Forwarded:
From: li...@16beavergroup.org
To: gene...@16beavergroup.org
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
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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 s
