99 Lifelike Animals Installation

Inspiré par un voyage qu’il a effectué en Australie, l’artiste Cai Guo-Qiang a imaginé une installation appelée Heritage, permettant de réunir autour d’une piscine maquillée en étang 99 répliques d’animaux venant des 4 coins du monde. Une œuvre magnifique, présentée à la Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art à Brisbane.

99 Lifelike Animals4
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El cuento de hadas

Más posibilidades de las que puedas imaginar.

by
Darren Fleet

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Beth Yarnelle Edward

Tu madre te cuenta una historia antes de que te acuestes y te la crees. Te dice que puedes ser lo que quieras cuando seas mayor. Te dice que eres una persona única y valiosa y que no debes olvidarlo nunca. Te dice que tienes mucha suerte y que el mundo es tuyo. Y tiene razón. Vives en una época excepcional. Viajarás distancias mayores en un solo día de las que la mayoría hace sólo un siglo viajaba en toda su vida. Podrás elegir entre una variedad de alimentos que los reyes ingleses o los príncipes otomanos no habrían podido imaginar. Te inundarás el organismo hasta el punto de enfermar con azúcar, la que una vez fue moneda de cambio del mundo y lo más preciado por los imperios. Vivirás más que ninguna generación precedente. Tendrás en el armario telas que en otro tiempo estaban fuera del alcance de las más grandes civilizaciones. Los huesos rotos no te convertirán en un lisiado. Si naciste chica, puedes volverte chico. Si naciste chico, puedes volverte chica. Puedes romper con la tradición sin pagarlo con la muerte. Puedes mejorarte biológicamente y cambiar de órganos. Puedes adoptar la identidad que quieras. Sus palabras reconfortantes te llevan a un sueño estupendo. Se cuida de explicar que este mundo sin límites no es para todos los niños del mundo o que semejante buena suerte hace que la Tierra enferme. Estropearía la historia.

—Darren Fleet

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El final del Modelo Consumista

Un imperativo político y económico.

by
Bernard Stiegler

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Nick Whalen

Escribo estas reflexiones en medio de los debates políticos y económicos que están teniendo lugar en todo el mundo sobre la necesidad de poner en práctica planes de estímulo que permitan limitar los efectos destructivos de la Primera crisis económica planetaria del mundo capitalista.

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En estos debates, se habla de “estímulos a la inversión” y “estímulos al consumo” en términos opuestos, confundiéndose dos cuestiones diferentes, cuestiones que requieren de un tratamiento simultáneo, pero en función de escalas temporales distintas. Esto implica una gran dificultad, que se hace mayor al considerar el hecho de que la actual crisis está anunciando el fin del modelo consumista.

Aquellos que defienden la estimulación del consumo como el camino para la recuperación económica no quieren ni oír hablar del fin de la era consumista. Por otro lado, los defensores del estímulo de la inversión tampoco están más dispuestos a cuestionar el modelo industrial basado en el consumo. La versión francesa del “estimulo a la inversión” (que se hace más sutil cuando viene de boca de Barack Obama) argumenta que la mejor manera de salvar el consumo es a través de la inversión. Es decir, mediante la restauración de la “rentabilidad”, que generará a su vez la restauración del propio dinamismo empresarial fundado sobre el consumismo, así como sobre su equivalente, el productivismo impulsado por el mercado.

En otras palabras, esta “inversión” no es capaz de generar una visión a largo plazo que permita extraer alguna lección de la caída de un modelo industrial basado en aspectos como: la automoción, el petróleo y en la construcción de redes de carreteras, así como en las redes herzianas de las industrias culturales. Este conjunto ha formado, hasta fechas recientes, la base del consumismo, sin embargo es un conjunto que hoy ya está obsoleto, hecho que quedó patente durante el otoño de 2008. Hablando con franqueza, esta “inversión” no se puede considerar como tal; es, por el contrario, una falta de inversión, una abdicación que consiste en no hacer nada más que esconder la cabeza como el avestruz.

Esta “política de inversión”, que no tiene más objetivo que la reconstitución del modelo consumista, es la traducción de una ideología moribunda. Es un intento desesperado de prolongar lo máximo posible la vida de un modelo que se ha convertido en autodestructivo, negando y ocultando, al máximo, el hecho de que el modelo consumista es, actualmente, enormemente tóxico (una toxicidad extendida mucho más allá de la cuestión de los “activos tóxicos”) porque ha alcanzado sus límites. Esta negativa a aceptar la toxicidad del modelo consumista se explica por el intento de mantener, durante el mayor tiempo posible, los beneficios colosales que pueden ser acumulados por aquellos que son capaces de explotar la toxicidad del consumismo.

El modelo consumista ha alcanzado sus límites porque se ha vuelto cortoplacista por naturaleza, ha dado lugar a una estupidez sistémica que impide la reconstrucción del horizonte del largo plazo. La manera de llevar a cabo la “inversión” no se ha basado en otros criterios más que la mera contabilidad: esta inversión se ha convertido en un puro y simple restablecimiento del estado anterior de las cosas, intentando reconstruir el tejido industrial sin modificar un ápice su estructura, y sin siquiera poner en cuestión sus axiomas, todo ello con la esperanza de mantener los niveles de ingresos que han podido ser alcanzados hasta la fecha.

Esa será la esperanza, el anhelo, pero lo que se plantea son los falsos anhelos de las avestruces. El verdadero objeto de debate a plantear a raíz de la crisis debería ser cómo superar el corto plazo al que nos ha conducido un consumismo intrínsecamente destructivo de toda verdadera inversión, un corto plazo que se ha convertido, por la propia aplicación rigurosa del mismo, y no de manera accidental, en la descomposición de la inversión en especulación. El anhelo debería ser la inversión en el futuro, ése debería ser el anhelo.

Es tan urgente como legítimo considerar si es oportuno que estimulemos el consumo y la maquinaria económica, con el doble objetivo de evitar una catástrofe económica de grandes proporciones, y de atenuar la injusticia social generada por la crisis. La razón es que esta política de fomento del consumo no sólo está agravando la situación en millones o miles de millones de euros y de dólares, sino que también está enmascarando el verdadero problema, que es generar una visión y voluntad política que permita transitar del modelo económico político del consumo, hacia un modelo basado en una inversión diferente. Este nuevo modelo de inversión debe ser una inversión social y política o, en otras palabras, una inversión basada en el deseo común, lo que Aristóteles llamaba philia, y que formaría la base de un nuevo tipo de inversión económica.

Existe una clara contradicción entre dos posturas:

  • la absoluta urgencia que obviamente viene fijada por el imperativo de salvar la situación actual, evitando cambiar la crisis económica por otra crisis política que pueda desatar conflictos militares de dimensiones globales.
  • y la absoluta necesidad de generar un futuro potencial, en términos políticos y sociales, que sea capaz de romper con la situación actual. Esta contradicción es característica de los sistemas dinámicos (en este caso, el sistema industrial y el sistema capitalista global), una vez que el sistema dinámico ha comenzado a mutar.

El problema de identificar en qué consiste precisamente esta mutación se trata de una cuestión tanto política como económica, una cuestión de política económica; y, por tanto, de saber a qué opciones políticas, pero también industriales, nos conduce. La cuestión está en identificar cuáles son las nuevas políticas industriales que esta nueva situación requiere.

Sólo esa respuesta será capaz de tratar de manera simultánea estas dos cuestiones: la cuestión sobre qué pasos inmediatos y urgentes son necesarios para salvar el sistema industrial, y cómo esos pasos deben ser dados dentro de un cambio económico y político que nos lleva a una revolución. Ya que cuando un modelo se agota, en su devenir se transforma, y si sólo en esa transformación puede evitar la destrucción total, esa transformación implica una revolución.

Bernard Stiegler aprendió filosofía de manera autodidacta durante su estancia en prisión por robo a mano armada, entre 1978 y 1983. Desde entonces se ha convertido en uno de los principales filósofos tecnológicos franceses. Este artículo ha sido adaptado de su reciente libro (traducción directa del título en inglés): “Por una Nueva Crítica de la Economía Política” (For a New Critique of Political Economy).

Translated by the Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

El sueño americano

No tengo deseos fuera de lo normal…

by
Sherwood Hinze

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Brent Humphreys

Estoy casado y vivo en las afueras.

Mi calle se parece a cualquier otra calle de las que has visto en cualquier anuncio emitido a partir de 1957. Desde que llegué, no me planteo vivir en ningún otro sitio.

Tengo dos niños (los dos inteligentes), una niña y un niño. Estoy deseando verlos crecer.

Me encanta mi coche. Mi casa impecable. Me encanta estar en forma y me encanta tener un buen día de trabajo. Me encanta ser hetero y no tener dudas acerca de mi identidad sexual. Me encanta mi mujer. Me encanta ser monógamo.

Me encantan mis vecinos, que salen los sábados por la mañana y cortan el césped, y charlan conmigo mientras lavamos el coche y el camino de la entrada.

Cada dos sábados, una vez que los niños están a buen resguardo en cama, me tomo una viagra. Mi mujer y yo acabaremos entonces de ver el programa policial nocturno, y durante los siguientes veinte minutos, más o menos, le recuerdo a mi mujer la verdadera razón por la que decidió casarse conmigo. Al acabar suele tomarse algún somnífero, dice que le gusta dormir bien los sábados por la noche.

Los niños siempre están levantados los domingos por la mañana, haciendo los deberes con diligencia en la mesa de la cocina, mientras mamá hornea galletas y hace pan en su panificadora nueva. Ese es el momento en el que la cocina cobra vida. No vamos a la iglesia, excepto los festivos religiosos, pero aun así sabemos que hemos sido bendecidos.

Mi mujer nos reservó un viaje al Caribe. Dijo que conseguiríamos el doble de puntos de vuelo si cargábamos todo el viaje en la VISA.

Cuando los vecinos nos preguntan qué tal fue el viaje, les digo que fabuloso, igual que lo fue el suyo. No es mentira.

Sí, es verdad, todos nos peinamos de la misma manera y estamos algo obsesionados con los dientes de león y con pasarnos el hilo dental. Y qué si a todos nos gusta ir a ver lo mismo al cine, ver lo mismo en la tele y comer las mismas palomitas. Aquí se vive bien.

Sin complicaciones.

No soy un hombre complicado.

No tengo deseos fuera de lo normal.

