NAP

'The non-aggression principle (also called the non-aggression axiom, the anti-coercion principle, the zero aggression principle, the non-initiation of force), or NAP for short, is a moral stance which asserts that aggression is inherently illegitimate. Aggression, for the purposes of the NAP, is defined as the initiation or threatening of violence against a person or legitimately owned property of another. Specifically, any unsolicited actions of others that physically affect an individual’s property, including that person’s body, no matter if the result of those actions is damaging, beneficiary or neutral to the owner, are considered violent when they are against the owner’s free will and interfere with his right to self-determination, as based on the libertarian principle of self-ownership'
WIKI


this definition is very interesting to me- to start with the question of self-ownership.
to whom belongs my body? and how much space my body takes?




what is the extension of my body and my territory?





According to G. Cohen, the concept of self-ownership is that "each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply."


so do we own our bodies? do we have the power over our life? do we control our bodies?





do we have the freedom to control our life as we want it? is there anybody around us? hellooooo!!! is anybody thereeeee....????

Agreesion/violence

the problem of aggression or violence doesn't lie in the definition of this term, but rather in the way we apply this definition. to apply the definition of violence we have to use 'the reasoning'. so if the reasoning is not sufficient enough the use of term violence might be used in a wrong way or better to say superficially, which again becomes a violence a crime, as we call things with wrong names and we might punish the innocent.

Money Today, Objects of Development, Precariousness, Frozen "Identities", Debt

there are two recent works of writing that are quite interesting, and worth reviewing.. for our project i think....

one is on how money in the current Neo-Liberal digital just-in-time society works... How it has come to be not just the oil that turns the wheels of finance, but in fact the true object that is sought, exclusively, across all scales. This means that investments, developments, etc. at any given time are intensively vulnerable to the pattern to cash out at any given time. In a world where only money matters and where legal and policy structures allow for capital flight (in ways that were specifically NOT permitted in the past, during the Fordist era) such a situation adds enormously to the general precariousness of the social landscape at any given time. Traditionally, developments take time and there used to be restrictions on capital flight (prior to the era of Globalization) so as to insure, to some measure, that big money would stay in the game, and hence developments could take hold. Now this is not quite the situation at any given time in the west and in the east.

Notes Towards A Critique of Money by Georgios Papadopoulos and Yannis Stavrakakis
download here

________

the other book that looks quite interesting to me, is Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

download here

under the surface....

liapis ptrubeckoi/artist from white russia

Here is a translation of some of the lyrics :

“I eat gold bricks for lunch,
Diamond dessert, oil cream.
My name is Beelzebub : the master of stratosphere,
I am unbelievably cool and commonly respected.
Refrain:
In my left hand is a Snikers, in my right hand is a Mars.
My PR manager is Karl Marx.
In my left hand is a Snikers, in my right hand is a Mars.
My PR manager is Karl Marx.
Capital! Capital! Capital! Capital!
My face is Madonna, all filled with rotten pears.
All kneel! The orchestra play flourish!
Capital! Capital! Capital! Capital!

some propaganda movies

lenin

statues pulled down....

it would be interesting to see about finding the people who worked on this. the soldiers, the everyday people and interviewing them as to the mechanics of how it came about and what it was like to do, etc. this is probably not possible, but who knows..? it would NOT be so as to make fun of them or anything like that.. but rather to gain understanding of how the mechanics of this sorta thing actually works... and what the feelings/etc. of the people on the ground were who were busy making this spectacle, this theater, this production 'real'... like a weird anthropology of behind the scenes of this Reality TV show... in the realm of everyday [media] politics...




same here....




same here...





i am not so interested in how people felt about these statues being torn down (partly as there is already a lot of footage, etc. on this) but on how this kind of thing is orchestrated, organized, etc.

sorta like the inner workings of making contemporary spectacle of this nature.

its sorta the inverse of Triumph of the Will.

In the Neo-Liberal state its not the Marching In and Forward as a Mass, as a Glorified Unity that is glorified,


its rather the breaking down of 'false' idols that are holding the people back from true "creativity", entrepeneurial development, etc. etc.

The idea is of opening the gates to the real freedom, that is what is glorified.... And this 'real freedom' is left vague and mystified... that is crucial...

And also this opening of the gates, this tearing down of the old Tyranny is proposed in the name of a kind of horizontal free space. It has no leaders, no Great Men, no ideology (or so it argues)....

There is no one behind it.. but freedom...

I am reminded here of an essay by a slave in america... one of the slave narratives.... that makes a very interesting argument about freedom... about how it is never one thing... how it is in fact experienced and practiced as something entirely different depending on your 'position' in the power structure at the moment....

anyhow...

