Forwarded:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Our Silence is (also) a Commons -- 05.25.19
Date: Sat, 25 May 2019 07:14:49 -0400
Our Silence is (also) a Commons -- 05.25.19
Contents:
1. Our Silence is (also) a Commons
2. First Postscript
3. Second Postscript
______________________________________
1. Our Silence is (also) a Commons
A few years ago, we wanted to organize a series of gatherings under
the heading 'The Comin or the common Depression'. We were hestitant
because naming is not a neutral act, and we did not want to call into
existence something which we were hoping as a community to avert.
A handful of months passed and we received news that Mark Fisher had
taken his own life. A brilliant writer and thinker who was himself so
present to the challenges imposed by a realism shaped by contemporary
capitalism, had been taken under. Again, we were challenged to do
something, say something, meet together, read Mark's writings, only to
fall within those same weeks, attending to the existential wildfires
caused by uprootings and evictions within our midst.
In these years, we lost more than one can recount, when even one is
too many.
Meanwhile the headlines go by, idiot president and hypocrite president
before him, and parties, and journalists saying truths while the lies
spill from their laps, from their laughs, from their cries. The
society of spectacle becoming the spectacle of society.
Fake news indeed make good fake presidents and fake politics and fake
lives, this analysis was done 50 years ago. Scurrying over to the next
protest, the next corruption or scandal, the next evidence that the
majority of institutions we inhabit are structurally capitalist,
racist, patriarchal, and intimately hooked into the biocidal machine
taking all life toward extinction. And we are not allowed to speak
about it, we may be deemed out of our minds.
Green New Deal up their ass, as our friend Valerie Solanas might have
said if she were still with us. And so too the addiction to
organization, without ever changing the way we ‘organize’ our
lives.
As if we would be waiting for the states and the existing forms of
institution to bring about the revolution rather than starting from
our everyday capacities and looking for the measures and means in our
everyday lives with those around us.
Already since our meetings with Bifo in 2009, we wanted to orient
attention toward one of the shifting terrains of capitalist
exploitation and extraction, what Bifo at the time referred to as the
mining of the psyche and what he would later write as the soul at
work.
How many have we lost in this war that is so invisible, so silent,
where the very machinery of care or cure, like the hospital, the
medications, the doctors themselves become the last and most violent
tools of capitalist extractivism. The most bitter pill to swallow for
those suffering from and struggling against the wreckage of capitalist
life, are the pills whose efficacy are measured not by how many they
cure and certainly not by how many they drive to the edge but instead
by the billions of profits they bring to their manufacturers.
‘Welcome to the New Paradigm?’ Where the institutions that are
meant to protect against racism or ecological ruin help perpetuate
them. Or the institutions responsible for educating the young only
seem to produce a more generalized ignorance concerning the gravity of
our times. Nothing has changed really, only now it appears the forked
tongue is more univocal and the masks hiding the racist, colonial,
patriarchal, and classist inheritances and underpinnings are
momentarily off.
Ulrike Meinhof was once rumoured to have said that every suicide is a
death by capitalism. And in this sense her note to her sister, "If
they say I committed suicide, be sure that it was a murder" can be
read beyond that of the specific circumstances of her own murder
inside Stammheim Prison.
How many silent deaths caused by medications, caused by overdose, by
abuse, institutionalized dis-care, by the ‘there is no
alternative’ conditions of a capitalist reality which does not give
space for other sensibilities, values, senses of life - augmented by
devices and apparatuses which aim to capture, extract, profit upon the
last bit of intimacy we posses, our imaginaries and our words to one
another. And where journals and newspapers cannot read yet alone
recall all the signs of a total disaster without adding a list of
great books to read this weekend, great shows to see, great recipes to
survive global warming, and the right app to organize your estate
before parting.
So it is with a deep sadness that we interrupt our extended
silence/strike to share the passing of a young comrade and friend of
the space, Zack Rosen. The crossing of a threshold always needs a
leaping into a beyond. We are in the beyond now, remembering a friend
of the space, but doing so remembering also all those we cannot name
who we have lost in these years of 'going under'.
We met Zack at a time when he had left college and became involved in
Occupy, meetings at 16 Beaver in 2011 and beyond. In many ways, Zack
represented so much of what is hopeful in a city like New York. That
it can still bring together people who really want to live another way
and who are committed to social, ecological, political, and a radical
idea of justice. But to go from years of fragmentation and disjunction
and arrive to the experience of the near wondrous conjunctions and
transversality of Occupy is a very different arch than starting
through Occupy. For many, even those of us older, who have lived
through the hyper individualizing and fractalizing inertia in a city
like New York, the fragmentation that once again took hold and slowly
became the norm again in the years following Occupy was difficult to
endure emotionally.