—Sherwood Hinze

Translated by the Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

This article is available in: English, Turkish, French & Spanish

Rural> Ciudad> Ciberespacio

Spanish translation of an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows.

by
Nicholas Carr

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Lao P. Xia Xiaowan

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A lo largo de los últimos 20 años, una serie de estudios psicológicos han revelado que después de pasar un periodo de tiempo en un entorno rural tranquilo, cercano a la naturaleza, las personas presentan una mayor atención, mejor memoria y generalmente una mejor cognición. Sus cerebros devienen más calmados y más agudos. La razón, según la teoría de la restauración de la atención o ART, es que cuando las personas no están siendo bombardeadas con estímulos externos, sus cerebros pueden, efectivamente relajarse. Ya no tienen que poner a prueba la operatividad de su memoria procesando un flujo constante de distracciones. El estado contemplativo resultante refuerza su habilidad para controlar sus mentes.

Los resultados más recientes de dicho estudio fueron publicados en Psychological Science a finales de 2008. Un equipo de investigadores de Michigan liderados por el psicólogo Marc Berman, reclutaron a unas tres docenas de personas y las sometieron a una serie de exámenes rigurosos que además provocan cansancio mental, diseñados para medir la capacidad de su memoria activa y sus habilidades para ejercer un control organizado sobre su atención. Los sujetos fueron divididos en dos grupos. La mitad de ellos pasaron alrededor de una hora paseando en un parque con árboles y la otra mitad pasó un tiempo equivalente paseando en las calles del centro de una ciudad. Los dos grupos fueron examinados una segunda vez. Los investigadores encontraron que los resultados de las personas que habían pasado tiempo en el parque habían mejorado de forma significativa en los tests cognitivos, indicando un incremento substancial de la atención. En contraste, caminar por la ciudad no derivó en ninguna mejora en los resultados de los tests.

Los investigadores realizaron otro experimento similar con otro conjunto de personas. En vez de pasear entre las distintas rondas de pruebas, los sujetos simplemente miraban fotografías de escenas rurales tranquilas o escenas del ajetreo urbano. Los resultados fueron los mismos. Las personas que miraron fotografías de la naturaleza fueron capaces de controlar mejor su atención, mientras que los que miraron escenas de la ciudad no mostraron ninguna mejora en su capacidad de atención. Los investigadores concluyeron que “en suma, interacciones simples y breves con la naturaleza pueden provocar un notable incremento del control cognitivo.” Pasar tiempo en el mundo natural parece ser de “vital importancia” para un “funcionamiento cognitivo efectivo.”

No hay ningún Sleepy Hollow en internet, ningún lugar pacífico en donde la contemplación pueda ejercer su magia restauradora. Sólo hay el interminable e hipnótico bullicio de la calle. Los estímulos de la red, como los de la ciudad, pueden ser vigorizantes e inspiradores. No querríamos deshacernos de ellos. Pero también nos agotan y nos distraen. Tal y como Hawthorne comprendió, pueden fácilmente abrumar los modos de pensamiento más tranquilos. Lo que alimenta la preocupación del científico Joseph Weizenbaum y del artista Richard Foreman es uno de los mayores peligros al que nos enfrentamos; al automatizar el trabajo de nuestras mentes, al ceder el control del flujo de nuestros pensamientos y memorias a un sistema electrónico poderoso, se produciría una lenta erosión de nuestra humanidad.

El pensamiento profundo no es el único que requiere tranquilidad y exige tener la mente atenta. También lo necesitan la empatía y la compasión. Los psicólogos han estudiado durante mucho tiempo cómo las personas experimentan el miedo y cómo reaccionan frente a las amenazas físicas, pero sólo han empezado a investigar recientemente los orígenes de nuestros más nobles instintos. Lo que están descubriendo, según explica Antonio Damasio, director del Instituto USC de Cerebro y Creatividad, es que las más altas emociones emergen de procesos neuronales que son “inherentemente lentos”. En un experimento reciente, Damasio y sus compañeros experimentaron con varios sujetos haciéndoles escuchar historias en las que se describían a personas que experimentaban un dolor físico o psicológico. A estos sujetos se les realizó una resonancia magnética durante la cual debían recordar las historias. El experimento reveló que mientras que el cerebro reacciona rápidamente a las demostraciones de dolor físico- cuando vemos a alguien que está herido, los centros de dolor primitivo en nuestro propio cerebro se activan casi de manera instantánea – el proceso mental más sofisticado de empatía con el sufrimiento psicológico se desarrolla con mucha más lentitud. Los investigadores descubrieron que el cerebro tarda tiempo “en trascender el involucramiento inmediato del cuerpo” y en comenzar a comprender y a sentir “las dimensiones psicológicas y morales de una situación”.

El experimento, dicen los académicos, indica que cuanto más distraídos estamos, menos capaces somos de experimentar las formas más sutiles de empatía, de compasión y otro tipo de emociones. “Para algunos tipos de pensamiento, especialmente para la toma de decisiones morales sobre las situaciones sociales y psicológicas de otras personas, necesitamos un tiempo adecuado de reflexión” advierte Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, miembro del equipo de investigación. “Si las cosas suceden de manera excesivamente rápida, quizás nunca puedas experimentar plenamente las emociones sobre los estados psicológicos de otras personas”. Sería precipitado llegar a la conclusión de que internet está socavando nuestro sentido moral. No sería precipitado sugerir que como la red desvía nuestros caminos vitales y disminuye nuestra capacidad para la contemplación, está alterando la profundidad de nuestras emociones así como nuestros pensamientos.

Hay quienes están animados por la facilidad con la que nuestras mentes se están adaptando a la ética intelectual de la red. “El progreso tecnológico es irreversible”, escribe un columnista del Wall Street Journal, “así que la tendencia hacia la multi-tarea y el consumo de muchos tipos diferentes de información sólo puede continuar como hasta ahora.” Sin embargo no debemos preocuparnos, porque nuestro “software humano” con el tiempo “alcanzará a la tecnología de las máquinas que hizo posible la abundancia de la información.” “Evolucionaremos” para convertirnos en consumidores de datos más ágiles. El escritor de una historia de portada en la revista New York dice que mientras nos acostumbramos a “la tarea del siglo 21” de “encajar” entre bits de información en línea, “el cableado del cerebro cambiará inevitablemente para manejar de forma más eficiente más información.” Quizás perdamos nuestra capacidad “para concentrarnos en una tarea compleja de principio a fin”, pero en recompensa ganaremos nuevas técnicas, como la habilidad para “mantener 34 conversaciones de manera simultánea en seis medios diferentes.” Un destacado economista escribe con entusiasmo que “la red nos permite tomar prestadas fuerzas cognitivas del autismo para ser mejores infóvoros.” Un escritor de Atlantic sugiere que nuestro “trastorno de déficit de la Atención inducido por la tecnología” quizás sea “un problema a corto plazo,” proveniente de nuestra dependencia de “costumbres cognitivas que han evolucionado y se han perfeccionado en una era de flujo informativo limitado.” Desarrollar nuevos hábitos cognitivos es el único enfoque viable para navegar en la era de la conectividad constante.”

Estos escritores están en lo correcto argumentando que estamos siendo moldeados por nuestro nuevo entorno informativo. Nuestra adaptabilidad mental, anclada en los más profundos circuitos de nuestras mentes, da comienzo a la historia intelectual. Pero si están cómodos en sus consuelos, éstos son fríos. La adaptación nos ayuda a ajustarnos mejor a las circunstancias, pero cualitativamente es un proceso neutro. Lo que importa al final no es que seamos apropiados, sino en lo que nos convertimos. En la década de 1950, Martin Heidegger observó que la creciente “marea de revolución tecnológica” podía “cautivar, hechizar, deslumbrar y seducir tanto al hombre que el pensamiento calculatorio podría algún día ser aceptado y practicado como la única manera de pensar.” Nuestra habilidad para involucrarnos en un “pensamiento meditativo”, que él veía como la mismísima esencia de nuestra humanidad, podría ser víctima de un proceso precipitado. El avance tumultuoso de la tecnología, como la llegada de la locomotora a la estación de Concord, podría ahogar las percepciones, pensamientos y emociones refinadas que surgen solamente a través de la contemplación y de la reflexión. El “desenfreno de la tecnología”, escribió Heidegger, amenaza con “atrincherarse en todas partes”

Quizás estemos entrando en la fase final de ese atrincheramiento. Estamos dando la bienvenida al desenfreno en nuestras almas.

Nicholas Carr es el ex editor ejecutivo de Harvard Business Review. Es conocido por su árticulo de portada en The Atlantic en que se preguntaba, “¿Nos está volviendo tontos Google?” Ha explorado esta cuestión en mayor profundidad en su libro más reciente The Shallows: Lo Que Internet Está Haciendo Con Nuestros Cerebros. Carr vive en Colorado y bloguea en roughtype.com

Excerpted from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (c) 2010 by Nicholas Carr. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Translated by the Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

O conto de fadas

Mais escolhas do que você pode sonhar.

by
Darren Fleet

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Beth Yarnelle Edward

Sua mãe te conta uma história antes de você se deitar e você acredita. Ela conta que você pode ser o que quiser quando crescer. Ela diz que você é uma pessoa única e valiosa e que você nunca deve se esquecer disso. Ela diz que que você tem muita sorte e que o mundo é a sua ostra. E ela está certa. Você vive num época excepcional. Você viajará distâncias mais longas em um único dia do que muita gente viajou durante toda sua vida apenas um século atrás. Você terá opções de comida que reis ingleses e príncipes otomanos sequer poderiam imaginar. Você eventualmente passará mal de tanto se encher de açúcar, a moeda do mundo e o prêmio dos impérios. Você viverá mais do que qualquer geração antes da sua. Seu guarda-roupas terá tecidos que uma vez estiveram além do alcance das grandes civilizações. Ossos quebrados não mais te impedirão de se movimentar. Se você nasceu menina, poderá se transformar num menino. Se você nasceu menino, poderá se transformar numa menina. Você pode quebrar tradições sem provocar mortes. Você pode melhorar sua fisiologia e trocar seus órgãos. Você pode assumir a identidade que desejar. As palavras dela te ajudam a mergulhar num sono maravilhoso. Ela é cuidadosa ao não explicar que essa ostra não é para todas as crianças do mundo e nem que tanta sorte assim está fazendo a Terra doente.

Isso arruinaria a história.

