cries and formulas for a New World

A New Way Forward: Protesting the Bank Bailouts

2009-03-28T12:21:00.003-04:00

Protests are starting up against bank bailouts and for bank nationalization at A New Way Forward, April 11. Rallies have already gotten started, but we need more and bigger! Progressives have a chance at changing the corrupt system that got us into this mess. Everyone needs to get in on this -- progressives need to own this.

Last week, we launched the first nationally-coordinated grassroots protests to break the power of the banks set for April 11. There are already over 20 protests planned in a grassroots effort in major cities across the country. We're calling for Congress to break up the banks and ensure that future banks never get so big again -- we want to see structural reform to our failing economic system. We think these protest can really tip the scales.

http://anewwayforward.org/demonstrations/

The right is really owning the anger on the bailouts -- they're eclipsing the possibility of any progressive structural reform that Obama himself supports. We need everyone's help to jump on board. We actually have a reason to be mad!

There's a protest in Augusta, ME, Hartford, CT and Boston, MA We're asking people to clog the machines -- line up at ATM's or be a part of the largest outdoor phone banks to members of Congress on weekend minutes.

writing as jonathanatographer...or from within the pseudonym...?

2009-02-11T15:17:00.000-05:00

it’s so discouraging sometimes, writing.

it’s not that nothing will come out

it’s not that i don’t have any ideas

it’s that i’m afraid of something, the judgment from elsewhere

at least, that’s what i tell myself i’m afraid of. and while i think it’s obvious the judgment exerts considerable influence, it very clearly does not act alone.

though (tee hee) might we say that, if it is not a ‘judgment’ from elsewhere of which we are afraid, it is nevertheless a fear that in some ways begs to be reckoned with, that fear being of an exterior, of forces outside of ourselves, forces that would decompose what we have written and what we have thought, forces that would produce effects which would render that which we have written unable to affect anything, unable to produce new compositions, and thus unable to transmit life.

i chose the pseudonym jonathanatographer because, in the wake of a death of someone i was very close to, i was trying to understand death, death as the end of a life, death as a part of life, death as an event, death as The Event in the sense of deleuze (or blanchot). my original claim was that death was the one thing whose power was great enough to take the life of even the most insulated thing and open it onto time.

i also knew a quote by henry miller: “I realized that I was free, that the death I had gone through had liberated me.” it’s from his book on Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins.

quite a title

so…it was not enough to try and understand death, or how the death of a person opens her life onto the world…it was necessary, even, to go beyond an understanding of miller (quoted by Deleuze)—how to die in order to live?

jonathanatographer wasn’t a name invented so that i could circumvent my old identity, to get away from it. i knew it’s important to get to a place where it doesn’t matter whether i say I, so what need for a pseudonym…? jonathanatographer was a signal, a reminder—writing to or from death, in a way…a writing beyond death.

but a writing beyond death, fine, that’s easy. one writes something, dies, someone else reads it…?

perhaps it’s not just the judgment from elsewhere that i’m afraid of. perhaps i’m afraid of what i think, what i will think if i do not restrain myself…—and know that it is precisely this restraint which restricts the flow of what might come out when ideas are had and beg to be followed: not what i will think but—what will be thought!

it is to the writing and death problem that i return, tonight, in search of new lines of thought to pursue. and these new lines are there for the cruising. and that’s just the thing: to get to these new lines…(to allow myself to follow these flows of thought…?).

(henry miller and deleuze we feel we are to use, we hear them from beyond the grave — oh no no no no NO! My! what an ugly writing style you have!)

henry miller and deleuze have laid out something very neat—to die, but not the death the depressive desires or the tyrant demands.

to die as an individual

the individual must die

and in dying an individual unfolds its life onto a world of pre-individual singularities,

singularities which organize bodies and thoughts, singularities whose expressions are productive of experiences which individuate—arriving again at individuals!

sort of…

it is true that individuation happens in this way—experiences create individuals. but no, it’s not the case that we ask the individual to die in order to access a world of pre-individual singularities only to produce experiences which individuate. what would be the liberatory powers of such a procedure?

if an individual finds its death, accesses pre-individual singularities, it is to lead an impersonal life in which flows of thought enter into unlimited becomings with each other, unconstrained by the limitations of personal experience.