We had seen for nearly two years large swaths of multiplicities
collectivizing their lives in daily struggle.How could we go back to
the normal, especially when the normal means a catastrophic fate for
life on earth?
It is a story that can be told across geographies regarding the
psychic fallout in the midst of our contemporary struggles. On the one
hand, one resists the violence of the state, the violence of the
corporations, the complicity of the institutions which are meant to
serve us. On the other, one is haunted and pulled down by the everyday
structural adjustments we inherit since the birth of neoliberalism
which disallows any life to stay out of the nexus and dependency on
money to reproduce and justify an existence.
We struggle against the community of money while at the same time
being forced to live by it, in it, through it. What measures do we
develop collective to overcome this basic contradiction? Are we
capable?
The struggles of this last decade - many of which through tactics of
occupation opened moments of a euphoric spirit of a communized care of
everyday social reproduction, more than the specific claims or demands
upon which they have initially gathered - have been the exact antidote
to atomized existence (where even friendship is increasingly a virtual
affair and touching associated more with devices than bodies).
Having lived this suspended and extended period of a communized
existence during Occupy, Zack would not accept no for an answer. Like
many other comrades who lived and created that experience, he tried to
find new collective processes of struggle, becoming among other
things, intensively involved in organizing against the building of a
fracked-gas pipeline off Far Rockaway. It should be said that during
Occupy, he was tirelessly involved in organizing for the called for
General Strike.
What seemed the challenge for so many of us was precisely where to put
our energies, how to live the spirit and lessons of the movement? How
to not find ourselves in isolation? Especially when the real tragedy
of the movements was not the violence and coordination of the states
to shut them down (giving birth to far more reactive forces to
mobilize that anger and contempt, as is evident today across the
globe). This is a historic fate always confronting most movements
which break from the logic and order of things. The tragedy was
witnessing all those people who ‘talked the talk’ but could not
‘walk the walk’ and could not see themselves implicated.
Especially those addicted to the comforts of the institutional worlds
we inherit, the money they provide, the recognition they give and the
way they buy our silence and complicity.
And those of us who resist and resist, the homes we return to, if we
are not evicted from them, the very places and conditions through
which we awake and reproduce ourselves, our places of work or
hopefully unwork, our relations, our foods, whatever we think are our
medicines, our sources of news, our sources of thinking, learning,
culture, and healing are numbing us if not killing us.
To put it differently or indifferently, everyday we wake up and
reproduce or take part in these structures of injustice and
negligence, without constructing their alternatives, we kill
ourselves, we destroy worlds. And with no exit plans, especially
those of a collective nature, the psychological fractures multiply in
lock step with the social, political, economic, ecological ones.
Staring at the face of this institutionalized negligence and the
proliferation of sad passions is but one dimension of the disaster we
are living through. In his fragment on Capitalism as Religion, Walter
Benjamin once noted, what distinguishes capitalism from other
religions is that there is no redemption. Its only endgame is for all
to share the guilt / the debt.
So we write this note as a way of remembering Zack and doing so by
linking his passing to those near and far who we have lost in the last
years, in this great struggle over the very terms of what it means to
live today and to do so without negotiating the non-negotiable. Zack
never wanted to be the center of attraction or a spokesperson. He was
intelligent, sensitive, vulnerable, haunted and inhabited by the
dynamics he was struggling against. He would never imagine himself an
emblem of a movement.
In our last correspondence with Zack, he had sent a text he wanted us
and other friends to collectively work on. It was a delirious text,
part poetry, part philosophy, part riddle, part political treatise. In
it, he tried to recognize and work through all that he was thinking as
well as all that he had been experiencing, including the darkness and
confusion. His preliminary title was, 'Going Under'. At the time, we
could not find our way into the text because even with the many
references to writers or ideas we recognized, the way of weaving
together the thoughts was all his. Sadly, only in his passing did we
find our way into this imagined writing together.
Years ago, when we lost Neil, we had a space to gather and grieve
together. And when Clark passed, his friends and family created a
space of collective grieving. And other loved ones passing, we had to
endure silently. But being someone who was between spaces and
communities, we felt that we needed to do something public, to mark
Zack’s passing and also to remember him and other comrades like him
who have fallen through the cracks and suffered emotionally in these
deeply conflicted and afflicted worlds we inhabit.