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—Darren Fleet

Traduzido por Carlos Alberto Jr.

The Age of Consequences

Gaia in turmoil.

by
David Abram

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

The Age of Consequences

Kenneth Bok

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Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

Today, as Earth shivers into a fever – the planetary climate rapidly warming as oil-drunk civilization burns up millions of years of stored sunlight in the course of a few decades – clearly the felt temper of the atmosphere is shifting, becoming more extreme. As local weather patterns fluctuate and transform in every part of the globe, the excessive moodiness of the medium affects the mental climate in which creatures confront one another, lending its instability to human affairs as well. Our human exchanges – whether between persons or between nations – easily become more agitated and turbulent, apt to flare into storms of blame, anger and war as the disquietude in the land translates into a generalized fearfulness among the population, a trepidation, readiness to take offence or to lash out without clear cause.

Indeed the propensity for random violence becomes more pronounced whenever the sources of stress are unrecognized, whenever a tension is felt whose locus or source remains hidden. And as long as we deny the animate life of the Earth itself – as long as we arrogate all subjectivity to ourselves, forgetting the sentience in the air, and the manifold intelligence in the land – then we’ll remain oblivious to what’s really unfolding, unable to quell the agitation in ourselves because we’re blind to the deeper distress.

For the possibility of a human future, and for our own basic sanity, we need to acknowledge that we’re not the sole bearers of meaning in this world, that our species is not the only locus of feeling afoot in the real. To weather the changes now upon us, we must become ever more attentive to the more-than-human field of experience, consulting the creatures and the old local farmers, comparing notes with neighbors, learning the seasonal cycles of our terrain even as we notice new alterations in those cycles. Listening at once outward and inward, observing the shifts in the animate landscape while tracking the transformations unfolding within us – in this way we weave ourselves back into the fabric of our world.

The violence and disarray of the coming era, its social injustices and its wars will have their deepest source in systemic stresses already intensifying within the broader body of the biosphere. Yet such system-wide strains cannot be alleviated by scapegoating other persons, or by inflicting violence on other peoples. They can be eased only by strengthening the wild resilience of the Earth, preserving and replenishing whatever we can of the planet’s once-exuberant biotic diversity while bringing ourselves (and our communities) into greater alignment with the particular ecologies that we inhabit. Acknowledging that human awareness is sustained by the broader sentience of the Earth; noticing that each bioregion has its own style of sentience; observing the manner in which the collective mood of a terrain alters with every change in weather: such are a few of the ways whereby we can nudge ourselves toward such an alignment.

The era of human arrogance is at an end; the age of consequences is upon us. The presumption that mind was exclusively a human property exemplified the very arrogance that has now brought the current biosphere to the very brink of the abyss. It led us to take the atmosphere entirely for granted, treating what was once known as the most mysterious and sacred dimension of life (called Sila, the wind-mind of the world, by the Inuit; Nilch’i, or Holy Wind, by the Navajo; Ruach, or rushing-spirit, by the ancient Hebrews) as a conveniently invisible dumpsite for the toxic by-products of industrial civilization.

The resulting torsions within the planetary climate are at last forcing humankind out of its self-enclosed oblivion – a dynamic spoken of, in psychoanalysis, as “the return of the repressed.” Only through the extremity of the weather are we brought to notice the uncanny power and presence of the unseen medium, and so compelled to remember our thorough immersion within the life of this breathing planet. Only thus are we brought to realize that our vaunted human intelligence is as nothing unless it’s allied with the round intelligence of the animate Earth.

David Abram is a cultural ecologist and the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Pantheon Books, 2010). He lives in the foothills of the southern Rockies. This piece is excerpted from an essay that originally appeared in Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis.

A Message Entangled With Its Form

The deeper tones of Occupy.

by
Nicole Demby

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

A Message Entangled with its Form
Senén Llanos

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Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

As I walk through lush Brownstone Brooklyn at night, I try to reconcile the stillness that pervades these streets with the urgency of Liberty Plaza. I wonder, did I lose touch with the beauty of the wet bluestone and wrought iron gates somewhere along the course of one of my many feverish runs to the 4/5 station to get to Wall Street?

I know that I’m young, and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the quaking I feel is the strength of my own heartbeat or the earth moving under my feet. I wonder if it’s impossible at any age to have perspective from the midst of something that resembles a movement; I imagine the view from the middle of the General Assembly looks dramatically different than the one from a calmer, more static place.

Yet the quaking earth hypothesis is supported by the fact that perhaps the sight from Liberty Plaza is similar to the one a person might have glimpsed from Tahrir Square, from Madison’s Capitol Square, from Ben-Gurion Boulevard, from among the indignados in Madrid and the protests in Greece. In Liberty Plaza, occupiers’ disaffection is part of a powerful surge of global discontent, a surge that is manifesting itself in the collective realization of bodies and voices as strategic tools for communication and collective action.

Many feel an immediacy springing from a loss of stability, an affordable education, a job, a home, a pension, health insurance, that we had taken for granted. Even those who don’t face immediately precarious situations are admitting to themselves that something has been terribly wrong for some time. We watched as our government deregulated the market and then bailed out the banks whose criminal activities led to the financial implosion; as they cut the taxes of the rich while 15% of American families fell below the poverty line; as they spent billions of dollars on imperial wars that divert money away from education and infrastructure and from any real solution to avert environmental degradation. If we’ve been apathetic, its because we’ve failed to see how to act. We have learned to be wary of “Change.” We lack faith in our politicians, entrenched as they are in the impotent theatrics of the two-party system.

Yet in Liberty Plaza people find themselves confronted with a radically inclusive new platform. In the horizontality of this platform, many who are disaffected now see a means of engagement that is immediate and real. If Occupy Wall Street has failed to use this platform to limit itself to a discrete set of demands, it is because it refuses to undermine the depth and breadth of what’s wrong. OWS’s message is entangled with its form, its self-sustaining structure in which the group provides for its own physical, social and intellectual needs. Given the group’s collective intelligence, it is becoming evident that its members can teach each other as much as, if not more than any, institution can.

Much has been made of the people’s microphone. When it works, its power is immense. People within hearing range chant each other’s words to convey them to those standing on the periphery of the larger group. Each person pits herself between the mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener in a manner that is both self-affirming and egoless. Loudly echoing the voice of another feels a bit like cursing, a vigorous and strangely gratifying speech act.

Occupiers are learning to use their bodies in ways that break with the modes of moving circumscribed by our culture of efficiency and the near-total encroachment of privatized space. Its members are learning how to stay in one place, how to civilly disobey, how to dumpster dive, how to interrupt auction proceedings. They are also confronting their bodies and the bodies of others, the cold, the rain, the smells and needs that bodies have that we can deal with so quickly in the comfort of the office and the home.

Occupy Wall Street is streamed, tweeted, posted and reposted. It is a curiosity, a screen for projection, a spectator sport, everyone’s favorite and most hated child. Yet people continue to come daily who earnestly want to join or to aid the effort. OWS has become a receptacle for the lost progressive hopes of a previous generation. Despite the attempts of some media sources to caricature the occupiers, they constitute a diverse group that is attracting even more diversity. OWS has gained the support of many labor unions and community groups. Most importantly, its existence is enabling a necessary discourse to enter the mainstream.

Liberty Plaza can also be an immensely frustrating, anxiety-provoking and chaotic space. Sometimes the chaos threatens to prevail and dissolve the whole. This is a particular risk now: as its numbers grow, OWS must become capable of incorporating interested parties in meaningful ways and must begin a real conversation about its own future. Yet in this heightened unknown many sense something uncanny, something real that feels unreal because it has been suppressed by layers and layers of banal culture, farcical politics and corporate sterility. They see a spark of true, systemic indeterminacy, in contrast to the systems entrenched by the collusion of money and power.

Occupy Wall Street is still a writhing, inchoate entity, yet it has a structure that can and must beget more structure. Its future is totally unknown, but the commitment among OWS’s ranks, the resonance of its message, and the appreciation so many feel for the rupture it presents from the status quo, assures me that this occupation will persist, whatever this persistence looks like. Perhaps the group will recognize the naivety of the dreams of its most utopian members, and compromise soon to settle on a list of specific economic demands. Occupiers are smart and knowledgeable, and have big, open ears to those even more so. More probably the occupation will continue to grow, to spread to other cities, to protest, and to self-determine, choosing to partake in a society whose structure its members believe in, rather than one corrupted to the point of disrepair.

In my more lucid moments, I know that Occupy Wall Street is a lichen that is preparing the intractable political ground for more substantive plant growth. In my dreams, however, Occupy Wall Street will evince its true self not when the media and well-meaning liberals tell it to produce a message, nor when it hands over its momentum to sympathetic, institutionalized political groups, but when the egalitarian entity it has created itself yields some kind of answer.

Nicole Demby is a writer and critic living in Brooklyn.

Jonathan Cook: Next Year in Jerusalem

Ongoing tremors of the Arab awakening.

by
Jonathan Cook

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Jonathan Cook: Next Year in Jerusalem

Newscom / Marc Longari

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If there was a moment defining the shift in Israel’s strategic position over the past year, it occurred in September when the Israeli embassy in Cairo was overrun by hundreds of Egyptian protesters, some armed with sledgehammers. A military plane, waiting across town, smuggled the ambassador and his family back to Israel.

It was not quite the fall of Saigon. But it indicated how in a few months Israel had gone from a state adept at shaping its regional environment to one increasingly buffeted by forces beyond its control. After decades of dictating to its Arab neighbors, Israel looked for the first time confused and vulnerable.

The primary cause of Israel’s discomfort is the Arab Spring, the tentative awakening of democratic forces in the Middle East. After the fall of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, the region’s autocrats have been forced for the first time to weigh the mood of their own peoples against the threats emanating from Israel and its superpower backer, the United States.

Nowhere is the change more obvious than in Israel’s relations with the Palestinians. The past year has seen a dramatic reconfiguration of power between three elements of the Palestinian national movement.

March saw a groundswell of popular activism in the occupied territories, especially among the youth, demanding unity from divided Palestinian leadership. The protests forced the two leading factions, Fatah and Hamas, into an uncomfortable reconciliation in early May. The incident indicated how quickly, in different circumstances, the gains from Israel’s long-standing divide-and-rule policy might unravel.

