Recording Surface

So here’s my schema for classifying some of the communiques/occupations/actions of the last few months: The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection is Situationist, the New School Occupation is autonomist, and the Communique from the Absent Future is anarchist. Okay, that’s pretty silly, and reductive of course, since I’m not really sure what any of those mean. But it does at least explain why the first of these is my least favorite.

The common logic of these “movements,” especially the last two, pivots around two points: occupation and the insistence on not demanding. Occupation, as the communiques make clear, isn’t a tactic for reprivileging the territorial or producing a new commons on top of the old. Instead it’s a disruption of the current functioning and a revealing of fault lines — a way to “blast the mindless structure.” Demanding, on the other hand, is just another way of asking for something, of recognizing someone else’s right to ownership. Occupation does the opposite of demanding: it takes, without worrying over how the action will be represented or asking for permission — it “needs no introduction, no visas or carte blanche.”

So, the occupiers aren’t really Situationist, autonomist, or anarchist. They are, to put it in punk rock terms, Teenagers from Mars:

We land in barren fields
On the Arizona plains
The insemination of little girls
In the middle of wet dreams

And we don’t care
And we don’t care, we don’t care
We don’t care, and we don’t care
And we don’t care

I’ve uploaded an article I wrote a few months ago on the politics of the 2006 protests in the United States, primarily, after the initial passage of HR 4437, the hardass immigration legislation. It was was not accepted for publication — boo hoo — but reading over it now, I’m not surprised: bad writing and inadequately developed ideas, which befits a piece I basically wrote in a day. But I think I’m interested in reworking it, so any comments or suggestions of outlets that might be interested would be very much appreciated. If you’d rather have a pdf, email me (there’s an address on the right-hand side if you need it) and I’ll happily send you a copy. Again, comments and critiques welcome.

Setting affirmation against “the negative” to explain and argue for the latter’s persistence and necessity misses the point. (more…)

Rhizomes has published the essay on The Wire, Omar Little, and neoliberalism . The synopses part at the beginning probably goes on a little long, but it picks up steam after that, methinks.

It’s a little strange to see something you wrote a year ago finally hit print.

From what I can gather, concepts of decay — as developed, in blogland, by Reza Negarestani, Planomenology, and Splintering Bone Ashes, among others — belong to what could be called the subtractive branch of ontological-political strategies: becoming-imperceptible, exodus, refusal of work. (more…)

Maybe I should expand a bit on my previous post on Badiou’s national subjectivity, since it could have come across as scurrilous. (more…)

The article “Street Combat Techniques,” from Khiaban, a newspaper apparently being circulated among the protesters in Iran, is a remarkable document. The article’s tone, at least in translation, is impersonal, sober, almost pedantic, but it’s a tone that befits a politics that wants to describe, occupy, and alter space and do so by the nonindividualized concentration of bodies. (more…)

I’m more than halfway through Pynchon’s Against the Day, and so far, like most of his books, it is by turns enthralling, excruciating, beautiful, and boring. I’ll wait until I finish the book to talk about the story and thematic elements, but I just wanted to put in a quick note about something that I keep thinking about it as I read it. (more…)

Below is among my favorite of the many insightful, and beautiful, communiques to come out of the actions in Greece over the past month. (more…)

And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of others. Like a will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your own death against the death of others, and measure everything by “deleometers.”

I watched only four speeches at the Republican convention — Thompson’s, Giuliani’s, Palin’s, and McCain’s — and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just witnessed a well-lit, hood-free Klan rally. (more…)