December 9th
Posted by: lettrist on: December 16, 2009
This is the day
All the pipes froze
And the things
We took for granted
Suddenly were
Granted no more
Winter is here!
at last
Let us try not
To perish
In December’s
Deepening drama
Poem For a Slow December Morning
Posted by: lettrist on: December 5, 2009
- In: Poetry
- 3 Comments
December.
Some have had enough of the cold
They would rather slip into a coma
And like yellow fog over these streets
Disappear completely
But throw on a heavy comforter
Put your feet against a warm iron
Create some friction with your body
And inhale the smell of freshly pressed coffee
Now the blood is flowing
And even though the toilet bowl might be frozen
Heavy rainclouds are on the way
Mozart’s symphony is playing downstairs
And the icy perfumes of winter
Slowly dissipating against the warm of your
Newfound ambition
Notes on the Personal Local
Posted by: lettrist on: November 29, 2009
If we didn’t know that the local was local it would be for us a little globality. The local is revealed as the global makes itself possible, and necessary. Go to work, do your shopping, travel far from home, this is what constitutes the local, which otherwise would more modestly be the place where we live. All the same, we live strictly speaking nowhere. Our existence is simply divided into layers of schedules and topologies, in slices of tailored life.
Tiqqun, Notes on the Local
How do we make ourselves feel “at home” in the world?
Consider how we decorate the interiors of our homes or our rooms. If you are like me, you design posters and create collages to draft up on your walls. You might take a piece someone else created and mash it up a bit with your own material, and hang that somewhere you’ll always run into it. You may write notes to yourself and tac them up near your desk. These are just some of the things people do. Maybe you paint images directly on the wall, or place objects in a specific ordering. The arrangement of objects can be like a ritual. I know someone who makes paper roses and place them into jars, and someone who maps out their menstrual cycle and draws it on the ceiling.
In any case, we have sincerely personalized the space around us, to make it our own. We are the artists of our own lives, at least in this space, at least in this respect. Thus far we are solitary practioners of this personal art.
What disturbs me is that I am not an artist of the world around me, beyond my solitary confinements, as much as I try. I am not an artist of the public space, and no one else is either. Nothing around me is personalized, though for some reason people talk about it like it is. “My city,” “My neighborhood,” etc. Even so, why should we feel “at home” in the world anyway? The only spaces we are supposed to feel at home in are monitored spaces, shopping spaces, and spaces we pay someone else directly to use. The parks we cannot make ourselves at home in. The streets neither. None of the spaces around us can be personalized at all, and hence we cannot be artists of these spaces.
I have tried to interject my ideas into mundane spaces as I conquer my layered schedule, as I wander through slices of the alienated life. I think that by extending my personal space into the world, I can transform the things around me into my personal wall, my personal stairwell, my personal desk. In fact there are many layers of personalization, because they do not belong to just me, but everyone else who’s life they’re apart of too. I want my world to feel personally intersected with other peoples’ world because it makes me feel connected to these surroundings, and by extension, to other people. It makes my surroundings feel lived in, cared for. I consider this a tiny revolution worth fighting, a small victory for raising consciousness.
So what is the local, if not something that could be profoundly personal? Personalization is the advantage the local has over the global, which by sheer proximity is entirely impersonal, and entirely representational. “The world is becoming global, but it is also shrinking,” the Tiqqun author says. Local space is becoming a tool for global space, and at the same time, the local is becoming untouchable for us who live here. And after we become artists of the local, artists of the spaces we inhabit, we still have a much greater art to realize — namely, to become artists of the social and economic situation altogether.
A few virtual world vignettes
Posted by: lettrist on: November 17, 2009
The following four vignettes have stuck with me since I watched them first in 2006, following the worldwide curiosity pique with the virtual world phenomena. As a filmmaker, when I first explored virtual worlds I wanted to document their religions like an anthropologist. I planned to make an hour-long film about the religious centers and religious spaces that could be explored inside the most popular world known as Second Life. My film was an expression of online religious seeking, based loosely on the book Give Me That Online Religion (a book that presciently anticipates virtual worlds) with themes borrowed from the novel Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre.
The project was never finished because the hard drive which held these file failed. Like the story of the wolf and the grapes I decided my filmmaking skills were not up to par anyway. However, several people I met and interviewed I discovered later had been featured in news interviews. The owner of a Jewish religious center, for example, aired on National Public Radio talking about Second Life and Judaism.
The film was initially supposed to be about my own experience traveling through Second Life with my gothic vampire avatar. He explores online Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism, Buddhism, Wicca, Judaism of all sorts, Islam, Classicism, Unitarianism, Bahai, and many new age breeds of just about everything. Every perplexity in real life is magnified with the new metaphor about the virtual world. He had encountered dozens of people and had conversations with them via skype, and these were all recorded. The script essentially wrote itself. Most of the places the avatar visited, however, were empty and lifeless. I usually found just a single occupant who was excited to have a new visitor (and virtual world journalist) visit them while they organized pixels.