(how curious would it be to find one’s own death?)

jonathanatographer was supposed to be a writing which would find a death, which would expose a thought beyond a subject, a thought which would move with the absolute necessity of life itself, which would attain to the impersonal Event of a life.

but a certain fear prohibited this task not just from being realized, but from being pursued at all. an inquiry into this fear? perhaps that’ll be necessary but why not try to develop methods, processes which might sneak away into the night, into an outside which glorifies every risk, because on this outside each chance that is taken affirms the whole of chance and endlessly ramifies it.

i do not need to tell you what is being risked…?

the judgment which condemns, which appears to come from the outside, loses all of its power in the face of this chance/chaos. the once-and-for-all of condemnations is located as a point on a line of chronological time—once-and-for-all indeed! for each time someone wishes to pronounce this judgment, the judgment itself must be repeated, the occasion must be marked; thus distinct iterations are a necessary actuality of Judgment.

tribunals punctuate their own discontinuous chronologies!

judgment deceives itself, and is itself a deception.

thus the aporia by which judgment comes undone, judgment in accord with eternal dictums—the cases to which a judgment is applied are of necessity distinct, fixed according to their historical locations. these cases communicate with one another, not just in the infinite causal chain of chronological time (which, it must be said, is not to be easily dismissed), but also by referring themselves always back to the judgment itself, always, even, affecting the judgment itself—where is its eternity now? the judgment swallows the individual cases and believes that it incorporates them into an already known interior with a smallness which is, alas, immeasurably incommensurate with the actions that devastate the bodies in which it realizes its pronouncements.

all the while the thought of the outside, an absolute exterior, flows on, unperturbed…

whereas chance!

chance which affirms and ramifies—one chance for all of chance—is not punctual. (hah! indeed! following deleuze, we can definitively say that it always arrives too early or too late). it is the same chance, the same cast of the dice, infinitely subdividing itself between the past and the future, eternally circulating along its formless line of time.

time and life and thought as continuous variation.

to go through a death, like miller? perhaps…? but to write as jonathanatographer will be to disappear within jonathanatographer—the personal dissolves and the world of impersonal singularities rises to the surface; a surface whose infinite movements do not allow the closure of judgment any power; a surface which is blind to distinct futures; and most importantly a surface which glorifies the chance which risks everything, each time for all time, no matter the outcome…

a note on individuation

2009-02-11T15:08:00.000-05:00

it is true that experiences individuate and that we are always already in the middle of this individuation—we are individuals before we even know it. however, individuation can be a powerful mode of living…provided it is a mode, not a subject. a subject has a form which proclaims its qualities in advance; in a way, it lives as if it has already been individuated… additionally, every reader of Spinoza knows that an individual can only be a mode, never a subject or a substance: the latter are God or Nature—or maybe Deleuze’s plane of immanence…

so…if we are always already in the middle of an individuation, what is there to do? the experiences which take place and of which certain combinations individuate are not those of an individual—they are external to each other but still produce an individual.

perhaps an individual is to disappear, disperse, dissolve itself into the forces which are productive of the experiences. what freedom is to be found in this process?

or perhaps an individual must search for ways of creating new experiences, experiences which would produce new individuations, compose new modes of living? there would no longer be any confusion between persons and individuals; only individuated modes on a plane of immanence…

New York Times: Complicity, Veracity, Voracity

2009-01-12T15:18:00.000-05:00

Remember how the New York Times, among many other media outlets, took for granted the veraciousness of the information coming from the Bush White House during the marketing of the Iraq war in 2002 and early 2003? Well, they're at it again, except this time the articles are based on information from the Israeli government and the virtues of its war on the people of Gaza.

Check out these articles, for examples:

A Gaza War Full of Tricks and Traps

Fierce Focus on Tunnels, A Lifeline for Gazans

Israelis United on Gaza War as Censure Rises Abroad

Perhaps this attitude on the part of the Times is due to the media's restricted access to information from anywhere but the Israeli side. Print what you've got!

Perhaps . . .

Fragments on Friends (Part One of More to Come)

2008-10-20T14:01:00.002-04:00

(For Lilah)

One loves a friend because of the way she modifies the world: of objects, of thoughts, of emotions. She may change the way one sees things, is affected by things – she may augment the ways by which one is able to affect things! In this sense, the modifications which happen to and are produced by a subject are expressive of a relationship that happens between two subjects.