The point was reinforced by a brief revolt by Palestinian refugees in May, on the anniversary of the Nakba, or the catastrophe of 1948 that came with the establishment of Israel on the Palestinian homeland. Hundreds of refugees stormed the border fences in Lebanon and Syria that for six decades served to bar them from reclaiming their family lands and homes. Israeli soldiers fired on the crowds, killing more than a dozen on that occasion, and at least another 20 in a repeat clash in the Golan Heights a few weeks later.

The millions of refugees – the largest and potentially most significant constituency in the Palestinian national movement – have been effectively shut out of peace efforts for two decades. One of Israel’s major aims in advancing the Oslo peace process was to sideline the refugees through the neutering of the PLO, which represents all Palestinians, and the promotion instead of the Palestinian Authority (PA), a weak government-in-waiting in the occupied territories that represents a minority of Palestinians.

With the usual constraints imposed by their Arab regime hosts loosened by the Arab Spring, the refugees reminded Israel and the world that their silence could not be taken for granted.

And then in late September, in a rare act of defiance against Israel and the US, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA, broke free of the confines of endless peace negotiations and applied for statehood at the United Nations. Promises by the US to block the application in the Security Council served only to underline Washington’s duplicitous role as “honest broker.”

One should not be too wide-eyed about Abbas’s role. He appeared to approach this new high-risk strategy with a heavy heart, aware that the PA’s survival depends on US and Israeli support. But with an electoral mandate well past its sell-by date and nothing to show for years of servile diplomacy, Abbas desperately needed to bolster his public standing.

Whatever Abbas’s motives, the move to the UN radically alters the parameters of the conflict for both the Palestinians and Israelis.

Israel has been only too happy to perform a pointless tango with the Palestinians on the diplomatic front while it encouraged its settlers to entrench their hold on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, gutting any chance of the Palestinian state that was ostensibly being negotiated.

Now Abbas has called Israel’s bluff, revealing Oslo to be nothing more than a stalling tactic. Israel and the US must quickly reinvent the peace process – or be exposed as charlatans. That will be no simple task.

The Palestinian leadership meanwhile has set for itself a goal that it appears to have no power to realize. Achievements toward statehood will remain stuck at the symbolic level, with the infrastructure of occupation still in place. The PA, already deeply compromised, has every incentive to conspire in the new charade being concocted by the Palestinians’ oppressors.

Where Israel and the Palestinians head next will be determined equally by developments inside the Palestinian national movement and by the interests of the region’s main players.

Soon to be shorn of the distracting illusion of statehood, the frustrated populations of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the refugees outside the territories, may be expected to take firmer control of the liberation struggle. Israel is already braced for mass nonviolent demonstrations its security forces – armed for warfare – have no reasonable means to confront. The protests could rapidly escalate into an antiapartheid movement, one whose message is directed at an international community exasperated with Israel.

Similarly worrying for Israel is the threat that the Palestinian leadership, its legitimacy waning, might unsheathe its ultimate weapon – what Israelis term “lawfare,” or actively pursuing Israel for war crimes though global bodies such as the International Criminal Court.

Palestinian campaigns for legal redress and popular demonstrations of nonviolent resistance, as well as Israel’s expected repressive responses, will occur in a region more actively supportive of the Palestinian cause than ever.

The refusal by Israel and the US to concede a Palestinian state is infuriating the most powerful states in the Middle East, worried that the festering Palestinian sore will only further inflame a region still reeling from the tremors of the Arab awakening.

Saudi Arabia, the oil kingdom whose fabulous wealth has bought it significant sway with Washington, threw down the gauntlet in September. Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of the Saudi intelligence services, wrote a scathing op-ed in the New York Times warning that a US veto on Palestinian statehood would end the “special relationship” and make the US “toxic” in the Arab world.

Egypt, the mightiest Arab state, has started to undermine Israel’s blockade of Gaza and is threatening to renegotiate the two countries’ 1979 peace agreement. In October, in a sign of a new independence to its foreign policy, Cairo began air patrols over the Sinai without Israel’s consent.

Likewise Turkey, traditionally a key military ally in the Middle East, has very publicly fallen out with Israel over its killing of nine Turkish civilians aboard an aid flotilla to Gaza in May 2010. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Erdogan, traveled to Egypt in September to underscore the interests shared by the two countries in isolating Israel.

By making common cause against Israel along with Israel’s main regional foe, Iran, Cairo and Ankara hope to push Israel into making major concessions toward the Palestinians.

Israel, addicted to its own inflexibility, needs a way out of its box. In recent months a batch of outgoing security chiefs, led by the Mossad’s Meir Dagan, have publicly warned that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, are bent on attacking Iran. The strategic cul-de-sac Israel now finds itself in may add significant impetus toward such a catastrophic move.

Jonathan Cook is a British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. Widely considered “one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East,” he won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism in 2011.

Post Cool

Carving up the new frontier of style.

by
Ted Gioia

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Post Cool

Cool’s original power had derived from its formative role in forging a modern personality type, a style of engagement – indirect, ironic, flexible, infused with humor, sometimes flippant – that was adopted with success by a growing percentage of the population.

But the relentless mass marketing of cool has tainted this style of behavior and made it seem inauthentic or contrived to a growing number of individuals. It is almost inconceivable that anything could happen, at this late stage, that would restore to cool the freshness and vitality it possessed in the fifties and sixties.

Of course, the old-school cool ethos will not disappear completely. Even when some color or fabric is passé, it still finds its way into our wardrobe. But cool now lacks conviction and energy. Above all, its economic force is diminishing. And this, more than anything, will accelerate its decline. One busy cash register is worth more than a thousand pundits. The arbiters of taste – at record labels, in films and TV, in consumer marketing, in media – will respond to these economic shifts rather than lead them. But follow they must, or disappear from the scene. Their successors will not make the same mistakes. Over time, this will transform even the last institutional bastions of cool into promoters of the postcool worldview.

One of the most interesting spectacles of postcool society will involve the dominant forces of the old paradigm scrambling to co-opt the new one. Packaged and slick and phony will attempt to become down-home and natural and authentic. We can see this playing out in many arenas – from music to clothing, politics to daily news. But let us take one sector of our economy and show how this works.

In consumer food products the postcool celebration of the natural and authentic is spelled out in the recent dramatic growth in the sale of organic fruits and vegetables, vitamin supplements, antibiotic-and-hormone-free beef, and other products that previously existed only on the fringes of the food industry. Of course this trend spells trouble for packaged-food multinationals, who are the real losers here. How do they respond? In the postcool society, representatives of the old paradigm imitate the new one. So we have the Naked Juice company, with its line of 100 percent natural, unsweetened beverages … but it’s owned by Pepsi.

The registered slogan of this company is “Nothing to Hide” – but one thing is clearly hidden in its marketing campaigns: its connection with PepsiCo Inc. Visit the Naked Juice website, and see if you can find the name of the parent company anywhere. Goodluck! Then again, Naked Juice needs to deal with its competitor Odwalla, a leader in all-natural juices … owned by Coca-Cola.

Next stop on your itinerary, please visit the website for Dagoba, a company committed to the highest quality organic chocolate, and see if you can find any mention of parent company Hershey. But Mars Inc., maker of M&M’s and Snickers, has gone even further, acquiring Seeds of Change, which sells more than six hundred types of 100 percent organically grown seeds. And we have the Back to Nature brand of cereal and granola … but it is now owned by Kraft foods, makers of Cheez Whiz and Velveeta. Heinz, through its minority position in Hain Celestial, has an equity share in dozens of natural brands. I could cite countless other examples. In fact, almost every major purveyor of packaged, processed food loaded with preservatives and various chemicals is trying to position itself as a champion of healthy, natural eating.

But the fascinating angle here is how well hidden these relationships are. In the old days, Hershey would make sure everyone knew they were involved when they sold chocolate. After all, what could be a better endorsement for confections than the Hershey brand name? Or Coca-Cola’s for beverages? Or Pepsi’s? These companies have invested billions of dollars in building and enhancing the value of their brand names. Pepsi alone has purchased celebrity endorsements at untold cost from Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, P!nk, Christina Aguilera, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, David Beckham, David Bowie, Shakira, Jackie Chan, Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, Tina Turner, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce Knowles, Mary J. Blige, the Spice Girls, Ray Charles, and many, many others. Yet now this company needs to conceal its involvement in the fastest-growing segments of the beverage market? What gives? We see the same old shift in field after field – music, media, consumer products, retailing, politics, fashion, academia, the internet, almost everywhere you look. Organizations that have spent decades investing in their image, their brand, their logo, now admit that it’s best to junk all that and start with a clean sheet of paper.

This paradox will become part of the day-to-day life in postcool society. Even if postcool celebrates the real and authentic, the simple and down to earth, it doesn’t mean that these attributes will actually dominate public life. Instead we will find a grand charade of phony pretending to be authentic, of contrived acting as though it is real, the intricately planned putting on the mask of the simple and unaffected. In many instances, postcool will just be the same folks who brought you cool, hiding behind a mask.

But this faux postcool will increasingly be forced to compete with the real thing. Grassroots movements will be built around the core postcool values of simplicity, authenticity, naturalness and earnestness. These will flourish outside the market place, in public and private discourse, shaping attitudes and interpersonal relations. True, they will have an economic impact, but their significance will not be reducible to dollars and cents. Postcool will inhabit people’s psyches long before it takes control of their wallets.

This core distinction will be our chief guide in distinguishing the phony corporate maneuverings from the real grassroots changes that will drive postcool society. The former will always inhabit a product or service. And if the cool was a friend to business, seeing its own destiny in accessories and gadgets, the postcool will have a more ambivalent relationship with the prevailing economic interests. The new ethos does not require expensive new accessories and often will take positive delight in downscaling lifestyles and paring back on unneeded extras.

Simplicity, authenticity, naturalness and earnestness … I mentioned these as though they were parts of a product positioning exercise. But in fact they will be in the foundations of the postcool personality type. Just as the cool was at its best when internalized as a way people acted and not just trumpeted as a marketing message, so will postcool have its greatest impact as a way people instinctively deal with situations and circumstances. In a book such as this, the examples gathered inevitably come from things that can be seen, heard, touched, measured – in short, what we call empirical evidence. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that these are the primary signs of the new postcool era. Many of the most salient changes will be those that we can grasp only indirectly and will not be measurable with any exactitude by statisticians and pollsters.

