus’ phrase, neither victims nor executioners, we cannot invest our whole identity with either–our only hope lies is forging solidarity with that which is neither. This is the root of the failure of cycles of vengeance and retribution. This is not a MORAL failure, but a failure of vision, a failure of creative imagination… of making real a world–forging actual relationships that know no borders, that disavow the distinctions which perpetuate the conditions of injustice and violence, seeking out those, individuals and collectives, with whom we can lay the foundations of a new reality.

The Ken Knabb piece linked here i

To be–in Camus’ phrase, neither victims nor executioners, we cannot invest our whole identity with either–our only hope lies is forging solidarity with that which is neither. This is the root of the failure of cycles of vengeance and retribution. This is not a moral failure, but a failure of vision, a failure of creative imagination… of making real a world–forging actual relationships that know no borders, that disavow the distinctions which perpetuate the conditions of injustice and violence, seeking out those, individuals and collectives, with whom we can lay the foundations of a new reality.