"the ultimate contagion machine"

Here

For the appropriate soundtrack for the reading of these diagrams, play the two tracks below simultaneously (the second set at half volume) and something like the thudding crystalline spheres of financial orbit in the age of implosion may start to emerge.  Because, like the above, it simply doesn't work.

Indian Summer / splattered windows

As always, the spambots that comment consistently on my writing produce prose of more subtle grammatic slippage - words chewed up somewhere down the line of a thought - and disjunction adequate to the slippery mess described than either news sources or I could ever do, with all our opposite attempts of clearly stated obfuscation for the former, and obscure clarity for the latter.  


The atmosphere suggested a dress rehearsal for the production of "Revolution. Musical" On a warm afternoon, Indian Summer, black-clad anarchist splattered windows Whole Foods. The general strike began in pantomime. One of the audience started to sing, "protest".


[particularly good is the singular "anarchist" which makes it sound like the substance that is splattered against those windows rather than what does the splattering.  (The windows were just dripping with anarchist this Indian Summer.)  And then someone clads the whole mucky thing in black and someone starts to sing a song that has only one word.]


The poetry of the future will be written by algorithms employed by the mongers of "human growth hormone," dick enlargement pills, bulk office furniture, and identity theft, written not in the nights after work but in the very process of the sheer stupefying attempt to come across as if human.

GI Joe Vs Carlo Cafiero

(Until 2'54", that is.  At which point we're just back to the gold standard, backed by luxury good reserves.  Hell, it was good while it lasted.)

in less than a week buying and selling have been replaced by rioting and looting... and you can't reestablish order until you print new currency.

Yeah, what did you?

Yeah, what did you?
Yeah, what did you?
What did you bring me, keep me from the gallows pole?

Friends, did you bring me the silver,
Friends, did you bring me the gold?
What did you bring me, my dear friends,
Keep me from the gallows pole?

Yeah, what did you?
Yeah, what did you?
What did you bring me, keep me from the gallows pole?

The Road to Hell is Paved With Silicone

In my house there's only one thing made of silicone. 

The tree.

Further evidence that an anti-civilization position is not a choice.  It is just an attentiveness to what our world is, its baffling self-baring of the heights of alienation and yes, you just can't make this shit up but yes, this shit still is made and that's where we're hung, tongues out, cruxed between that make and made.  And so we don't choose to hate it, all we to do is turn ourselves up slightly, aim the eyes slightly above street level, or we put ourselves down, an ear to the street, and there we catch a bare rumble, a murmur from that dumb forest of silicone which has no birds in it, which has no roots but weighs all the same, and their needles do not fall, and their branches never droop yet their proximity to a cozy roaring fire will soften the polymers barely, open its substance a bit to let the polysiloxanes breathe, its backbone whispering ⋯-Si-O-Si-O-Si-O-⋯ out into the rooms of the living.

And how one cannot want to let flourish its total, utter decomposition is utterly beyond us.

Listening to J. Stalin in the negative city

I have seen a few things in my life, and I have taken photos - inconstantly - of a few of those things.  Few have heretofore made me as happy as this.

I'm starting a series of "dispatches" from Naples.  They will not be Roman Letters 2: The Lachrymose South, in large part because they are not to a series of ones, single letters, singular friends and comrades. But insofar as my life is a void of structure, these will perhaps produce a fleeting illusion of continuity across it, if only - likely only - for me.

They are titled Listening to J. Stalin in the negative city.  Henceforth LTJSITNC.

J. Stalin is a rapper from West Oakland.  (So named because, "he was short like me, but he was always smashin' on everybody.") "The negative city" is one of terms used to describe the immense Neapolitan sottosuolo, the underground.  Not the underground as in "the metro," but the sprawling web of Greek and Roman ruins, cisterns, tunnels, roads, evacuated markets, empty grain containers, walls, and junk heaps that lie beneath - and mirror - the world built above it.  A good 60% of this lived, teeming, leaning city stands on top of this other one. 