For the same reason, postcool will be less fickle and changeable than cool. Postcool is not just another style, another trend. It is the antithesis of style, of trendiness. And because it reflects an emerging personality type and not a passing fashion, postcool will probably be around for quite a while. Many merchants of cool will be tempted to dismiss or misinterpret postcool, seeing its key elements as a new, marketable lifestyle, as just one more way of being cool. We can already see many examples of this shortsighted behavior. But ultimately the attempt to treat postcool as just another variant on cool will fail.

For 50 years, the prevailing tone has been focused outward. Cool was in the eyes of the beholder, and those who lived by its principles needed constantly to be attuned to what others were thinking and doing. As trends and fashions and languages changed, the cool cats had to changes as well … or risk being left behind. And even though good guys are expected to finish last, according to the adage, cool cats are not allowed to bring up the rear. The cool was a demanding deity, requiring its adherents to keep up with the times, to maintain a retinue of admirers. But postcool, by nature inward focused and self-directed, will not be so easily budged. From now on, the game will be played by different rules.

Postcool will be more intense than cool. Higher strung. More determined and less easily deflected and distracted. For this reason, many parties will strive to win the allegiance of this rapidly growing constituency. Political candidates will build their campaigns to appeal to the new psyche. Marketers will position products to maximize their perceived value to this demographic. Social movements and churches and media will all try to attract them. Who wouldn’t want these assertive, strong-willed folks in their camp? But the challenges involved in securing their support should not be minimized. The postcool person is not a belonger, not a follower. As Arnold Mitchell discovered when he first identified this group in the seventies – when it was just a tiny subset of the American public, maybe one or two percent by his measure – these individuals are the hardest to market to … because by their nature they are suspicious of marketing and resistant to its methods.

As a result, the postcool society will be full of surprises. The scene will be marked by unexpected grassroots activities that come to the fore despite the best-laid plans of politicians and corporate execs. Exciting? Perhaps. Dangerous and volatile? Certainly at times.

Of course, even postcool may sow the seeds of its own eventual decline. A new personality type lasts longer than a passing fashion, but even deep-seated character patterns and emotional styles can outlive their usefulness. Just as the cool personality became less effective over time, postcool could find itself replaced by some yet-to-be defined paradigm. We can already see postcool’s vulnerability in its unstable reliance on bluntness and aggression, its susceptibility to anger and confrontation. When so much irritability and adversarial posturing permeate our national and local lives, won’t this breed another reaction in time, a new cooling down of the temperature and the emergence of consensus building and a softer, gentler emotional style in public and private life?

But old-school cool will not come back. The cool is dead … at least as we knew it back in the second half of the 20th century. If aspects of it still hold center stage from time to time, they will do so because they have adapted to the new state of affairs. As with all passing movements, the age of cool will inspire nostalgia and retain a few adherents, those folks who always look back dreamily at the past, lamenting the loss of the good ol’ days. But the future belongs to a different personality type and hard-nosed assertiveness. It’s like everything Mom and Dad told you is finally coming true … only now you will be hearing it from your own children.

Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and contemporary culture. He is the author of eight books, including The History of Jazz, Delta Blues and The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

Simon Critchley: What Is Normal?

The surprising power of the political imagination.

by
Simon Critchley

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Nick Whalen

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We are living through a dramatic and ever-widening separation between normal state politics and power. Many citizens still believe that state politics has power. They believe that governments, elected through a parliamentary system, represent the interests of those who elect them and that governments have the power to create effective, progressive change. But they don’t and they can’t.

We do not live in democracies. We inhabit plutocracies: government by the rich. The corporate elites have overwhelming economic power with no political accountability. In the past decades, with the complicity and connivance of the political class, the Western world has become a kind of college of corporations linked together by money and serving only the interests of their business leaders and shareholders.

This situation has led to the disgusting and ever-growing gulf that separates the superrich from the rest of us. State politics in the West in the past four decades has become a machine for the creation of gross inequality whose patina is an ideology of ever-more vapid narcissism. As the Eurozone crisis eloquently shows, state politics in the West simply exists to serve the interests of capital in the form of international finance, which exerts a human cost that Marx could never have imagined in his wildest dreams. No matter how much people suffer and protest in the street, it is said, we must not upset the bankers. Who knows, our credit rating might drop.

It is time to take politics back from the political class through confrontation with the power of finance capital. What is so inspiring about the various social movements that we all too glibly call the Arab Spring, is their courageous determination to reclaim autonomy and political self-determination. The demands of the protesters in Tahrir Square and elsewhere are actually very classical: they refuse to live in authoritarian dictatorships propped up to serve the interests of Western capital, corporations and corrupt local elites. They want to reclaim ownership of the means of production, for example through the nationalization of major state industries.

The various movements in North Africa and the Middle East – and one is simply full of admiration for their individual and collective courage and peaceful persistence – aim at one thing: autonomy. They demand collective ownership of the places where one lives, works, thinks and plays. Let’s be clear: it is not just democracy that is being demanded all across the Arab world; it is socialism. And the tactics that have been developed to bring it about are anarchist.

There is a deeply patronizing view of these protests – common among Western politicians and their intellectual epigones – namely that they want what we have: the liberal democracy and neoliberal economics of our fine regimes. On the contrary, the movements in North Africa and the Middle East should be held up as a shining example for European and North American societies of what suddenly seems not only possible, but increasingly probable: that another way of conceiving and practicing social relations is not just possible, it is practicable.

Politicians in the West should be scared, very scared. The clock is running down. What we see emerging across our societies with increasing boldness, coherence and clarity are movements that refuse the separation of politics and power and who want to take power back through the invention of new forms of political activism.

It is in this spirit that I’d like to celebrate and congratulate the protesters in the Wall Street occupations and their followers all around the world.

We should not predict the future, but I think we are entering into a period of increasingly massive social dislocations and disorder which harbors within it countless risks, dialectical inversions, defeats, dangers, false dawns and fake defeats. But I think we are all coming to the powerful and simple realization that human beings acting peacefully together in concert can do anything – and nothing can stop them.

Something is happening. Something is shifting in the relations between politics and power. We don’t know where it will lead, but the four-decade ideological consensus that has simply allowed the creation of grotesque inequality has broken down, and anything and everything is suddenly possible. What we require now is solidarity, persistence and the endlessly surprising power of the political imagination.

Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He has authored over a dozen books including the celebrated Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance in which he argues for an ethically committed political anarchism.

O Mundo Pós-Ideias

Para onde devemos nos voltar quando as fontes de inspiração secam?

by
Kalle Lasn and Micah White

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Selingkuh Tak Sampai – 2004 – Agus Suwage

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Por milhares de anos, a civilização humana foi inundada por uma sucessão de mudanças de paradigmas, de grandes ideias. O espírito mundial hegeliano da modernidade, a morte nietzschiana de Deus e o Ser heideggeriano deram lugar, na pós-modernidade, ao dispositivo de Foucault, ao fim da história de Fukuyama, à desconstrução de Derrida e ao rizoma de Deleuze e Guattari. No entanto, enquanto todos nós presumíamos que as grandes ideias continuariam a jorrar intensamente para sempre, nos últimos anos parece que as fontes de inspiração começaram a secar. Começou-se a perceber que ideias realmente novas e criativas de repente pararam de surgir. Ninguém sabe por quê.

A seca conceitual não poderia estar ocorrendo em um momento mais inoportuno. Sete bilhões de nós estão atravessando a mais severa crise ecológica, financeira, política e espiritual de nossa história. Desta vez a catástrofe que estamos enfrentando não afeta somente uma nação ou uma região ou um continente… é ainda mais aterrorizante por ser mundial e simultânea. O mais provável é que, se não conseguirmos sair desse declínio, podemos simplesmente nos afundar em uma horripilante era das trevas… uma era chamuscada por capitalismo-autoritário, brutalidade e desordem que fará com que os genocídios e holocaustos do século passado pareçam só preliminares. Não foram só as ideias que se esgotaram; o tempo está se esgotando.

Agora, mais do que nunca, precisamos dos avanços criativos e dos brainstorms revolucionários que possam transformar o campo do pensamento, revelando saídas, abrindo possibilidades, potencialmente salvando a todos nós. Precisamos de dissidentes da mídia independente que possam matar o vírus comercial que infecta nossos fluxos de informação. Precisamos de uma brilhante nova safra de estudantes de economia que consigam peitar seus professores, derrubar o paradigma neoclássico e substituí-lo por um novo modelo, baseado em custo real. Precisamos de novas e poderosas formas de desmantelar o domínio corporativo e de matar o conceito de corporação como indivíduo. E há ainda o maior desafio de todos: como dar início a uma revolução social, uma insurreição do dia a dia que varra o planeta bem a tempo de evitar a catástrofe final?

Pode ser que o fato de termos abandonado o mundo natural, e de termos migrado em massa para o ciberespaço tenha cortado nossas raízes e embaralhado nossos neurônios de forma irreversível. Pode ser que estejamos no meio de um colapso mental sem volta da raça humana que caminha paralelamente ao colapso irreversível dos ecossistemas de nosso planeta. Essa espiral eco-psicológica pode nos esgotar. Talvez seja tarde demais?

Mas a edição #99 da Adbusters não é sobre desespero, é sobre esperança, revolução e como viver sem tempo morto… é sobre testar coisas novas e perceber se conseguimos arranjar energia psíquica para uma reviravolta radical.

Kalle Lasn e Micah White

Trad: Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

Die Welt nach den Ideen

Was tun wir, wenn die Inspirationsquellen versiegen?

by
Kalle Lasn and Micah White

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Selingkuh Tak Sampai – 2004 – Agus Suwage

This article is available in:

Über Jahrtausende hinweg wurde die menschliche Zivilisation von einer Abfolge von Paradigmenwechseln, von großen Ideen mitgerissen. Der moderne Weltgeist Hegels, Nietzsches Tod Gottes und Heideggers Begriff vom Sein wurden in der Postmoderne ersetzt durch Foucaults Dispositiv, Fukuyamas Ende der Geschichte, Derridas Dekonstruktivismus und Guattaris Rhizom. Und obwohl wir alle annahmen, dass große Ideen für immer weiter in einer schnellen Abfolge fließen würden, scheint es in den letzten Jahren so zu sein, dass die Inspirationsquellen austrocknen. Es dämmert uns, dass wirklich neuartige, kreative Ideen auf einmal nicht mehr entstehen. Niemand weiß, warum.

