notes on resistance

⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇ TXTBLOGGING BY CUMPERVERT ⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇⌇ var sc_project=8775213; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="30676d7f"; var scJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://secure." : "http://www."); document.write("");

[notesonresistance-blog]

To that end, the notion that “we” are practicing non-violence when “we” partake of non-violent resistance is unacceptable. Our tax dollars and our passive acquiescence, our quiescence, or quietude, our muted fury—all of this creates complicity in violence, and there is something hypocritical in advocating non-violence while we do not, at least episodically, throw ourselves on the machine that churns out Palestinian and Iraqi and Afghan and African bodies. Violence suffuses our societies, and the privilege we have to write and speak about non-violence is a privilege that is the heritage of historical violence. Let us look at the podium from which our voices and “values” sound out. It is made of bodies, and they are mostly brown.

Max Ajl, “Our western privilege is the legacy of historical violence”

[notesonresistance-blog]

A prescription for Palestinian pacifism amounts to saying to a people under the gun: 'Oppose the violence that I pay for, and throw your body on the machine. Some of you will die, but it will be better for you. Trust me. But I will not throw my body on the war machine. I will not throw my body on the war machine of which the war machine that is oppressing you is a cog. I have nothing to do with that war-machine.'

Max Ajl, “Our western privilege is the legacy of historical violence”

[notesonresistance-blog]

The thing is, we already live in a world soaked with violence. The notion that we can remove, via spiritual transformation, the scars of violence while still living in a world totally riddled with it suggests that spiritual catharsis will be easier in a world where structural violence is reduced considerably, if not nearly eliminated. And this sort of thinking can move in another direction too—not that we totally reject violence, but that we cocoon ourselves from its damages. Violence will influence the character of the world we wish to create, sure, but it already does so, and if righteous violence can reduce the scale of constant, structural, morally unacceptable violence—the occupation, the siege—why on earth would we on principle reject its use, or morally privilege non-violence?

Max Ajl, “Our western privilege is the legacy of historical violence”

[notesonresistance-blog]

Moreover, the quotation [in which Gandhi prefers violence to cowardice] precisely points up the problems of not recognizing the continuum on which violence and non-violence exist. Rigid bifurcations are problematic, both for obvious reasons—is pushing the Israeli soldier at Budrus violence or not?—but also for reasons that are less obvious. Non-violence and violence are only polar opposites in a realm of ideas which demands that they be so. Their sharp separation is in fact an ideology. ... When violence and non-violence are understood as shading and melding not merely at the margins but throughout, the idea that non-violence is a tactic, an action, a way of implementing something rather than its essential character, and furthermore something that should be assessed consequentially, becomes obvious.

Max Ajl, “Our western privilege is the legacy of historical violence”

[notesonresistance-blog]

This pitiful display is particularly insidious because it turns the leftist cultural workers into that which they most fear: Validators of the conservative interpretive matrix. If the fundamental principle of conservative politics is to maintain order for the sake of economy, to complement the needs and desires of the economic elite, and to discourage social heterogeneity, then the documentary, as it now stands, is complicit in participating in that order, even if it flies the banner of social justice over its ideological fortress. This is true because the documentary does not create an opportunity for free thought, but instills self-censorship in the viewer, who must absorb its images within the structure of a totalizing narrative.

Video and Resistance: Against Documentaries

[notesonresistance-blog]

A documentary fails when the causal chain breaks down, showing the seams and allowing a moment of disbelief to disrupt the predetermined interpretive matrix.Without the scientific principle of causality rigorously structuring the narrative, the documentary’s legitimized authority dissipates quite rapidly, revealing its true nature as fictional propaganda. When a legitimation crisis occurs in the film, the image becomes transparent, rather than exhausting itself, and the ideology of the narrative is displayed in all its horrifying glory. The quality documentary does not reveal itself, and it is this illusionistic chicanery—first perfected by Hollywood realism—that unfortunately guides the grand majority of documentary and video witness work that leftist cultural workers currently produce in endless streams.

Video and Resistance: Against Documentaries

[notesonresistance-blog]

Film is not now nor has it ever been the technology of truth. It lies at a speed of 24 frames a second. Its value is not as a recorder of history, but simply as a means of communication, a means by which meaning is generated. The frightening aspect of the documentary film is that it can generate rigid history in the present in the same manner that Disney can generate the colonial meaning of the culture of the Other.

Video and Resistance: Against Documentaries

[notesonresistance-blog]

What is more unfortunate is that such work is often perceived to be elitist, because its use of the aesthetics of confusion does not at present draw popular support. It should be noted that such commentary generally comes from a well-positioned intelligentsia certain of the correctness of its ideology. Its mission is to not to free its converts, but to keep them locked in and defending the bunker of solidified ideology. It is disturbance through liquidation of these structures that resistant nomadic media attempts to accomplish. This cannot be done by producing more electronic monuments, but rather, by an imaginative intervention and critical reflection liberated in an unresolved and uncertain electronic moment.

