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theory
Reappropriate the Imagination!
Submitted by onion on Mon, 01/05/2009 - 18:17
By Cindy Milstein
(Note: This essay originally appeared in Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority, edited by Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland (AK Press, 2007). I’ve been meaning to republish it for months now, but finally found the perfect excuse: the “City from Below” conference in Baltimore (http://illvox.org/2008/11/30/the-city-from-below-a-call-for-participation/). One of the “City from Below” organizers is CampBaltimore, which was used as a promising example in this essay, and this new project underscores the interplay between “reappropriating the imagination” and potentially reappropriating the material world of our lives and communities. So in hopes of encouraging creative thinking that’s also, in turn, a creative praxis of social transformation, now seems like a good time to circulate this piece and point people toward the “City from Below” call for participation--against the backdrop of a world that’s more than ever in need of repossessing from below.)
Beyond Voting
Submitted by onion on Thu, 11/06/2008 - 02:06
from the B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S
THE LIMITS OF ELECTORAL POLITICS
Roughly speaking we can distinguish five degrees of “government”:
“Spider” Woman: Louise Bourgeois’s Retrospective at the Guggenheim
Submitted by onion on Tue, 10/14/2008 - 02:49
by Bronwyn
On entering Louise Bourgeois’s Guggenheim Retrospective (the museum, a spiraling stroll of four floors – like walking inside of a large conch shell is a perfect space for her work) one is greeted by a 30-foot, steel spider: “Maman” (1999). Typical of the ambiguous and contradictory emotions found in and elicited by her work, the spider (or mother) is simultaneously frightening, larger than life and devouring – representative of…well, mothers, and of the sustenance of life… the spider is also a weaver – of stories, social threads, interconnectedness; a spider’s web is both practical and beautiful to behold. To kill a spider is bad luck. Bourgeois, named by her feminist mother, after Louise Michel, an anarchist involved in the Paris Commune, has said “my best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as a spider.” A tapestry-repairer and a strong role model in many ways, her mother nevertheless tolerated a visible affair between Louise’s father and her governess, a self-described childhood ‘trauma’ that Bourgeois has revisited in her artwork through out her life.
John Holloway: 1968 and Doors to New Worlds
Submitted by rosa on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 13:57
From Turbulence 4 via http://auto_sol.tao.ca
With the explosions of 1968 still reverberating, John Holloway talks of our fast-moving, unstable and polyphonic revolt against abstract labour, the activity that weaves capitalist domination.
Hope in a Time of Elections: Movement Building at the Summer Conventions
Submitted by onion on Thu, 06/19/2008 - 18:25
Cindy Milstein
(Note: This essay is reprinted from the July–August 2008 issue of Left Turn magazine, which features a special section on the elections; it was written before Obama secured the nomination.)
“The world as it is, is not the world as it has to be.”1 Long our basic aspiration, this ideal now springs from a U.S. presidential contender. And yet the gap between the change that Barack Obama promises and the transformation that we know is crucial may offer a space of possibility. For even as liberals are utilizing “hope” to captivate millions this election, embodied in Obama’s “New Politics,”2 I would maintain that those of us who seek a nonhierarchical world are still the real carriers of utopia. Nevertheless, this election supplies us the opening to reject statism in a way that’s sensitive to the historical moment and prefigurative of a directly democratic society—but only if we mind the gap.
"Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint"
Submitted by onion on Wed, 06/18/2008 - 05:04
by Silvia Federici
[Precarious work is a central concept in movement discussions of the capitalist reorganization of work and class relations in today’s global economy. Silvia Federici analyzes the potential and limits of this concept as an analytic and organizational tool. She claims reproductive labor is a hidden continent of work and struggle the movement must recognize in its political work, if it is to address the key questions we face in organizing for an alternative to capitalist society. How do we struggle over reproductive labor without destroying ourselves, and our communities? How do we create a self-reproducing movement? How do we overcome the sexual, racial, and generational hierarchies built upon the wage?
Social Change in the 21st Century
Submitted by rosa on Thu, 05/29/2008 - 03:39
Angela Davis at U of Ps Women’s Week – 2/15/08 the 21st Century
by Bronwyn Lepore
Angela Davis, of the beautiful gap-toothed smile and uncompromising spirit – and she smiles often, in the face of (or in solidarity with) the struggles she speaks to, and readily – shakes her shaggy fro as she warms to the audience of students, academics and activists tightly packed into College Hall for her Women’s Week keynote address on “Social Change in the 21st Century.” Despite the crowd – even after moving the talk to a larger venue to accommodate demand, many had to wait patiently outside the hall for a promised short after chat – she manages to create a sense of warmth and familiarity, as if we were all crowded into someone’s living room and she’d just popped in for a brief, but intense, chat. “Who’s here?” she asked. Recognizing the privileged status of many in the predominately Penn associated crowd, Davis challenged the audience to put such formally acquired knowledge to good use, as she herself has done, “so that it might make a difference, not for ourselves, but for others,” and to recognize and respect the intellect of those less privileged outside the academy who typically form the core of grassroots movements.