Diese Konzeptdürre könnte in keinem ungeeigneteren Moment passieren. Sieben Milliarden Menschen kämpfen sich gerade durch die schlimmste ökologische, finanzielle, politische und geistige Krise der Geschichte. Diesmal betrifft die bevorstehende Katastrophe nicht eine einzelne Nation, Region oder einen einzelnen Kontinent … sie ist noch viel schrecklicher, weil sie global und gleichzeitig geschieht. Wenn wir es nicht schaffen, uns selbst an den Haaren aus diesem Sumpf zu ziehen, ist es wahrscheinlich, dass wir in einem grauenvollen dunklen Jahrtausend versinken … ein Zeitalter der verbrannten Erde und des autoritären Kapitalismus, der Brutalität und des Unheils, das die Völkermorde und Massenvernichtungen des letzten Jahrhunderts wie ein Vorspiel erscheinen lassen wird. Uns gehen nicht nur die Ideen aus, sondern auch die Zeit.

Gerade jetzt brauchen wir kreative Durchbrüche und abwegige Geistesblitze mehr denn je. Sie verändern die Denklandschaft, eröffnen Auswege und Möglichkeiten und könnten uns alle retten. Wir brauchen Querdenker in den unabhängigen Medien, die den kommerziellen Virus, der unseren Informationsfluss infiziert, abtöten können. Wir brauchen eine geniale neue Art von Studenten in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften, die ihren Professoren die Stirn bieten können, das neoklassizistische Denkmuster kippen und es durch ein neues Modell der tatsächlichen Kosten ersetzen. Wir brauchen mehr Macht, um die Herrschaft der Konzerne zu brechen und den Status der Konzerne als Personen zu kippen. Und dann die größte Herausforderung: wie kann man eine soziale Revolution entfachen, einen Aufruhr im Alltag, der sich rasend schnell über die ganze Welt ausbreiten, um die endgültige Katastrophe abzuwenden?

Vielleicht hat das Aufgeben des natürlichen Umfelds und unsere kollektive Abwanderung in den virtuellen Raum unsere Wurzeln gekappt und unsere Neuronen für immer zerstört. Vielleicht befinden wir uns gerade inmitten eines irreversiblen geistigen Zusammenbruchs der Menschheit, der Hand in Hand einhergeht mit dem irreversiblen Zusammenbruch der Ökosysteme des Planeten. Diese öko-psycho Spirale kann uns ganz schön herunterziehen. Vielleicht ist es schon zu spät?

Allerdings geht es in der Ausgabe Nr. 99 von Adbusters nicht um Verzweiflung, sondern um Hoffnung, Revolution und Leben ohne tote Zeit …es geht um ein Ausloten der Gewässer, es geht darum, herauszufinden, ob wir die seelische Energie für einen mächtigen Umschwung aufbringen können.

Auf ins Unbekannte,
Kalle Lasn and Micah White

Translated by the Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

Eine Einordnung von „Occupy“

Lektionen aus der revolutionären Vergangenheit.

by
David Graeber

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Thomas Good / Next Left Notes

Der wahrscheinlich größte noch lebende Philosoph Immanuel Wallerstein behauptet, dass alle großen Revolutionen seit 1789 tatsächlich Weltrevolutionen waren.

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Die Französische Revolution hat vordergründig nur in einem Land stattgefunden, hat aber in Wirklichkeit die gesamte nordatlantische Welt so tiefgreifend verändert, dass gerade einmal 20 Jahre später Ideen, die vorher als verrückt und grenzwertig galten?–?dass sozialer Wandel gut ist, dass Regierungen den sozialen Wandel bewältigen sollen, dass Regierungen ihre Legimitation aus einer Einheit namens “Volk” beziehen – so tief im Gemeinsinn verwurzelt waren, dass selbst der schwerfälligste Konservative Lippenbekenntnisse dazu ablegen musste. 1848 brachen beinahe gleichzeitig Revolutionen in 50 verschiedenen Ländern aus, von der Walachei bis nach Brasilien. In keinem Land übernahmen die Revolutionäre die Macht, jedoch entstanden hinterher fast überall von der Französischen Revolution inspirierte Institutionen?–?z.B. allgemein zugängliche Bildungssysteme.

Dieses Muster tauchte im 20. Jahrhundert erneut auf. Die “zehn Tage, die die Welt erschütterten” 1917 fanden in Russland statt, und dort gelang es Revolutionären, die Macht im Staat zu übernehmen. Was Wallerstein als die “Weltrevolution 1968” bezeichnet, war jedoch mehr als 1848: die Welle breitete sich von China über die damalige Tschecheslowakei nach Frankreich und Mexiko aus, nirgendwo wurde die Macht übernommen, aber trotzdem begann ein tiefgehendes Umdenken im Hinblick darauf, was eine Revolution bedeuten könnte.

Dennoch war diese Sequenz im 20. Jahrhundert neuartig, da 1968 die Errungenschaften von 1917 nicht festigte?–?de facto war 1968 der erste wichtige Schritt in die andere Richtung. Die russische Revolution bedeutete selbstverständlich die ultimative Verherrlichung des jakobinischen Ideals der Veränderung der Gesellschaft von oben her. Die Weltrevolution von 1968 war im Geiste anarchistischer. Das ist ein seltsamer Widerspruch, da Anarchismus in den späten 60er Jahren als soziale Massenbewegung größtenteils verschwunden war. Dennoch durchdrang sein Geist alles: die Revolte gegen bürokratischen Systemzwang, die Ablehnung von Parteipolitik, das Engagement für die Schaffung einer neuen, befreienden Kultur, die echte individuelle Selbstverwirklichung ermöglichen sollte.

Das wichtigste und nachhaltigste Vermächtnis der Weltrevolution 1968 war der moderne Feminismus. Nur durch die vom radikalen Feminismus eingeführten Richtlinien und sensiblen Ideen wie die hierarchiefreien bewusstseinserweckenden Diskussionszirkel, die Entwicklung eines Prozesses zur Konsensfindung, die Wichtigkeit der Abschaffung jeglicher Form von Ungleichheit, egal wie tief sie im Alltag verwurzelt war, konnte der Anarchismus als soziale Bewegung erneut Form annehmen.

In den letzten Jahren haben wir eine Art Abfolge kleiner 68er Revolutionen erlebt. Die Aufstände gegen sozialistische Staaten, angefangen auf dem Platz des Himmlischen Friedens bis hin zum Höhepunkt des Zusammenbruchs des Sowjetreiches, begannen so, obwohl sie rasch umgelenkt wurden und in einer kapitalistischen Rückgewinnung des Geistes der 60er-Rebellionen gipfelten, die heute als “Neoliberalismus” bekannt ist. Nachdem die Weltrevolution der mexikanischen Zapatisten – genannt der vierte Weltkrieg – 1994 begonnen hatte, kam es in einer solchen Dichte und Schnelligkeit zu kleinen 1968s, dass sich der Prozess beinahe institutionalisiert zu haben schien. Seattle, Genua, Cancun, Québec, Hong Kong … Und er wurde in der Tat durch von den Zapatisten mitbegründete Netzwerke institutionalisiert, auf Basis einer Art Mini-Anarchismus, beruhend auf den Prinzipien der dezentralen direkten Demokratie und des unmittelbaren Handelns. Die Aussicht auf eine echte globale Demokratiebewegung scheint vor allem die US-Behörden nun so in Angst versetzt zu haben, dass sie in einen richtigen Panikmodus verfielen. Natürlich gibt es ein traditionelles Gegenmittel bei einer Bedrohung durch Massenmobilisierung von unten. Man fängt einen Krieg an, egal gegen wen. Es geht nur darum, einen möglichst umfassenden Krieg zu führen. In diesem Falle hatte die US-Regierung den außergewöhnlichen Vorteil eines triftigen Grundes – ein Gesindel bisher wirkungsloser Islamisten vom rechten Flügel, die, einmalig in der Geschichte, einen wilden, ambitionierten Terrorplan ausgeheckt hatte und ihn tatsächlich ausgeführt hatte. Anstatt nun einfach die Verantwortlichen aufzuspüren, begannen die USA, Waffen im Wert von Milliarden auf alles Erdenkliche zu werfen. Zehn Jahre später scheint die daraus folgende Verkrampfung wegen der imperialen Überansprüche die Basis des amerikanischen Imperiums untergraben zu haben. Jetzt erleben wir den Prozess des Zusammenbruchs dieses Imperiums.

So ergibt es Sinn, dass die Weltrevolution 2011 als Rebellion gegen Satellitenstaaten der USA begann, so wie die Revolution, die die Sowjetmacht zu Fall bringen sollte, in Staaten wie Polen und der Tschecheslowakei ihren Anfang nahm. Die Welle der Rebellion in Nordafrika schwappte bald über das Mittelmeer nach Südeuropa, und dann, anfangs noch eher zögerlich, über den Atlantik nach New York. Sobald dies geschehen war, war sie innerhalb von Wochen überall angekommen und ausgebrochen. Momentan ist es sehr schwer, vorherzusagen, wie weit all dies am Ende gehen wird. Wirklich historische Ereignisse bestehen schließlich genau aus diesen Momenten, die man nicht vorhersagen hätte können. Könnten wir gerade einem fundamentalen Umbruch wie 1789 beiwohnen – nicht nur ein Umbruch der globalen Machtverhältnisse, sondern ein Umbruch in unserem allgemein grundlegenden politischen Denken? Das zu behaupten ist unmöglich, aber es gibt Gründe, optimistisch zu sein.

Lassen sie mich diesen Artikel durch die Aufzählung dreier dieser Gründe beenden.

Erstens befand sich in keiner Weltrevolution zuvor das Zentrum der Mobilisierung im Zentrum des Imperiums selbst. Großbritannien, die große imperiale Macht des 19. Jahrhunderts, war von den Aufständen 1789 und 1848 kaum betroffen. Gleichermaßen blieben die USA unberührt von den großen revolutionären Momenten des 20. Jahrhunderts. Entscheidende Straßenschlachten spielen sich üblicherweise nicht im Zentrum des Imperiums ab, auch nicht in den ausgebeuteten Randgebieten, sondern in den Gebieten, die man als zweite Ebene bezeichnen kann: nicht London, sondern Paris, nicht Berlin, aber St. Petersburg. Die Revolution 2011 begann nach diesem bekannten Muster, hat sich aber tatsächlich ins Zentrum des Imperiums selbst ausgebreitet. Wenn das so weitergeht, ist es noch nie zuvor so geschehen.

