I cite

The Natural History Museum -- Grand Opening, September 13

Bound books: The Communist Horizon (Verso)

Chickens are not an alternative

Support No Space here

 

Haircut before the Party

Hair Cut Before The Party get going this Friday till Tues in a shop front on Whitechaple Rd. BOOK A CUT and, if you would like, tell us something specific you would like to chat about. COME HANG OUT the salon is open from 12 to 6pm. Come to specific conversation or just drop by. In the times we're not snipping we'll be reading, drinking coffee and making posters. See the wonderful www.thehaircutbeforetheparty.net for bookings, details and what's happening each day.

Spam our poster out into your online worlds: http://tinyurl.com/67ukn5h

Tweet tweet tweet if that's your thing @HaircutsBTP

A song on the end of the world

 

Theory & Event 13.3 (with the much anticipated Deleuze and War symposium)

(excerpted from the introduction by Davide Panagia and Jodi Dean)

Issue 13.3 begins with an article by Seán Molloy that analyzes the nature and substance of Thomas Pynchon’s political thought.  This comprehensive analysis of Pynchon’s writings explores not simply Pynchon’s style of political criticism, but the complex layers of his political cosmology as well.

Dylan Weller offers us the second essay of this issue.  In his piece Weller intervenes in recent discussions of James’s radical pluralism by addressing James’s commitment to a science of religion which collects a variety of religious experiences but excises that which is uncommon between them.  In doing so, Weller complicates the image of James as “an unwavering proponent of pluralistic contestation.”

Brad Evans and Laura Guillaume guest edit our third symposium of Volume 13, entitled “Deleuze and War.”  The ambition for this symposium is to explore Deleuze’s concerns with the problem of war, their contributions to his thinking, and the contemporary issues that arise out of the relationship between Deleuze and war in the face of increasingly shifting conceptions of state power and militarization. Their introduction is openly accessible and is available here.  http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.3.evans02.html

Pieces in this symposium include:  an exchange with Brad Evans and Michael Hardt on the relationship between civil war and the problems of sovereignty; an interview by Laura Guillaume with James Der Derian that takes up issues such as the (ab)use of the militarization of critical thought; an essay by Julian Reid that engages Deleuze’s analysis of cinema and his problematic periodizations of pre and post-war films; a contribution from Brian Massumi considering the ubiquity of “soft power” and “epistemological warfare” and defending the virtual against the military logic of pre-emption; a paper from John Protevi deploying Deleuze and Guattari’s complex notion of affect in order to rethink how we understand the body in the face of affective responses to war; an essay by Brad Evans arguing that security is becoming less concerned with issues of identity and more focused on questions of circulation and emergence; a genealogy of war exploring how the forces of capture and flight operate in everyday life by Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc; and, a paper by Gregg Lambert that traces the relationship between the war machine, the state, and the people.

Our review section, edited by Kennan Ferguson, includes the following reviews of recent publications:  Nicola Masciandaro of Brooklyn College reviews Giorgio Agamben’s The Signature of All Things: On Method (Zone, 2009); Simon Scott of the University of Warwick reviews Alexandre Lefebvre’s The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza (Stanford University Press, 2008); Nicholas Tampio of Fordham  University reviews Nathan Widder’s Reflections on Time and Politics (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); Beth Hinderliter of Buffalo State College reviews Erin Manning’s Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (MIT Press, 2009); and, Dean Mathiowetz of the University of California in
Santa Cruz reviews Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy (Semiotext(e), 2008).

2nd Former West Research Congress on Horizons: Art and Political Imagination

1. On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination, the second in the series of FORMER WEST Research Congresses, takes place on 4–6 November 2010 at Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul. The Congress revolves around the theoretical notion of the “horizon” and its place within artistic production and political imagination today.

   If, as it is commonly assumed, the global political and cultural changes of 1989 left the world bereft of a sense of politics as striving towards a future—a horizon as it were—then we are left with the perpetual caretaking of the existing state of things. Given this apparent endgame of liberal democracy, how can we insist that it is possible to imagine and to realize another world, to posit the horizon anew?