Don't Deconstruct

2008-10-20T13:39:00.001-04:00

We have no need for a Deleuze which deconstructs. A process of deconstruction that is not accompanied by complementary constructivisms may be simply tracing a line through chaos. Even more than “The World Must Be Destroyed!” – A Plane Must Be Constructed! The decon line that is traced, it is true, is a series, and series, it is true, are very dear to Deleuze’s works – the Logic of Sense does not have chapters, only series. And series, it is further true, continue to operate in Deleuze’s thought: they operate with power (puissance) in the book on Leibniz and folds. But, after the Logic of Sense, Deleuze never again constructs a book with series in stead of chapters. Rather, as in A Thousand Plateaus with Félix Guattari, what would elsewhere be a chapter and what once might have been a series is now a plateau – thirteen of a thousand.

The method of constructing a plateau and the problem of saying what a plateau is is, for sure, quite an undertaking. So why not turn to saying something about one or two differences between the series-chapter and the plateau-chapter . . . ? (This, of course and for sure, will have to be filled out or deleted later). The Logic of Sense proceeds series by series, each series put into action by Deleuze in order to construct a concept of sense . . . ? Perhaps. Or, each series is put into action by Deleuze in order to construct a plane of immanence, an outside of thought which operates, organizes and creates according to a logic of sense.

In this second option one might say then that each series is itself a concept, and to define a concept here we will have to use what is given to us in Deleuze’s final book with Guattari, What is Philosophy? There they put quite a bit of emphasis both on the need for creating concepts, as well as the requirement – absolutely necessary for a philosophical concept – that each component of a concept not only be dependent on every other component of the concept which comprises them, but that each component is also variable, capable of varying in accordance with the variations of every other component. With these variations there is, of course, a threshold. When this threshold is reached, or crossed, the components will be varying to such a degree that another concept will be formed. 100º C being a threshold for water and steam.

Can Deleuze be Deleuzed on Deleuzean territory?

2008-05-18T23:19:00.001-04:00

What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

“Concepts are events, but the plane is the horizon of events, the reservoir or reserve of purely conceptual events: not the relative horizon that functions as a limit, which changes with an observer and encloses observable states of affairs, but the absolute horizon, independent of any observer, which makes the event as concept independent of a visible state of affairs in which it is brought about” (36).

With this quote the plane of immanence could be thought into an identity with the God of Spinoza as Deleuze uses it from Expressionism in Philosophy on. And there could be found good reasons for doing such. Deleuze often writes about Spinoza’s God as a plane of immanence, Spinoza had to create a plane of immanence, had to show it, had to think it, etc. (The history of Deleuze’s use of the equation plane of immanence = God in Spinoza may need to be traced. By MP there is Spinoza’s plane of immanence but the equation is missing. And after, there remains only the plane of immanence of Spinoza, no need to talk of Spinoza’s God.) The second chapter of WisP?, ‘The Plane of Immanence’, ends with a discussion of whether there is a best plane of immanence. THE plane of immanence is that which Spinoza created, on which all other planes of immanence are based. It is immanent to all other planes which do not succeed in thinking it because it is the unthought in thought, but also that which must be thought (59-60). The unthought in thought does not show up in D’s books until the Cinema books (?), and maybe even not until the Time-Image. The definition of the plane of immanence (D&G insist it is NOT a concept: “The plane of immanence is neither a concept nor the concept of all concepts” (35)) is modified by a new aspect – the unthought in thought. This modification should not allow commentators on Deleuze, those academics who we shall call Deleuzers, to insist on a constant Spinozist plane of immanence in Deleuze.
The Deleuzean plane of immanence has changed.
The plane of immanence is fractal, the individual is fractured by time. Spinoza’s conception of the individual’s relation to time could at best be described as chronological – the individual becomes aware of a single truth and follows that which it knows on to discover what are its good and bad encounters, what forces affect it, what forces it affects, etc. Philosophy had to wait for Kant to create the concept of the pure form of time before it was able to show that an individual is divided from itself in time – Rimbaud’s formula “I is an other” – and that its experiences receive a greater power when thought in temporal series which make an identity of chronological truth impossible. Deleuze himself, and in WisP? with Guattari, creates differences in the plane of immanence.
Two things are insufficient: the first is commentary from Deleuzers which, even if they are clever enough to not use the word identity, allow THE plane of immanence to congeal across all of Deleuze’s writings. The second would be commentary from either Deleuzers or, more likely, Deleuzean thinkers, which would painstakingly show the differences (we all know identity must be attacked and that differences must be drawn) between Deleuze’s planes of immanence, Deleuze & Guattari’s planes of immanence. Both commentaries will be insufficient.
Perhaps the problem is this: Can Deleuze be Deleuzed on Deleuzean territory? For example, D.N. Rodowick’s Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine fails, Deleuzes its project, Deleuzes its power by reterritorializing Deleuzean thought onto Deluzean territory. One option, perhaps, is to create properly Deleuzean concepts (as Deleuze stated that it was necessary to create properly cinematic concepts, concepts immanent to cinema itself) and make them cut across Deleuze’s thought and open onto an outside – a work of transversality. Perhaps. And this is a big perhaps – hasn’t this already been attempted by Deleuzers and Deleuzeans alike? And wasn’t Deleuze himself creating concepts which were immanent to his thought and which would allow him to cut across his thought, recreate it, so that it could make attempts at opening onto an outside, onto an unthought in his thought?