The loneliness I found online reflected the poverty of online escapism, especially when combined with religious escapism. Eventually my character was unsatisfied with the “answers” everywhere he looked, and concluded that virtual life was every bit as meaningless as life in the real world. It was only an an extension of real world, and did not transcend it. This was, essentially, a reflection of my personality at the time, an expression of my dissatisfaction with the world and the multiplicity of cosmological stories and devices for overcoming alienation and despair.
Mapping Historical Space
Posted by: lettrist on: November 13, 2009
University websites can sometimes be a great store of new ideas. Stanford has a project called The Spatial History Project working toward an intersection of geography and history. The scholars are using the InfoGraphics Lab to integrate GIS and graphic design tools, combined with a contemporary cartographic design aesthetic to produce historical, graphical maps.
These include some geographical and historical maps of Rio de Janiero, such as rent rates and concentrations over time, and income inequality over time (Lorenz curves). There is also an ecological-historical map series of California.
It would be interesting to combine these techniques to a Foucauldian approach to history. The size and location of prisons over time. The number and location of surveillance cameras over time. Number of psychiatric facilities over time, etc.
Reinventing Communes – From Paris to Home
Posted by: lettrist on: November 12, 2009
The Paris Commune, that pervasive theme of French leftist history, hangs like a shadow over European politics, indeed, world politics.
Just like in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s — the heyday of leftist anarchism — we seem to be reinventing ideas of the anti-authoritarian, anti-political left today, such as ‘the commune’. Our era is ripe for the reinvention of communes. Have we come full-circle? Our generation does not seem to be heirs of the 1960s and 1970s hippie generation, but much more resembles our great great grandparents.
On the other hand, the idea of the commune might seem a bit trite now. After all, it was crushed after two months of starvation, of eating cats and dogs. A powerful bureaucracy flourished out of what was initially an anarchist commune aiming to satisfy the immediate desires of its inhabitants. It was surrounded and laid to siege by the Prussian army and its leaders were murdered in the streets. Are we really interested in doing something again which failed in the past? Or are we talking about something entirely different?
There are always trends in leftist circles, and the idea of the commune is one of them today, thanks in part to “The Coming Insurrection”. Though the Paris Commune has never left the French political consciousness, a resurgence in the Paris Commune has spread elsewhere, such as with the film about the commune. But why does the idea of ‘the commune’ seem trite? Other than the obvious circumstantial failures of the historical Paris Commune, is there something else that makes the commune — as we conceive of it today — a trite idea or a failure in the making? And what is triteness if not a symptom of overexposure, or apathy, or another kind of cognitive coping mechanism to deal with the defeatism in the left? Do we mean to say the commune is really “outmoded”? And what about any other communes? Are they all trite too? (What geographical place does not have a rich history, and a sense of place, to draw its own historical theme from? Such as the Home Colony near Tacoma, WA in the 1890s.)
Notes from The Invisible Committee, writing The Coming Insurrection:
A commune forms every time a few people, freed of their individual straitjackets, decide to rely only on themselves and measure their strength against reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every building occupied collectively and on a clear basis is a commune, the action committees of 1968 were communes, as were the slave maroons in the United States, or Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977. Every commune seeks to be its own base. It seeks to dissolve the question of needs. It seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation; it degenerates into a milieu the moment it loses contact with the truths on which it is founded. There are all kinds of communes that wait neither for the numbers nor the means to get organized, and even less for the “right moment” – which never arrives.
The principle of communes is not to counter the metropolis and its mobility with local slowness and rootedness. The expansive movement of commune formation should surreptitiously overtake the movement of the metropolis. We don’t have to reject the possibilities of travel and communication that the commercial infrastructure offers; we just have to know their limits. We just have to be prudent, innocuous.
For us it’s not about possessing territory. Rather, it’s a matter of increasing the density of the communes, of circulation, and of solidarities to the point that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory.
Communes come into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path. The commune is perhaps what gets decided at the very moment when we would normally part ways. It’s the joy of an encounter that survives its expected end. It’s what makes us say “we,” and makes that an event. What’s strange isn’t that people who are attuned to each other form communes, but that they remain separated. Why shouldn’t communes proliferate everywhere? In every factory, every street, every village, every school. At long last, the reign of the base committees! Communes that accept being what they are, where they are. And if possible, a multiplicity of communes…
What is Biopower?
Posted by: lettrist on: November 12, 2009
Biopower is literally having power over other bodies, “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol.I, p.140).
Biopower for Foucault contrasts with traditional modes of power based on the threat of death from a sovereign. In an era like ours where power must be justified rationally, biopower is utilized by an emphasis on the protection of life rather than the threat of death, on the regulation of the body, and the production of other technologies of power, such as the notion of sexuality. Foucault defines it as positive, in opposition to the classic understanding of power as basically negative, limitative and akin to censorship. These contrast the uses of power in masculine and feminine spheres.