2. In this context, the project FORMER WEST is a proposition for speculating—in the field of contemporary art—about a possible horizon. For, can it not be argued that art works, exhibitions, and their discourses inherently set up a horizon, offering a proposal of what can and cannot be imagined? This horizon links aesthetics with politics, creates an image of possible futures, yet also marks a limit that cannot be surpassed as it recedes with each move toward it, offering a sense of both possibility and that which remains out of reach.

3. Venue: Istanbul Technical University, Taşkışla Campus, Room 109.

   Language: English (simultaneous translation into Turkish is provided).

   Admission: free (registration is required).

   Deadline for registration: 3 October 2010 (Registration is closed, all available seats have been reserved).

A poem by Nazim Hikmet: On Living

ON LIVING

1

Living is no laughing matter :
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example -
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Living is no laughing matter :
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory ölebileceksin,
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people -
even for people whose faces you have never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees -
and not for your children, either
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.


2
Let's say we are seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get up
s no laughing matter :
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example -
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Living is no laughing matter :
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,

or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people -
even for people whose faces you have never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees -
and not for your children, either
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.


2
Let's say we are seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously                           

Let's say we are at the front -
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,

We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.

Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
we might fall on our face, dead.
for the latest newscast.
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.

I mean, however and whereever we are,
we must live as if we will never die...



3
This earth will grow cold, a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet -
I mean this, our great earth.

This earth will grow cold one day.
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space.

You must grieve for this right now
- you have to feel this sorrow now -
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived"...


tr. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk

Exercises in facing reality: hoarding as faith in a future

I've become interested in the tv shows about hoarders and hoarding. The footage of people drowning in their things, overtaken by their things, evicted and oppressed by their things absorbs me. My own tendencies to hoard are minimal. I much prefer the satisfaction of throwing things away, giving things away. It's like the inside version of weeding a garden.

Paul views things rather differently. He appreciates people's regard for the things around them, particularly those hoarders who see something unique and wonderful in every broken lamp or old game ("well, we might find another one at a yard sale and then we can combine them and have all the pieces"). I had a friend in Vienna who lived above the flea market. When it rained, he would race down to the market and buy as many of the old toasters and appliances that he could carry. He hated the thought that the appliances would be left drenched and helpless. Anyway, Paul has viewed the therapists on these hoarder shows as the bad guys, that is, as a kind of ideological thought police trained to rein in the hoarders and make them into proper consumerist subjects rather than subjects whose consumption has become so excessive as to be an illness or syndrome.

Last night, though, Paul said something a little different. My daughter and I are painting her room and refinishing her floors (a nasty job that immediately redeems those who undertake it). This means that all her items are now in her brother's room (her brother is on a camping trip in the wilderness; I figure that if I'm not done when he gets back, at least he's become accustomed to roughing it). So the room is difficult to navigate. There is a small path through bookcases, toys, and mattresses over to the bed. Every surface is piled high with stuffed animals, baskets of girly things, pillows, paper, extra lamps. We look like hoarders. And Paul, who is in the process of painting of the kitchen in an apartment in the building he owns, noticed that the occupant of the apartment has saved lots of little packets of soy sauce and other condiments. She hasn't lived there in a year, but she had saved the packets in case she needed them. Or someone else, like one of her kids or a friend who might stay for a weekend, needed them. She saved the condiments because she was imagining a future where they would be needed. Don't must of us have a little bit of the hoarder? And if so, why the impulse to denigrate people for and cure them of their hoarding?

What if these hoards of items are not remnants of a past that cannot be let go, symptoms of loss, but instead elements of a hope for a future? On one of the hoarding shows, the expert convinced a woman to get rid of some of knitting needles and yarn stash. Those items are about a future, future projects, and a step toward undertaking those projects. Another hoarder was a dumpster diver and an artist. He saw a future in each wonderful object. It would become art. It might not be art yet, but that was the future he imagined for it.

I see these hoarder shows as sharing the current moment with post-apocalyptic fiction. Both mark the end of the future. Our capacities to imagine a future not overrun by zombies and violence seem too pathological, too fantastic. They have become evidence of an imagination unconstrained by reality. Throwing out things is a way to throw out options, alternatives, different futures. The lesson these hoardist missives impart is that one must consume properly, along one path. Futures are not allowed.

Blog Theory (cover)

Polity has done a great job with Blog Theory: feedback and capture in the circuits of drive. Here is a file with cover. Download Dean-BlogTheory-CoverProof