With that exigency, we have put together a film in these last days,
using the last version of his text we had received. Pairing his
writing with video materials found online from an autonomous news
collective documenting the gilets jaunes protests, using just one
day's reel, March 16 in Paris. Having initially thought to just
publish and share his text, then to shoot materials from our own
environments, we came to the conclusion that his thoughts were
animated by struggles and that this video material would make his text
more comprehensible and alive and vice versa.
Let us clarify that this film has not been made in the logic and order
of production, exhibition and thus consumption, but as a way of
conjuring and keeping alive the spirit of a lost comrade and
remembering a generation that in Zack's own words, has 'gone under.’
You who will read this note, will recognize who we are speaking of,
because it is impossible that we have not all suffered such losses.
It must also be said that we do not make this film to celebrate or
glorify what for us in the words of Ulrike amounts not to martyrdom
but the taking of a life. And it is such losses, these lives taken
silently each day from our communities, which are the real events
requiring our care and attention. Not what some idiots and a thousand
mouthpieces say or report upon from an oval or circular or square or
whatever shape office.
But can we organize ourselves around grief and mourning? Must we
confront that these are the preconditions of our struggles today? What
kind of spaces of struggle exist and means to confront and accept and
tend to our vulnerabilities? Or are we still living the nearly fascist
fiction of an infinite supply of young martyrs for the struggles to
come?
For those anywhere, interested in organizing a screening of the film,
whether in small groups or larger ones, both as a way of remembering
Zack and marking his passing as a political experience and linking it
with the psychic, economic, ecological, political deteriorations and
struggles we are living ... please write to us and we can provide you
with a link to the film.
______________________________________
2. Postscript
As an intergenerational space, we also mark the passing of our elders,
and we write this short postscript to remember the autonomist artist,
writer, poet Nanni Balestrini. In his book ‘We Want Everything’
his nameless protagonist of his book referring to the factory says,
“Only a drone could spend years in this shitty prison and do a job
that destroys your life.” Already the outlines and necessities of a
human or beyond human strike were laid out in the ‘years of lead’
in the 70’s in Italy, and elucidated with even greater lucidity by
the feminist movements which took the struggles of operaismo beyond
the factory and into the living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and everyday
spaces of reproduction and care. Their thesis, the strike begins there
(ironically and parodically asking for lost wages!). What they sought
was nothing short of a revolution of everyday life through the
communalization of that care. Parodic, because they knew that no boss
or state would ever do it for us. Just as they will never be able to
heal or attend to the maladies they perpetrate and perpetuate. The
intensification of the means of extraction from our everyday spaces of
reproduction only makes more pertinent that analysis and horizon of
struggle. And for this, maybe if we were to project and invoke in
language what we hope to create the conditions for, which certainly is
not a further proliferation of sad passions, it is the coming or
common strike. And we say beyond-human strike, recognizing that a
great part of the living world around us is already on that path.
______________________________________
3. Second Postscript:
The multiplicities that have nurtured and given life to 16 Beaver in
these twenty years have not disappeared. And though we have had to
resort to a strike against the conditions of reproducing a space of
meeting and convening while concurrently battling the arbitrary power
of those who ‘own’ or control our spaces of reproduction - we have
not stopped our struggles to create such spaces. New York City and the
worlds we depend on are dying because too many accept to swim in the
muck or struggle against irremediable institutions. Our lived thesis
has been that one can only wage those struggles through the strength
of such common places, which do not submit to the organizational logic
of neoliberalism nor the movements of bureaucratization and
professionalization of politics - situations where we actually build
the infrastructures that attend to our real concerns. That is what 16
Beaver has been a movement of, beyond an autonomous university, beyond
an autonomous clinic or center of care, beyond an autonomous space for
art, and even beyond an autonomous political movement. It has been a
search for constructing the space for bringing all those things
together. And we are looking for the conditions that would allow us to
do that, but we must remove the constant threat of eviction and
monthly rent extraction which we have been exposed to since starting
in 1999. And if that is impossible in New York in the 21st century,
then we must look for other means or construct the conditions of
possibility for such a situatuion to exist.
As we formulated some years ago, if the reigning logic is eviction,
then we must turn our eviction into exodus, a pure passivity or a
radical agency, it does not matter as long as the hive, can delineate
a line of flight with enough consistency to regroup and strike again.
For those who have a space or building in the city to common or short
of that, and probably more realistically, those interested in being
part of our continued search for constructing such spaces
through/within our own means and abilities, you can some traces of it
in the link below and write to us.
http://andandand.org/2019.htm
_______________________________________________
16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004
for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org
TRAINS:
4,5 -- Bowling Green
2,3 -- Wall Street
J,Z -- Broad Street
R -- Whitehall
1 -- South Ferry
Backwarded
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