THE plane of immanence, the One-All is the Open. The Open is conceived through time, and thought opens itself onto unthought by the use of time. Uses of time?

L'IMAGE-ENNUI, Vol. XI, No. 3

2008-03-22T12:27:00.017-04:00

3/ 22/08 For Immediate Release:

The University of Minnesota Press is pleased to announce the publication of a revised 3rd edition of L'IMAGE-ENNUI, Vol. XI, No.3, with beautiful new illustrations by Zak Smith.

L'IMAGE-ENNUI

Vol. XI, No. 3, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...And Spring, 2008

Special Edition

What's Behind Deleuze
and What Shall We Take From It?

Edited by jonathanatographer

Table of Contents

- Response to Vol. XI, No. 3, Special Edition: The Late Derrida:
Letter to the Editor by Leonard Lawlor

- Preface: Invitation to a Buggering by Gilles Deleuze, translated by Réda Bensmaïa

- The Middle Spreads So Far: An Interduction by jonathanatographer

- Behold Deleuze! Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and Life in Deleuze's Homoerotic Heterocritical Bodies of Thought by Sarah Kofman

- Tony Conrad Can and Does Explode Deleuze by Tony Conrad

- Anal Rope: A Buggering From Behind of Deleuze's Cinematic Thought by D.A. Miller

- Folding Emotions, Affects of the Fold, Gilles Deleuze, A Fear (?) of Fassbinder comma Rainer Werner by Godard comma Jean dash Luc

- Indefinite Responsibilities by Simon Critchley

- I Must Insist on Lacan: Une guerre contre les machines de guerre compiled by Slavoj Zizek

- I Love Him, I Love Him Not by Alain Badiou

- Bartleby : Pop Up That Money, Bitch! : An Impersonal Autobiography by jonathanatographer

Moderate to Almost Very Hot Sex Available!!!

2008-02-27T17:28:00.002-05:00

Hey You!!!

There's a Local Male who's WAY INTO SEX!!!!! (description to follow...)

SWM (hey kids, S is for Swinging!)
6'2''
+200 lbs.
8-ish" and somewhat thick (though not heavy on the semen count - if that's something you need you'll be best served by seeking it elsewhere; otherwise...)

enjoys all types of sex:

-sweet 'n tender - we'll coo to each other, light candles, use water based non-toxic body lubricants to enhance our considerate, mutual and caring gentleness...

this local male also enjoys being asked to and then obliging to fuck very hard, perhaps even violently, in various immoral positions, etc

additionally, he enjoys:
-stimulation by suffocation - giving and receiving
-physical pain brought to the limits of life itself (a bit academically here sometimes - it's all like what transformations must we create in ourselves to endure, avoid or sustain threats of death in these situations, n shit, etc. ...)
-group diarrhea in extremely claustrophobic situations (for example, see Mark Konix's novella 'of a sex symbol'...)
-the cutting of bodies with extremely sharp - and precise! - instruments: razor blades, scalpels, pins, etc.
-pretensions of parental sex
-how might zombies fuck?
-performances of oral sex, particularly with anal stimulation (tender or otherwise)
-the creation of situations in which bodily limits become indiscernible
-bright colors, bright lights, noisome environments
-being a top
-being a bottom

hence, therefore and thus, i will send you various pictures of myself upon an indication of interest from you (unfortunately, i must, of course, confirm that you are 18 years of age or older and thus I will need a credit card number along with its expiry date for verification...)

to conceal my identity i can only give you a pseudonym which rhymes with my name,
thus fondly,
i await in breathless anticipation for the future collisions of our bodies,
baron von trapp

Multidirectional : Platonism : Attack!