The other day, when I was down in this other one, breathing air that is neither older nor newer, neither stale nor fresh, looking at Nike Air footprints in beige dirt, I was listening to J. Stalin.  It made some degree of sense.

A Pervert's Guide to Provocative Agents

"Police responses are not, in general, decided by individual police witnessing specific events, but by senior police and political leaders deciding how to deal with the protest as a whole. If the police attack protestors, it’s because they’ve decided to attack protestors, not because of anything the protestors did (this is also why worrying about police infiltrators is usually pointless; police may use provocateurs to stage-manage their intervention, but the form of their intervention is decided in advance and is independent of what either protestors or provocateurs do)."

Here 




By the way, small note on the pervy libidinal economy of the internet and the pre-selection of content...

... there is no way to google image search "agent provocateur" without receiving results that are almost entirely from luxury lingerie ads. 

Adding the word "police" calibrates the results to include the standard "use of circles to illustrate how you can, in fact, tell a cop by his shoes", but also to include a very Night Porter falange of lingerie models and a woman in bra and panties standing in front of a custom "Agent Provocateur" pink and black Police mini. 

 + "anarchist" gives the more familiar results....

while "+ communist" treats us to a first result of a champagne cork popping off.  At least it got something right.

+ "liberal" mainly shifts the optic toward the "non-West," plus the amping up of the spittle-rain of Tea Party hysteria.


But, more seriously: what "agent provocateur" truly indexes is the quintuple notion that

a) as Voyou notes, the fantasy that there is not already a state game plan in action, as if - notwithstanding the genuine, and vicious, decisions that get made on the ground on the basis of a general predisposition to treat people like that, such as the now-infamous of throwing of a flash-bang grenade into a crowd of people surrounding a man who would require brain surgery - the police were a neutral substance that responded solely on the basis of a catalyst such as "property destruction."

b) that there is a predetermined object - a "protest" - that already exists, that is capable of being "ruined."  The clusterfuck of predictable media condemnation and predictable "left" infighting over the minor chaos of Rome a couple weeks back entirely confirmed this: the discourse centered around the idea that there was a perfectly good demonstration and a few shits - "bad apples", of course, as if the harvest were ripe, untainted, yet subject to the transmission of decay - who went and spoiled this safe, edible, lovely thing.  What this implies, then, is a conception of a protest as something that "everyone" knows damn well how it should go: a set number of hours, the expected quantity of chants performed and flags waved, and a return home at the end, having put in a good day's work.  The echoes of labor time are far from incidental.  And who could blame some for wanting to ruin it?


c) conversely, that a situation itself neutral, undecided, not agitated but capable of being provoked.  A slim beam of contingency.

d) the correct assertion that there do exist, at times, agent provocateurs.

e) the incorrect notion that there are not amongst us who, God for-fucking-bid, might not wish to be provocative, that we might not want our days to end up exhausted, excited, confused, gutted as an abandoned building, taken over by something bigger than ourselves, blown away by how previous lines of adherence came apart, uncertain of what has or what may come to pass.  

Splinter cell

Self-portrait as a thief of relics

Thou shalt not offer to take another person’s place, or help out unless you’re not paid to do it ... blood transfusions aren’t paid for.

 
What kind of strength is it you mean?  

Well, where people don’t know how to say what they think or even think what they think but think it somehow. They live through it and take risks and make choices for it and learn to cope with what they feel but can’t think. It’s very powerful and very inarticulate. 

You mean this strength is more genuine because it’s not just intellectual?  

I wouldn’t say the intellect is non-genuine, except that rationality offers merely theoretical possibilities, so many slick outs and slick ways of manipulating people. And English working class culture is very non-manipulative. Rough, but not so manipulative. 

In what sense?  