Video and Resistance: Against Documentaries

[notesonresistance-blog]

Confusion should be seen as an acceptable aesthetic. The moment of confusion is the precondition for the scepticism necessary for radical thought to emerge. The goals then of resistant nonfiction video are twofold: Either to call attention to and document the sign construction of simulation, or to establish confusion and scepticism so that simulations cannot function.

Video and Resistance: Against Documentaries

[evilscum-deactivated20160223]

there is no inherently radical identity. survival can overlap with resistance but they’re not the same item. an oppressed person can resist for survival, or they can bargain with power for survival, or accept domination for survival. many actions bring survival. most liberatory actions come at a personal cost which is why it’s rare for survival to be bound up with resistance. so there’s no “surviving as a trans woman is inherently radical!” because it’s not. radicalism isn’t a given, ever.

[notesonresistance-blog]

yep

[notesonresistance-blog]

Of course it's not enough. But if you begin anywhere else, there's no hope at all. You can't say, 'We're going to change the way people behave toward the world, but we're not going to change the way they think about the world or the way they think about divine intentions in the world or the way they think about the destiny of man.' As long as the people of your culture are convinced that the world belongs to them and that their divinely-appointed destiny is to conquer and rule it, then they are of course going to go on acting the way they've been acting for the past ten thousand years. They're going to go on treating the world as if it were a piece of human property and they're going to go on conquering it as if it were an adversary. You can't change these things with laws. You must change people's minds. And you can't just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they've lost—something that makes better sense than the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn't serve his needs directly or indirectly.

Ishmael, Daniel Quinn

[no-new-ideas-press]

We are the late beginning of your social conscience…

READ // PRINT

Half-sized zine. To print: 2 copies per page, landscape, flip on short edge.

[halflighttracing]

Including:

 I’m glad I was in the Stonewall riot’ an interview with Sylvia Rivera 

Every Destructive Thing a “dialogue” between Sylvia Rivera and some pigs 

Street Transvestites for Gay Power statement on the NYU occupation 

Transvestites: Your Half-Sisters & Half-Brothers of the Revolution by Sylvia Rivera, 1971 

Rapping with a Street Transvestite Revolutionary an interview with Marsha P. Johnson 

Y’all Better Quiet Down Sylvia Rivera’s speech at Liberation Day 1973 

Bitch on Wheels a speech by Sylvia Rivera, June 2001 Queens in Exile, 

The Forgotten Ones by Sylvia Rivera

[leger-blog]

Chantal Akerman/On Suicide (by Sarah Schulman)

(Originally posted here on Facebook on 10/7/2015) So, Chantal Akerman’s death makes me have to think, once again, about queer suicide. Suicide is a public act. The pain may have been private, but the death is a fact. I have never understood the desire to hide a suicide, it’s an opportunity to get real. Lying about it is so unproductive.

Being a queer New Yorker of a certain age, I have been exposed to many suicides, and here we have one of the greatest artists of our time…and it’s implicating. Lets face it. If someone so gifted, and so realized, and so recognized and so revered cannot bear her own life, it is threatening to the rest of us. And therefore worth thinking through.

Of course she had all kinds of issues around her mother, her mother’s suffering, her mother’s “survival”, perhaps a relationship of dependency that made connecting, supporting and relying on other adults as equals too difficult. I don’t really know, but we all have these weaknesses of history: personal ones, and many people in the world now suffer from the historical cataclysm of someone else’s violent supremacy ideology. It is common to be on the receiving end of political cruelty.

Yet, whenever someone commits suicide - even if it is historical, biological, inevitable and unstoppable, it still feels like a failure of community.

There are people who commit suicide on impulse, and if we had just returned that phone call…It is not about guilt or blame, but more about learning how to live that requires us to think this through.

It is a skill to allow another person to suffer, to grieve, to be in repetitive pain, to need to talk about the same problem more times than we want them to. But sometimes that refusal to listen and be present is really about our own anxieties masquerading as their deficiencies. Really, it’s no skin off our backs to be uncomfortable and listen when someone really needs to connect. We act like it’s a big deal, but actually it’s not. Why punish someone because they are already upset?

Sometimes people kill themselves because the situation is unbearable as it is, and sometimes we can help them change it. Sometimes we can intervene, sometimes our presence is the change.