2008-02-26T17:32:00.007-05:00

To turn Platonism on its head? Surely we have more directions
available to us than just up & down.

(he stammers, hesitates...)

To turn Platonism on its head? Surely we have more directions
available to us than just up & down . . . ?

(and a stuttering is heard offstage)

Hillary Clinton and the Immigration Scare (Part 2)

2008-02-18T19:01:00.003-05:00

Is support for Hillary Clinton support for anti-immigration policies? Is Hillary Clinton’s existence a symptom of the anti-immigration scare, or more precisely, is her status as a New York senator and 2008 presidential candidate an expression of the tendencies of a machine which organizes and guarantees at the expense of chance and creation?

Of what are we thinking here?

Of corporations:
Starbucks, 2000 Western Ave., Seattle, WA, Starbucks, 1820 Market St., St. Louis, MO, Starbucks, 101 Bass Pro Dr., Broken Arrow, OK, Starbucks, 3100 Mesa St., El Paso, TX, Starbucks, 2300 North Mesa, El Paso, TX;

Home Depot, 650 Ponce de Leon, Atlanta, GA, Home Depot, 2525 Piedmont Road NE, Atlanta, GA, Home Depot, 1032 Research Center Atlanta Dr Sw, Atlanta, GA, Home Depot, 3885 Jonesboro Rd SE, Atlanta, GA, Home Depot, 2450 Cumberland Pkwy, Atlanta, GA, Home Depot, 4551 Padre Island Hwy, Brownsville, TX, Home Depot, Constitución #850, Col Barrial, Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, Home Depot, LIBRAMIENTO SUR PTE. #2991 COL. TERÁN, Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas;

jonathanatographer...

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks

http://www.starbucks.com/retail/locator/default.aspx

http://www.homedepot.com/storefinder

http://homedepot.com.mx/hdmx/esmx/encuentra_tienda.shtml

Hillary Clinton and the Immigration Scare (Part 1)

2008-02-18T18:52:00.002-05:00

Is support for Hillary Clinton support for anti-immigration policies? Is Hillary Clinton’s existence a symptom of the anti-immigration scare, or more precisely, is her status as a New York senator and 2008 presidential candidate an expression of the tendencies of a machine which organizes and guarantees at the expense of chance and creation?

Of what are we thinking here?

Of politicians: William Jefferson Clinton and Hillary Clinton;

Charlemagne, Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jeb Bush;

Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.;

King Gregory the Great, John Winthrop, Thomas Dudley, James Bowdoin, Robert Charles Winthrop, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Tennesse Williams, Humphrey Bogart, David Souter, John Forbes Kerry, George W. Bush;

Thomas Jefferson Gates, Patrick Henry Gates, Benjamin Franklin Gates;

jonathanatographer...

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http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=PED&db=glencoe&id=I39445

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Tyndal_Winthrop

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_family

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_family

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_kerry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_family

What's up with space anyway?

2008-02-01T15:27:00.000-05:00

I'm not so sure about space anymore.

It seems like it's about time we gave up this idea of space we've been lugging around for all too long now. It's vestigial – its once useful interpretation of differing experiences now appears insufficient for the organizations of forces that are the necessities of our futures.

And Kant’s empty form of time? Empty indeed. When I come across it in Deleuze I’m surprised he uses it. There is much that is questionable in our ideas of time, particularly experiences in the metrics of time.

We have an enormous amount to learn from the precariousness of operatives’ positions of secrecy in national security agencies.

Vivre la vie!