Zweitens können die Machteliten diesmal keinen Krieg beginnen. Das haben sie schon versucht. Was das angeht, können sie hier keine Karte mehr ausspielen. Das ist ein großer Unterschied.

Schließlich hat die Verbreitung feministischer und anarchistischer Gedanken die Möglichkeit eines tiefgreifenden kulturellen Umbruchs eröffnet. Nun die wichtigste Frage: können wir eine wirklich demokratische Kultur schaffen? Können wir unsere grundlegenden Konzepte, wie Politik gezwungenermaßen sein muss, ändern? Weiße Anzugträgern mittleren Alters an Orten wie Denver oder Minneapolis, die geduldig den Konsensprozess von heidnischen Priesterinnen oder Mitgliedern von Gruppen wie den “Anarchistischen Farbigen” lernen, um an ihrer örtlichen Generalversammlung teilnehmen zu können (das gibt es wirklich… es ist wahr! Man hat es mir erzählt) ist für mich wahrscheinlich das bisher dramatischste Bild, das die Occupy-Bewegung hervorgebracht hat.

Natürlich könnte dies auch nur der erste Moment einer weiteren Runde von Regeneration und Niederlagen sein. Sollten wir jedoch die Entstehung eines neuen 1789 beobachten – einen Moment, an dem sich unsere grundlegenden Vorstellungen von Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft ändern werden – dann sollte es genau so anfangen.

David Graeber, Professor und anarchistischer Aktivist, wir als der “beste anthropologische Theoretiker seiner Generation” bezeichnet. Er ist Mitorganisator von #OCCUPYWALLSTREET vor Ort in New York. Sein neues Buch heißt: Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

Übersetzt von: Translator Brigades (translatorbrigades@gmail.com)

Post-Anarchy

Capitalism burns all around us.

by
Saul Newman

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Post-Anarchy

Keystone US/Zuma/Rex Features

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Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

Capitalism burns all around us, leaving behind the debris of a bankrupt financial and political system. The illusion of limitless economic growth and the endless utopia of consumption have been forever shattered. Now governments have only austerity and hard times to offer us. Yet their assurances are wearing thin. Our political and economic masters know that people no longer believe in them, and behind the calm visage of power there is fear, fear of the specter of insurrection, the old fear that has haunted the imagination of every regime. Doesn’t everything – from the statements of politicians to the market predictions of economic gurus, to celebrity reality shows – now have a slight air of desperation, as if the entire spectacular-capitalist system (a system which in any case no longer even believes in itself and probably never did) is terrified lest it reveal the nihilism behind its facade?

This is a year of insurrections, from the streets of Cairo, Tunis and Benghazi, to the squares of Athens, Madrid and Wall Street. Miraculously, ordinary people gathered in public places – reclaiming these as public spaces – without authorization and without official representation. In some cases, they brought down governments, and in others they exerted a new kind of mass pressure on obsolete political systems that no longer even pretended to represent them. Revealed in the autonomous zones of Tahrir and Syntagma squares was the absolute abyss between people and the formal mechanisms of state power. In the people’s gesture of refusal, a new political space opened up, one whose consequences no one could determine in advance. The significance of these movements and occupations lay not so much in their achievement of concrete goals, but in their embodiment of a new collective political life, a form of politics that rejected representation through the tired old channels of political parties. The cry of the indignados in Spain was “You do not represent us!” – which can be understood both as a complaint against the lack of representation and as the desire to break with representation altogether and to act for themselves.

One of the lessons from these insurrections – and there are many – is that there is now no longer any difference between formal democracy and dictatorship; it’s simply a matter of degrees of repression. The power of the police, whose ghostly presence in the life of democratic states Walter Benjamin saw as devastating, is felt everywhere. What is the difference between Mubarak’s or Assad’s attempts to shut down social networking sites in Egypt and Syria, and Cameron’s threat to do the same in the UK?

And what is democracy in any case but a system that encourages a mass contentment with powerlessness, a collective voluntary servitude legitimated by the purely symbolic ritual of voting? The recent insurrections should be seen as being more than just about democracy, which in any case is now such an ambiguous term. Rather they were a collective form of voluntary inservitude. They were the realization that every system of power is ultimately fragile and dependent on the alienation and relinquishment of our power.

I talk of insurrection but not revolution. The revolution overthrows one regime of power only to replace it with another; the insurrection suspends power altogether, resisting its own institutionalization. Perhaps Max Stirner put it best: “It [the insurrection] is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established.”

A working forth of ourselves out of the established is the necessary threshold that any radical politics must pass through. It is the micro-political terrain upon which the insurrection takes place, at once ethical, psychological and spiritual, at once individual and collective. It involves an interrogation of one’s desires and attachments to power, as well as a transformation of one’s relation to others.

What made the recent riots in the UK seem different from the insurrections elsewhere was that they lacked this ethical (as well as political) dimension and were characterized by the worst kinds of incivility. I am not talking here about the defilement of the idols of property, which we should have no respect for. But what strikes us about the rioters was not their disrespect for the commodity but their absolute reverence for it – all that rebellious energy squandered on the desire for some silly designer label! What better example of what Stirner calls possessedness – where one becomes possessed by the thing, the object one desires to possess? The riots and looting were the ultimate expression of the fetishistic excesses of consumer society, and were thus thoroughly internal to it – as well as being internal to the binary of law-and-order/criminality. The problem with the riots was not that they were too transgressive but that they were not transgressive enough – they did not signify any kind of break with the religion of consumerism.

In the wake of the riots, the old bogeyman of anarchy loomed up again, authorizing a further intensification of police power. But anarchism – as a mode of politics and an expression of a free, ethical life – has little in common with this sort of quasi-religious spectacle of violence. Rather, anarchism involves a certain ethical discipline. Yet this is a self-imposed discipline of indiscipline, or what Foucault calls willful indocility. Obedience, as La Boëtie recognized long ago, comes easily to us – it is habitual. And so we must become disciplined into becoming undisciplined; we must become the ascetics of freedom. We must acquire, as Georges Sorel put it, “habits of liberty.”

Anarchism, or as I prefer to call it, postanarchism, is more than a political ideology. It is the ethico-political horizon today of all radical politics. The desire for an autonomy that can only be realized associatively and the emergence of movements that do not so much protest against the misery of our lives but joyously affirm the possibility of a radically different life are the unmistakable signs of the deepening of this horizon.

Saul Newman is a political philosopher and Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Newman is known for coining the term “postanarchism.” His latest book is The Politics of Post Anarchism.

Good Times on Campus

Fight for your mind in 2012.

by
Darren Fleet

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

Students at the University of North Carolina get down and boogie with the SuperTarget mascot at a midnight shopping spree officially endorsed by the school’s top brass.

Teddy bears, booty shorts, sandals, cut off jeans, hand claps, crunking, shopping carts … welcome to the school where learning doesn’t have to be just about books.

This year’s welcome week at the University of North Carolina was outsourced to a host of consumer companies, including the mass wholesaler SuperTarget. The box store giant organized a fleet of buses to take freshmen on a midnight shopping frenzy in their store as the week’s grand finale. The entire event was officially chaperoned by the vice chancellor of the university, who also acted as Target’s tour guide for the evening. The New York Times also reported that American Eagle Outfitters hired popular sophomores on the same campus, ideally those with significant online social network presences (500+ friends), to be brand ambassadors. Their job during the week was to recruit their friends into volunteer moving squads, all wearing gift AE swag, to help new students carry their belongings into their dorms and to give a warm welcome on behalf of American Eagle.

On a more optimistic day, I would tell you that the students involved in this fiasco are able to identify the not-so-subtle-manipulation at work, and that if a party isn’t in the school budget, then why not let SuperTarget or Walmart or Nike throw a bash; or that free duds from a company desperate for market share is a fair trade for a poor students’ time. On a more realistic day, I would tell you that this cohort is the same one that American sociologists are pointing to as the empty-headed Icarus generation now beginning to fly.

Christian Smith and his colleagues at Notre Dame University recently produced a study Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood which revealed that the majority of America’s young adults on campus navigate ethical propositions based only on time, feeling, benefit and desire. Principles such as honor, valor, virtue, morality, God, chivalry, familial piety, ideas that dominated the Western mindset well into the 20th century, were non-factors. Most surprising to them the Times writes is that participants in the study were not at all bothered by “rabid consumerism” and lacked even the basic language to formulate ethical queries about consumerism. To them the market was a benign and neutral reality.

The implications of this objective ethical free-fall are contested and the debate flounders between pragmatic optimism and cautious realism. It isn’t that bad to have finally chased superstition, pre-judgment, and patriarchal precepts to the ends of the earth. On the downside, the trend points to the emergence of ethical silo’s where moral considerations – like should I care about the environment or should I help a stranger or should I buy this product – are nudged to the periphery of the soul in the same way that religion and philosophy have been pushed over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, out of sight, out of mind.

—Darren Fleet

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

What to expect in 2012.

by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

What to expect in 2012.

blulaces

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Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

Some of the most inspiring social struggles of 2011 have placed democracy at the top of the agenda.

Although they emerge from very different conditions, these movements – from the insurrections of the Arab Spring to the union battles in Wisconsin, from the student protests in Chile to those in the US and Europe, from the UK riots to the occupations of the Spanish indignados and the Greeks in Syntagma Square, and from Occupy Wall Street to the innumerable local forms of refusal across the world – share, first of all, a negative demand: Enough with the structures of neoliberalism! This common cry is not only an economic protest but also immediately a political one, against the false claims of representation. Neither Mubarak and Ben Ali nor Wall Street bankers, neither media elites nor even presidents, governors, members of parliament, and other elected officials – none of them represent us. The extraordinary force of refusal is very important, of course, but we should be careful not to lose track in the din of the demonstrations and conflicts of a central element that goes beyond protest and resistance. These movements also share the aspiration for a new kind of democracy, expressed in tentative and uncertain voices in some cases but explicitly and forcefully in others. The development of this aspiration is one of the threads we are most anxious to follow in 2012.

One source of antagonism that all of these movements will have to confront, even those that have just toppled dictators, is the insufficiency of modern democratic constitutions, particularly their regimes of labor, property, and representation. In these constitutions, first of all, waged labor is key to having access to income and the basic rights of citizenship, a relationship that has long functioned poorly for those outside the regular labor market, including the poor, the unemployed, unwaged female workers, immigrants, and others, but today all forms of labor are ever more precarious and insecure. Labor continues to be the source of wealth in capitalist society, of course, but increasingly outside the relationship with capital and often outside the stable wage relation. As a result, our social constitution continues to require waged labor for full rights and access in a society where such labor is less and less available.