*****

just to quickly jot down some ideas we noted today:

• radio play aspect (afs mentioned situation moves into darkness or near dark on stage, becomes about not the obvious physical high energy "aggression" but about really listening and noticing to the smallest of things... going on;  nadia mentioned radio show aspect)
• statue pulling down on stage
• "aggression": is the term 'right' for what we are busy with? -- violence of the state/system is closer
• working in georgia to see/experience actual situation/violence there
• working in america to see/experience how actual situation/violence is just under the surface
• link of stalin and current neo-liberal state (hidden and "official") violence
• chomsky/groyz observation that stalin/soviet system and american/international corporate liberal-humanist societies work(ed) very similarily. both are largely determined by elites exploiting the everyday people. afs had some reservations with this, as he thinks that the bourgoise revolution in the west has chaotic elements which are in a way creative in capitalism and which do not fully remain determined by a stable and consistent elite in the usual sense of the term. 
• chomsky observation that actually post-war period (under rule of american & nato alliance in cold war with soviet hegemony) has been more violent world-wide then ww1 and ww2 combined 
• afs wonders about how exhaustion works in the construction of state power. the overload works to make "political solutions" (which are not really at all) become 'effective'.. a kind of melodrama perhaps...

there is another level i am somewhat concerned with.... because this is true: "precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time"... in other words, the whole weirdness of the "system" is that it both makes no sense and is in fact crazy, YET it works well all the time. Take the stock market or say the Iraq War. The stock market: it is possible to study it, to learn quite a lot and to make it work in a way for you. Not just for individuals but in fact big big money the world over does just this. Whether it is aggressively managing funds or very conservatively or like Soros utilizing pretty radical theories of how you 'play' the market, nonetheless it is both reasonable to do so and on another level completely nutty. It is high risk all the time. And at a certain level this makes no sense whatsoever. And here is the thing: nonetheless it works. It continues to produce itself and to produce wealth and loss, etc. Same we could say with the Iraq War. There are hardly any americans now who think it was not manipulated and unjustified, itself. A big disaster and tragedy. And that popular feeling about it came to be the case about mid-way, yet it was not stopped or radically reduced then. It had to continue for various reasons...

the point is that wherever we are, we are in the middle... and this middle involves being in this somewhat schizophrenic reality that the 'system' is both completely not-working (and mad) yet works all the time, and not just as insanity, but rather has a kind of 'sense' to it... a melodrama in a way...

so i think its a mistake to aim to be Super Rational ourselves.... rather i think we have to deal with this strange schizophrenic, delirious state per se, as such... even in the mapping that we may get into.. we cannot entirely be outside this... delirium... we are inside it too! no different then anyone else that way! further do shed any light on the situation by aiming to be outside it.... ?  I think we might reveal more by looking into, and in a way being in (performatively) the inside...

about mapping... as an art practice

this is the artist that Badiou used as a paradigm example.

by Mark Lombardi. more information about him here

the key concept of the exploded view .... is a kind of diagram

an exploded view (the term for a diagram that reveals how the different parts fit together but seperates them out so that you can visualize it, three-dimensionally). like this:

or this
















nonetheless the exploded view concept-- its actual manifestation (in art practice) can be rather abstract or absurd (unlike Lombardi's work which is pretty much very informative tho the results are done in a highly aesthetic way) one might say...it doesn't have to be literal or totally informative-bound (i.e. didactic) itself... but rather can be more weird and funky i think... more 'personal'... but still driving towards this conceptual approach (of mapping, of making connections...)... also funny!

for example, here is something of an example of this approach to revealing connections... its an art installation... with a humorous, funky touch, no doubt.  yet i find it gets you thinking (note the use of weird asian motifs, etc. etc.-- it becomes about how basic needs [i.e. water] is distributed-- who rules that, how that is manifest... etc. etc. )

From New Museum exhibition up now

and i think this kind of thing (the exploded view or the effort to reveal connections as such) has been in art for some time... so its not exactly brand new... but to work it now and with a more focused approach to this kind of exploded view concept of organizing is the difference... it creates a way to think about how things are connected, without becoming didactic exactly...

for example this to me is something of a precursor to this thinking/appraoch. its a still from a comedy silent film from like 1918, by a french comedian. i am going to see today btw the movie.

or in a way, the futurists and the russian constructivists were also exploring this in a way... its quite different in certain key ways, but there is an element of this taking it apart to see how it works in relation to parts (its not quite deconstruction per se) aspect..

Currently, to me, this relates very closely to Actor Network theory developments and Object Oriented Ontology (or Speculative Realism) new turns in philosophy. which i am very much intrigued with, inspired by and have been following in their development for some time now...

Anyhow... nuff said for now!..

The Anchor and the Madness

I am re-reading our posts on the blog and thinking about what we have explored and touched on....

one of the things that comes to me in this is a kind of two poled structure... (but i don't want to make that heavy... its not a key to it all, but rather just something I am noticing that has evolved in how we are searching into this)....

i will call it the Anchor and the Madness

the Anchor is the location/presence/activity/'reason' of Being Rational, of Being Sane, of Being "Normal", etc.

and the Madness is the location of all That-Cannot-Be-Expressed-In-The-State, all that is Weird, all that is Not-Normal, all that is Angry, "Aggressive", etc.


The Anchor provides distance, safety, common-sense, perhaps even the fold and inter-personal dynamics of an imagined community, it provides a good virtuality, a space where we can all 'come-together' and feel ok (not nervous, not too overwhelmed), etc.

The Madness is a space 'outside' this field that the Anchor argues is always-there. The Madness defies the Anchor.

The Anchor must struggle with the Madness...to find good reason, to re-assure, to be here/now in Good Sense...

and at moments these cross into strange new re-surfaces.... where both share the stage... in the spectacle...

and at times, now, these are given expression in simple pulp fiction "good vs. evil" manifestations

and this western tendency to split the difference, to create absolute poles.... is not always in the world the 'norm'.... often, in places like africa, the good vs. evil expression (in the realm of fiction, play, etc.) is not so strictly bound, but rather a different horizon of possibilities and relations, in a certain way... the role of shaman, of festivals, of durative fictional plays is quite different...