2008-01-09T13:33:00.000-05:00

Will I still want to fuck Mary-Kate when I’m 80 and she’s hosting The Price is Right (a female host – finally! – such progress!) which I’ll watch religiously while dutifully living out the twilight of my zombie existence? I hope so, but I doubt it. Trop d’effort. If such is the situation it is improbable that I’ll have learned to live according to the exigencies of reckless expenditure. I’ll have nothing to risk having never learned – or perhaps even unlearned! – what there is to be risked. And all of that at a time when people who will know me – but what will there be to know? – will think of me as being near the end, being close to my death. Nothing could be further from the truth! I could not be further from such a death. A death to which I’ll have no claim because I’ll have never brought my life close enough to distinguish between the two, never brought my life close enough perhaps to even mix the two and thus to enjoy the strength of my life which invents transformations of itself in order to overcome – and create anew! – such risky encounters. The celebration begins!

La voila, une famille: Sickening allergies in the grandparents; life threatening allergies in the son, which are become even more dangerous in the grandson, allergies which, thanks to Modern Medicine and Contemporary Commerce (provided one has the means...), are sidestepped, for a time – life goes on as normal... And the humor of it all? The conservative family, a family of traditions – we must preserve our past successes and the values which led to them. Quelle niaserie!

to stop the organs from functioning

2007-12-16T17:28:00.000-05:00

to stop the organs from functioning
to eat no more
to shit out everything and to vomit out all the rest

no more consumption

i can’t stop consuming
i have to stop consuming

to let myself be consumed
to let it work, to let it all work
overconsumption overwhelms me
overconsumption makes a me

to stop consuming, to inhibit consumption, to let it work – that leads beyond

everything that’s eaten comes out again, wants to come out again even before it’s eaten – overconsumption lies in waiting

our great nausea – to no longer suppress nausea for to vomit is to clean, to purify, to begin to work again

to vomit means – to become light

not to see, not to taste, not to eat, not to smell, not to hear

but to touch, to feel the shitting, to fuck, to be cut – thinner, deeper

an orgasm, a shit withheld, a gagging – and another body, an unsensed double, is felt, begins to operate, is consumed – but also escapes

a body of cuts, thin thin thin cuts
you will cut me
you will make my new body
you will make a new body

a new body

this war, terrible

2007-10-24T10:35:00.000-04:00

here,

for you,

from whitman's 'specimen days':

The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up

The dead in this war—there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and valleys and battle-fields of the south—Virginia, the Peninsula—Malvern hill and Fair Oaks—the banks of the Chickahominy—the terraces of Fredericksburgh—Antietam bridge—the grisly ravines of Manassas—the bloody promenade of the Wilderness—the varieties of the strayed dead, (the estimate of the War department is 25,000 national soldiers kill’d in battle and never buried at all, 5,000 drown’d—15,000 inhumed by strangers, or on the march in haste, in hitherto unfound localities—2,000 graves cover’d by sand and mud by Mississippi freshets, 3,000 carried away by caving-in of banks, &c.,)—Gettysburgh, the West, Southwest—Vicksburgh—Chattanooga—the trenches of Petersburgh—the numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere—the crop reap’d by the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery, inflammations—and blackest and loathesomest of all, the dead and living burial-pits, the prison-pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle, &c., (not Dante’s pictured hell and all its woes, its degradations, filthy torments, excell’d those prisons)—the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead—or South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)—or East or West—Atlantic coast or Mississippi valley—somewhere they crawl’d to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of hills—(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleach’d bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found yet)—our young men once so handsome and so joyous, taken from us—the son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend from the dear friend—the clusters of camp graves, in Georgia, the Carolinas, and in Tennessee—the single graves left in the woods or by the road-side, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)—the corpses floated down the rivers, and caught and lodged, (dozens, scores, floated down the upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the pursuit of Lee, following Gettysburgh)—some lie at the bottom of the sea—the general million, and the special cemeteries in almost all the States—the infinite dead—(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)—not only Northern dead leavening Southern soil—thousands, aye tens of thousands, of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.

And everywhere among these countless graves—everywhere in the many soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe, over seventy of them)—as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles—not only where the scathing trail passed those years, but radiating since in all the peaceful quarters of the land—we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word Unknown.

(In some of the cemeteries nearly all the dead are unknown. At Salisbury, N. C., for instance, the known are only 85, while the unknown are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A national monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark the spot—but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate that spot?)