In the sense that it was traditionally based on loyalty and bloody-mindedness. There wasn’t a sense of intricacy. Even solidarity was erratic. But there was a kind of non-performance principle. Never work too hard because that would be dropping your fellow workers in shit. The Working Class Goes to Heaven [1971] has it. It’s what Ealing comedies should have been, if they’d had more sense of the man in the cloth cap. The British cinema got it briefly — Saturday Night and Sunday Morning [1960], a few others — then lost it again. The Man in the White Suit [1951] discovered it, from a middle-class angle. One could summarise a proletarian Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not strive too hard, or jump through more hoops than you have to. Thou shalt not offer to take another person’s place, or help out unless you’re not paid to do it ... blood transfusions aren’t paid for. Thou shalt not expect good treatment. Thou shalt always look for the catch, for what the other person gets out of it. Thou shalt contemplate defeat, but not change yourself to avoid it. Thou must become accustomed to always being outtalked and made to look a fool and put in the wrong ... but Thou shall not be moved ... Oh, and don’t be downhearted. Something like that.

- Raymond Durgnat, 1977

[A strange stumbling onto a previous mention of a rather particular lineage I've been drawing forth between Ealing and Petri, between Teflon white suits and the bestial mutter of a busted worker.  Namely, that of a) anti-Stakhanovism and refusal of work, b) stubborn inarticulacy, c) the problem beween class as relation and as status, d) sabotage, willed and unwilled, and e) the repetition of what can't help but go on, and what will, at best, wind up naked, without a finger, contemplative, or all three, while meanwhile the blood keeps getting let and no one is getting a transfusion.]

A Very Neapolitan Halloween

"Young Jesus."

(Halloween, otherwise, is rather unremarkable in Naples.  Sure, there are bands of kids in weird outfits walking into businesses or up to pedestrians and asking for free goods - "treat" - with the threat - "trick" - of violence or mayhem.  But that is, after all, what they call a "daily problem" or "the informal economy" here.  It's as year-round as the fire-crackers, which are, for the record, as daily as bread.  Were one to record every small explosion across the city in real-time and stream them together, the sound of days would be that of a rusty gatling gun, rumbling on from dawn to dusk and back again.)

Wolves Were Thick In Staging Days

Rome (Buildings go up and down meanwhile light goes diagonal; Held frames that hold heads that speak; Abandoned swine deposits; Rubbish art)

 

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Komsomol

From the other day in Rome.  Fuchsia skirt, rifle training, frolicking half-dressed half-defined figures in the distance, and a dead-eye stare smashing of the fourth wall.

[Musical accompaniment thanks to Cartographies.]

No future

Here's hoping...

Oakland

 
This.  (See also this and this.)  General strike called for November 2.

 In addition, for any who might fret about those perfectly good barricades - those fences put up to keep people out of a public space and torn down by those same people in retaking that space - going to waste, don't worry.  They were put to much better use:

Arguably the least expensive (excluding the whole massive militarized mobilization and war being made on a populace in a time of the drastic cutting of social services part of things) installation of "public art" in America.  Not to mention, it is both minimalist and repurposed.  No wonder the city of Oakland is so hot to claim that they support the goals of the Occupy movement, all possible evidence (including both the attack and the fact that it is fundamentally impossible) to the contrary.

To all back home: whatever part of the body - thoughts are too diffuse, heart is too easy, too central, too stupidly trodden - is adequate to say is with you in full, across these oceans and continents.

[Note: I am far too far away to give any adequate account, but in case you haven't been following, get info at Occupy Oakland (here and twitter here).  Some initial footage rounded up here.]

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. (Letter of Solidarity From Cairo)

[via comrades in Egypt - please share widely]


To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it's our turn to pass on some advice.


Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years­long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.


An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.


The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity­state now even attack the private realm and people's right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed­upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.


So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.


In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces for gathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst .

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.


But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti­camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.


We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it . Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government's own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party's offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.


It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose.


If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.


By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never give them up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.

Comrades from Cairo. 24th of October, 2011. 

A thousand times

Should ever one require a measure as to if a situation has truly opened the floodgates, if the social fabric isn't strained but rent, if the clarity of who is supposed to comport themselves how is obscure, if we have left behind a simple face-off of easily divisible forces, if, in short, the shit and the fan can no longer be told apart from one another, then this should do nicely.  If it looks like this, the answer is: yes, oh yes, indeed.

A thousand times more heartening than a thousand pictures of property aflame.

L'angolo sterminatore