Customary regulations, habits, health, reproductive practices, family, “blood”, and “well-being” would be straightforward examples of biopower, as would any conception of the state as a “body” and the use of state power as essential to its “life”. Hence the conceived relationship between biopower, eugenics, and state-sponsored racism. But anything “species-preserving” is an exercise of biopower. When the state, for example, is invested in protecting the life of the population — when the stakes are life itself — anything can be justified. Groups identified as a threat to the existence of the life of the nation or of humanity can be eradicated with impunity.
Biopower is itself a technique used in society of the spectacle. The biopower of this spectacle has totally colonized all of social life, and hence the more interesting manifestions of biopower are manipulations invisible to the straightforward observer. These are sophisticated techniques, and likely unknown to the originators themselves. The biopower discourse, like the discourse on “racism” and “patriarchy” — is a window to the everlasting subterranean war which takes place beneath the peace and “unity” of the spectacle. With biopower we find the appearance of “unity” within the society, since the goal of biopower is to present disunities as unities, and vice versa, within the appearance of the spectacle.
“If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power, this is not because of the recent return to the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population.”
(History of Sexuality, Vol. I in The Foucault Reader p. 137).
Communism is Weakness on Stilts?
Posted by: lettrist on: November 5, 2009
It’s amazing how much people in general can shift their views with enough time and psychic manipulation. “Communism is weakness on stilts” is something I wrote in an online forum four years ago here. I was apparently debating “religion vs. the will to power” on philosophyforums.com. I got the phrase from Jeremy Bentham who once wrote that the concept of human rights was “nonsense upon stilts”.
Yet communism today means something completely different to me than it did four years ago. Earlier this year while I worked in the “paper factory” (as I liked to call it) my co-workers were complaining about Obama’s stimulus package and his alleged communism, and the fact that he is a Marxist. Just to be a thorn, I told them I was a communist and that Obama – if he is communist indeed – was an extremely bad one. I explained that communism is a free association of people working in cooperation to achieve common goals, who collectively own what they use to achieve those goals. A commune, I explained, is self-managed and collectively owned. Hence communism is a way of life that exercises and integrates collectivity, that is, into the organization of the commune. People can live in communes, work in communes, and communes are not reliant on “state power” as they have wrongly been associated with.
Hell, I said, if we decided we did not need our manager anymore and realized we could collectively own and manage this paper factory ourselves, we would be communists too.
A light went on in their heads. Suddenly communism did not seem like such a far-off idea. It seemed reasonable, even possible. Our generation does not identify with the role of ‘the worker’ like our grandparents did, so transcending the worker-capitalist dichotomy is easy. And perhaps this is the reason why many working people have found the idea of communism so salvific: sometimes it feels closer than an arm’s length away. Not communism the way the media talks about it, but communism in the most charitable and basic sense. Without communism life has become alienating, not being able to manage ourselves, not being able to experience those partnerships with other human beings, instead condemned only to fellowship in a stagnant church. The church – as Dietrich Bonhoeffer idealized about a “Christian community” – is maybe the closest thing resembling the commune. It is no wonder people flock to churches feeling depressed about their lives under late Fordist capitalism (yes, late and still Fordist for most people.)
The problem with Zarathustra, however, is that to capitalist pigs he is a capitalist pig. To liberal democrats he is the patron saint of human rights. To buddhists he is a boddhisatva. To communists he is proto-communist.
With four years’ rationalization, communism to me is ultimately an expression of strength: a will to overcome the society locked by modern conditions of production. “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Free to associate, but is everywhere dominated by the invisible demands of capital. Communism in our personal lives, then, is a will to power. Free association of any sort is a will to power, but especially in communism, since it is a transvaluation of all values hitherto experienced in modern society. Hence communism is for the stronger willed. Zarathustra calls upon his brethren to have strength. He does not have an ethics, because a system of ethics is a substitute for power. He only has a call to indiscriminate strength. The world is will to power — and nothing besides! You can be weak person anywhere – whatever you do – and you can be strong person anywhere. At a very profound level, the will to overcome a power beyond us and replace it with our own power – is nothing less than the strength of Zarathustra.
Full Body Check
Posted by: lettrist on: November 4, 2009
I lie alone
I lie in my bed
I watch the ceiling
“Take your temperature” it says
OK full body check:
I am still pulled in by the sound
My heart is pulsating
I remember everything even the things
No one else saw
No one else heard
No one else felt
Knowing every cell of my own flesh
Knowing the taste and feel of everything
Knowing
The wild wins
The ocean prevails
Lovers leap
As we encircle Dionysus
And get what this doctor ordered
All I can think about is everyone
At this party leaving
And you and I on the bleachers
Sitting so close
Daaaaam.
I like it when you say things in Russian
I like it when you swim in my direction
I hear the sound of two worlds coinciding
Back on the wave
Here we go
When this dancefloor is burning
So will
Our hearts
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