-------------------------

Andersonville, Salisbury - Southern sites for prisoners of war. The following citations from Gilles Deleuze's 'Whitman', in essays critical and clinical: “...everywhere a collection of fragments, haunted by the menace of succession, that is to say, by war” (56-57). Haunted by war and its “dying parts, fragments of mutilated men (which) coexist absolutely solitary and without relation” (59).

The dead of Iraq and Afghanistan, hidden under the weight of the deaths of Vietnam - the success of 21st century medicine man; its advances. Today, the fragmented, the mutilated, wander the public art bedecked campuses of Walter Reed, dislocated, confused, ignored, isolated. ''He used to be a soldier, a killer, an athlete, and now he's reduced to this.'' They are there for rebuilding - blind, deaf, amputated; in pieces, they are to be reconstructed.

for example, here and here

the sousveillance of hasan elahi

2007-10-17T20:08:00.000-04:00

We can know where Hasan Elahi is at all times – he tells us where he is. At least, with its always operating and broadcasting GPS, where his phone is at all times.

Hasan Elahi shows us the toilets in which he urinates & defecates; H.E. shows us the meals that he eats while he’s travelling and lets us know not only the airlines he flies on but his flight numbers, with their dates & times.

Hasan Elahi shows us his debit card statements, with the dates & times of his purchases, the vendors, retaillers, businesses patronized, the amount of each transaction.

We never see Hasan Elahi – is he too modest to show himself pissing, shitting, etc., in all of these toilets, in so many airports and so many in-between spaces of arrivals & departures? He’ll never eat a meal in front of us – no, he’s far too proper for that. H.E. gives us the meals as they’re given to him – images of consumption to be consumed by any-individual-whoever.

September 2001 – Days after planes were crashed into two World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia and a field in Pennsylvania, owners of a self storage business in Florida reported that an Arab man removed suspicious, possibly even bomb-like, materials from one of their self-storage units. Hasan Elahi is not an Arab man.

Hasan Elahi makes purchases, buys stuff, engages in economic transactions of incommensurable exchange. In short, H.E. is a consumer. But what does h.e. consume? He gives us plenty of materials with which to formulate guesses... For example, he spent $479.98 at CIRCUIT CITY SS #4124 MANCHESTER NH on October 2, 2007. But the collation of proper noun, proper noun, dollar amount and location – postponing the problem of online transactions, with their spatio-temporal topographies, their dis-locations – does in no way bring us closer to the sought after knowledge of his materials.

What does H.E. buy? He spends an amount on a day at a time at one retailer or another – but what services, what materials purchased?

Perhaps it’s in his F.B.I. file: Hasan Elahi is not an Arab man.

June 2002 – I forget where HE was returning from – a location outside the U.S., could’ve been anywhere, doesn’t matter, really – when he was escorted into an I.N.S. backroom in some airport or another on the United States’s East Coast. Immigration control? U.S. passport. U.S. citizen. U.S. birth. Where was he coming from? What had he done there? And where was he before that? What is this about?

Perhaps it is in his F.B.I. file – doesn’t matter, he’s made his file redundant.

HE now does his own surveillance for the F.B.I., provides them with constantly, continuously updated information they may, perhaps, use. He does it better than they.

Soiveillance.

The Battle for Hearts and Minds

Tractable Transience.

our future is already underway...

2007-10-02T19:02:00.000-04:00

What is our choice for president? The candidates give but the palest of choices, paler still than the process in which they envelop themselves. Divert our eyes from these electoral determinations and turn toward the workings of a democracy in which each choice affirms the possibility of choosing again; a democracy which creates itself by the invention of ever new relations among the most diverse aspects and traits of any chosen environment; a democracy which is nothing more than these relations and their creation, which is here, ready for anyone who chooses to experiment, which is open, always open despite our ability to foreclose its possibilities by passively submitting to commands from closed sets of false choices.

Our democracy is found not in an individual candidate, not in any isolated individual whoever, nor in collections of individuals wherever: it is found there in the in-between spaces and in-between times which are the spaces and times of our relations and which are always in the process of being carved out and produced. Our democracy chooses the creation of relations in any direction whatever; our democracy is an “infinitely proliferating patchwork of relations”, with no beginning or end, always open and opening anew, again.

This is our future and we know it is already underway...