Sometimes it is our cruelties that provoke suicide in others: Being cold, shunning, group shunning, refusing to communicate, refusing to face and deal with conflict. Or even refusing to intervene or “get involved” because we just don’t want to be bothered with facing ourselves in the way necessary to change. You never know how much your tiny little self-righteous power play is going to devastate someone else. You can blame them for not being able to tolerate you. But they still can’t.

And sometimes people commit suicide because of long-term deterioration or long -standing problems. Addictions that can’t be shaken. They see things as insurmountable, or unchangeable when they are not. Or they can’t adjust to the situations that ARE in fact unchangeable. I think it is better to tell someone honestly that they are caught up in distorted thinking, when they are. It is more loving to have the complex, difficult conversations than to pretend everything is fine.

But, it is so important to combine this honesty with company. One of the lowest things one person can do to another it to say “You need help” and then shun them. That is the evil combination. If we think someone needs help, we need to help them.

Sometimes a person’s life can be saved by dropping petty cruelties. Or by inviting them over for breakfast. Or by picking up the phone and saying “How are you really?” Or going over there and watching TV together, even if they are in bad shape. Or doing it twenty days in a row. Yeah, it’s a lot of time.

Saying, “You are over-reacting and I am going to sit here with you, with those feelings” can be a life saver.

And sometimes none of this will make a difference and they will still take their own life. And sometimes it will make all the difference in the world. And sometimes we just can’t know if there was a way to help.

And sometimes we just don’t care enough to try. And this too, is worth knowing.

[topsidepress-blog]

Chantal Akerman was a brilliant feminist lesbian artist, one of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century. She made the choice to take her own life this week at the age of 65. Here you can watch a portion of her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman. Upon its release, The New York Times called it the “first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema”. It was named the 19th-greatest film of the 20th century by The Village Voice.

[lumpenfag]

We are very pleased to announce the third issue of the journal Bædan

Bædan: journal of queer time travel marks a further attempt to pose and to flesh out a queer critique of civilization. Queer not only in the sense of coming from those outside and disruptive of the Family, but also in the sense of a critique weirder than its more orthodox cousins. We imagine the Bædan project as an effort to pose the critique of civilization otherwise, to begin from another place. In this issue (and beyond…) we have conjured a strange bestiary of thinking, trying to unearth and trace the tradition of anti-civilization thought in the literature of queerness and in queerness as immanent critique.

From the introduction:

“Bædan: journal of queer time travel happened almost by accident. Very little of what we had intended for a third issue is included within these pages; instead, these texts are the remainder of a series of distractions, detours and wanderings away from where we thought we were going. In the last year and a half we fell into ruts, and we fought our way out. We found unexpected friends, and we lost others. We encountered old enemies, neither leaving unscathed. We pirated, burned, and searched. Again and again, we returned to certain questions. How did we get here? By means of what traps and misfortunes did we get ourselves into this mess? Is there a way out? We laughed at the questions, cried at the answers, and let the rest drift off into silence. We allowed our minds to stray, to err here and there, and one thing led to another. Our little obsessions and parentheticals took on a frenzied energy, and, when we paused a moment, we realized that out of our inquiries, correspondences, and translations another issue had quietly materialized—clandestinely smuggled itself into the world.

“Our methodology in this issue could, at best, be described as wandering or errant. We began with a sort of intuitive reading; we softened our gaze so as to let certain figures, some old friends and some strangers, make themselves known to us. In this we searched for clues—synchronic coincidences, liminal events, weirdnesses—and let ourselves fixate on them. From there we went in spirals and lines of flight, exploring boundaries and other sides. By means of obsessive daydreaming and the perfect alchemy of stimulants and delirium, our project burst outwards in leaps and bounds. When we stepped back, we realized that between these disparate inquiries we had triangulated something unexpected: a gaping hole in spacetime. Wherever we poked and pressed, we found ourselves returning to the strange phenomena and transformations happening at the beginning of the 1970s (more on that later) and realized our historical research was leading us somewhere unknown. Time, suddenly, felt open, indeterminate, up for grabs. We were experiencing a sort of chronotaraxis: a distortion of time. This felt different than the chronophobia with which we usually look upon the “storm blowing from paradise”. We came to realize that we were playing with—to borrow a term—“queer time” and were in a sense, time traveling. And so, our chrononautic project, this journal of queer time travel,was born.”

This issue contains:

~An exploration and interrogation—with some help from Copi, Michel Foucault, and Samuel Delany—of the ‘coming out’ of the early gay liberation movement, and its relationship to identity and time.

~A reading of the interweaving friendship and conspiracy between James Baldwin and Jean Genet with particular attention paid to the lessons they offer to those living and fighting today.

~A new translation of “Anal Terror”, Paul / Beatriz Preciado’s mythical history of the emergence of the front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR) in France.

~“The Antinomies of Sexual Discourse”, a critique of sexual liberation, published with an introduction in memory of our dearly departed Chris Chitty.