Private property is a second fundamental pillar of the democratic constitutions, and social movements today contest not only national and global regimes of neoliberal governance but also the rule of property more generally. Property not only maintains social divisions and hierarchies but also generates some of the most powerful bonds (often perverse connections) that we share with each other and our societies. And yet contemporary social and economic production has an increasingly common character, which defies and exceeds the bounds of property. Capital’s ability to generate profit is declining since it is losing its entrepreneurial capacity and its power to administer social discipline and cooperation. Instead capital increasingly accumulates wealth primarily via forms of rent, most often organized through financial instruments, through which it captures value that is produced socially and relatively independent of its power. But every instance of private accumulation reduces the power and productivity of the common. Private property is thus becoming ever more not only a parasite but also an obstacle to social production and social welfare.

Finally, a third pillar of democratic constitutions, and object of increasing antagonism, as we said earlier, rests on the systems of representation and their false claims to establish democratic governance. Putting an end to the power of professional political representatives is one of the few slogans from the socialist tradition that we can affirm wholeheartedly in our contemporary condition. Professional politicians, along with corporate leaders and the media elite, operate only the weakest sort of representative function. The problem is not so much that politicians are corrupt (although in many cases this is also true) but rather that the constitutional structure isolates the mechanisms of political decision-making from the powers and desires of the multitude. Any real process of democratization in our societies has to attack the lack of representation and the false pretenses of representation at the core of the constitution.

Recognizing the rationality and necessity of revolt along these three axes and many others, which animate many struggles today, is, however, really only the first step, the point of departure. The heat of indignation and the spontaneity of revolt have to be organized in order to last over time and to construct new forms of life, alternative social formations.

The secrets to this next step are as rare as they are precious.

On the economic terrain we need to discover new social technologies for freely producing in common and for equitably distributing shared wealth. How can our productive energies and desires be engaged and increased in an economy not founded on private property? How can welfare and basic social resources be provided to all in a social structure not regulated and dominated by state property? We must construct the relations of production and exchange as well as the structures of social welfare that are composed of and adequate to the common.

The challenges on the political terrain are equally thorny. Some of the most inspiring and innovative events and revolts in the last decade have radicalized democratic thinking and practice by occupying and organizing a space, such as a public square, with open, participatory structures or assemblies, maintaining these new democratic forms for weeks or months. Indeed the internal organization of the movements themselves has been constantly subjected to processes of democratization, striving to create horizontal participatory network structures. The revolts against the dominant political system, its professional politicians, and its illegitimate structures of representation are thus not aimed at restoring some imagined legitimate representational system of the past but rather at experimenting with new democratic forms of expression: democracia real ya. How can we transform indignation and rebellion into a lasting constituent process? How can experiments in democracy become a constituent power, not only democratizing a public square or a neighborhood but also inventing an alternative society that is really democratic?

To confront these issues, we, along with many others, have proposed possible initial steps, such as establishing a guaranteed income, the right to global citizenship, and a process of the democratic reappropriation of the common. But we are under no illusion that we have all the answers. Instead we are encouraged by the fact that we are not alone asking the questions. We are confident, in fact, that those who are dissatisfied with the life offered by our contemporary neoliberal society, indignant about its injustices, rebellious against its powers of command and exploitation, and yearning for an alternative democratic form of life based on the common wealth we share – they, by posing these questions and pursuing their desires, will invent new solutions we cannot yet even imagine. Those are some of our best wishes for 2012.

Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist philosopher. In the late 1970s Negri was accused of being the mastermind behind the left-wing terrorist group the Red Brigades. Negri emigrated to France where he taught in Paris along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Hardt and Negri have published four important critiques of late capitalism and globalization: Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (1994), Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009). These four works have been highly praised by contemporary activists. Empire, for example, has been hailed as “nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time” by the Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

?wiat post-ideowy

Polish translation of “Post Idea World.”

by
Kalle Lasn and Micah White

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Selingkuh Tak Sampai – 2004 – Agus Suwage

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Od wieków cywilizacja ludzka stala pod znakiem wielkich zmian, idei, paradygmatów. Modernistyczny heglowski duch subiektywny, nietzscheanska smierc Boga i heideggerianskie bycie-w-swiecie ustapily w postmodernizmie foucoultowskiemu dispositif, koncu swiata Fukuyamy, derridowskiej dekonstrukcji i klaczom Deleuze i Guattariego.

A jednak, podczas gdy wiekszosc z nas, przyzwyczajona do wielkich idei i pomyslów oczekiwala pojawiania sie nowych z co najmniej ta sama predkoscia, w ostatnich kilku latach wydaje sie, ze poklady inspiracji zaczely sie wyczerpywac. Staje sie jasne jak slonce ze prawdziwie nowatorskie, kreatywne pomysly i idee raptem przestaly naplywac. Nikt nie wie dlaczego.

Konceptualna susza nie moglaby nastapic, zdawaloby sie, w czasie bardziej nieodpowiednim. Siedem miliardów nas zmaga sie z najbardziej powaznym ekologicznym, finansowym, politycznym i spirytualnym kryzysem w naszej historii. Tym razem katastrofa, której stawiamy czola, nie dotyka jedynie pojedynczej nacji, regionu czy kontynentu… Jest to tym bardziej przerazajace, ze jest to katastrofa globalna i równoczesna. Szanse sa ze jesli nie uda nam sie wygrzebac z tego regresu, prawdopodobnie zstapimy w przerazajacy tysiac lat ciemnych wieków … era ziemi wypalonej autorytarnym kapitalizmem, brutalizmem i chaosem które sprawia, ze ludobójstwa i holokaust poprzedniego wieku beda sie wydawac jak gra wstepna. Nie tylko koncza nam sie pomysly; konczy nam sie czas. Teraz bardziej niz kiedykolwiek potrzebujemy kreatywnych przelomów i burzy mózgów inspirowanych z zewnatrz, które przemieszcza tereny mysli, otworza nowe mozliwosci, potencjonalnie ratujac nas wszystkich.

Potrzeba nam odwaznych radykalów mediów niezaleznych, którzy przyczynia sie do upadku komercjalnego wirusa infekujacego nasz strumien informacji. Potrzeba nam nowego grona studentów ekonomii gotowych stawic czola swoim profesorom, gotowych obalic neoklasyczny paradygmat a w jego miejsce zainicjowac nowy, prawdziwy model finansowy. Potrzeba nam nowych sposobów na rozmontowanie wladzy korporacji i usmiercenie idei korporacyjnej tozsamosci. Ale najwiekszym ze wszystkich wyzwaniem jest: w jaki sposób rozniecic rewolucje, insurekcje dnia powszedniego, która rozprzestrzeni sie po swiecie na czas aby uniknac ostatecznej katastrofy?

Byc moze nasze porzucenie swiata naturalnego i masowa migracja w cyberprzestrzen bezpowrotnie odciely nasze korzenie i zmacily nasze neurony. Byc moze jestesmy po srodku nieodwracalnego rozpadu moralnego rasy ludzkiej, który odzwierciedla nieodwolalny upadek ekosystemu naszej planety. Ta eko-psychiczna spirala moze nas wykonczyc. Moze juz jest za pózno?

Ale wydanie #99 Adbusters nie jest o rozpaczy; jest o nadziei, rewolucji i zyciu bez martwego czasu … Jest o próbowaniu czegos nowego i szacowaniu, czy potrafimy zebrac wystarczajaco duzo energii umyslowej na wszechmocna odmiane.

Dla dzikich,
Kalle Lasn i Micah White

Translated by the Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com

Amerikan Rüyas?

Sapk?n arzular?m yoktur.

by
Sherwood Hinze

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012


Brent Humphreys

Evliyim ve banliyöde yasiyorum.

Sokagim, 1957’den beri gördügünüz her reklamda oldugu gibi.

Buraya ilk geldigimden beri baska bir yerde yasamayi aklimdan bile geçirmedim.

Iki çocugum var- ikisi de zeki- bir kiz ve bir erkek. Büyüdüklerini görmek için sabirsizlaniyorum.

Arabami seviyorum. Kusursuz evimi. Fit olmayi ve iyi bir is gününü severim.

Heteroseksüelligi severim ve hiçbir zaman cinsel kimligimden sasmadim. Karimi seviyorum. Tekesliligi seviyorum.

Komsularimi severim, cumartesi sabahlari evlerinden çikarlar ve çimlerini keserler. Arabalarimizi ve garaj yolumuzu yikarken birlikte çene çalariz.

Her ikinci cumartesi, çocuklar sag salim yattiktan sonra bir Viagra alirim. Sonra karim ve ben geceyi polisiye izleyerek sonlandiririz. Asagi yukari 20 dakika boyunca karimin aslinda neden ilk is olarak benimle evlendigini ona hatirlatirim ve ardindan o genelde uyku hapi alir çünkü deliksiz bir cumartesi gecesi uykusunu sever.

Pazar sabahlari çocuklar hep erken kalkarlar. Anneleri onlara kurabiye pisirir ve yeni makinesiyle ekmek yaparken çocuklar mutfak masasinda özenle ev ödevlerini yaparlar. Iste o zaman mutfak gerçekten parildar. Önemli dini bayramlar haricinde kiliseye gitmeyiz fakat yine de kutsanmis oldugumuzu biliyoruz.

Karim Karayipler’de bizim için bir gezi ayarladi. Söyledigine göre bütün seyahati VISA kartimizla yaparsak iki kat bonus kazanacagiz. Komsularim gezinin nasil geçtigini sordugunda harika oldugunu söyleyecegim, ayni onlarin seyahati gibi. Yalan degil.

Elbette, saçlarimizi ayni sekilde tarariz ve karahindibalar ile dis arasi temizligi konusunda biraz takintiliyiz. Ayrica ne olmus yani hepimiz ayni filmlerden hoslaniyor, ayni televizyon programlarini izliyor, ayni popcorndan yiyorsak. Burada güzel bir hayat var.

Komplike degil.

Ben anlasilmasi zor bir insan degilim.

Sapkin arzularim yok.

—Sherwood Hinze


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Translated by the Translator Brigadestranslatorbrigades@gmail.com