~And a multiplicity of diverging correspondences inspired by and engaging with a polymorphous corpus including: Diane di Prima, Guy Hocquenghem, Zach Blas, the Dark Mountain project, Austin Osman Spare, Alejandro de Acosta, chaos magic, Afro-pessimism, black feminism, critiques of the human, queer theory, urban rioting, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Kurdish struggle for autonomy, very bad nihilism, encryption, utopia, holes, the occult, the ecstatic, the flesh.

This issue is 270 pages, set in Bodoni and Futura, with artwork throughout by Austin Osman Spare. Printed and bound in Seattle with covers printed by Eberhardt Press.

Copies are available from Little Black Cart.

Those located in or around Seattle or the Bay Area can contact us through the email address below.

As with our previous release, we are also making the texts of Bædan: queer journal of heresy (issue 2) available on The Anarchist Library.

We welcome critique, submissions, inquiries, friendship and enmity at our email address: [the name of the journal][at]riseup[dot]net

- - -

baedan.noblogs.org

[notesonresistance-blog]

!!!

[hfml-deactivated20170210]

Yes thank you Yasmin Nair for pulling together a narrative of today’s to put forward some important questions that have come to fruition in an era of “The New Gay.”

Some key questions include: where is the gay media in their response to this? What will their response tell us about the broader assimilationist project of gay marriage and respectability politics? How will this deepen/further reveal the gay establishment’s (the media as well as gay lobbyists, etc.) relationship to criminalization of HIV and sex work?

Reading the column I’m also thinking about the “What next” or how to do the work of supporting our brothers and sisters who will be affected by these events? How will we resist this clamping down of surveillance upon the our lives, sexual and professional?

Share this article and discuss it with your community. If you can, support Yasmin so she can continue to write the necessary critiques of contemporary queer experience. (Details on her awesome page).

In solidarity!

[mostmodernist-deactivated201708]

some people seem to be operating under the assumption that calling a cop a bastard has something to do with whether I think they are “corrupt” or whether there is evidence that they inflict “unnecessary force” or said something racist in an e-mail or something, and they think that therefore cops should considered innocence until proven guilty of being a Bastard

but guess what, this is not an individualist evaluation

no no no, don’t get it wrong here

this has nothing to do with “corruption,” and I don’t need quantitative evidence of anything that registers on some liberal’s arbitrary spectrum of “justified/unjustified force”

All Cops Are Bastards because All Cops are accomplices to the systemic repression carried out by the institution and complicit agents of violence at both the structural and individual level. By doing exactly what they are supposed to do, by following the codes and orders and manuals and their own hearts and minds, they are carrying out a level of brutal violence and violation that simply does not register on the surveys and agendas of any police oversight committee or “progressive” journalist or state proposition

you can’t fucking reform away the roots of an institution that inform its very structure and function, past present and future

you cannot “demilitarize” an institution that is meant to be a military force used to protect capitalists, defend private property, break strikes, and uphold white supremacy; you can’t “sensitivity train” away the fundamentally racist and anti-black and xenophobic purpose of an institution that is meant to segregate and criminalize and brutalize people of color because its very notions and definitions of “criminality,”  “vagrancy,”  “loitering,”  “belonging,”  “intimidating,”  “aggressive,” etc are predicated on white supremacy; you cannot ~queer~ an institution that is normalizes and legitimates violence against queer people and criminalizes those who are already most at risk of being isolated into so-called “criminal” categories

everything about what the police are supposed to do is what is wrong with the institution, and all cops participate in this because it is what they are paid to do, it is what they are told makes them “good cops” who are “upholding the law” and “preserving the peace”

everyone who makes a single exception to the rule of All Cops Are Bastards is supporting the narrative that what cops do, when they aren’t making headlines, is good and right and just

but its fucking not

cops exist to maintain the “law and order” of the capitalist class, to maintain the white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy, to criminalize and brutalize and violate the poor, people of color, the neuroatypical, the queer and genderdivergent, and all others whose existence and/or behaviors either threaten the system or cannot be subsumed, coopted, and defanged by the ideological apparatuses of the ruling class

I don’t give a shit about individual cops, or “good cops” or even fucking “bad cops”

its what cops are supposed to do, its what all cops do, no matter who they are as individuals or what they do in their off time or who they shared a sandwich with or what color they died their hair or who they decided not to pull a gun on who who they let off the hook and why

okay how sweet, at that one moment in time they didn’t add one more person to the growing count of people in prison or dead, but guess what, they went back to fucking work after that and violated or arrested or killed someone else and you didn’t hear about it or you did and you thought it was right and just

that is why All Cops Are Bastards and everyone who supports them are bastards too