archive : s0metim3s

The first paragraph, in late-running final draft, of a collaborative text-image project with Bryan of subtopia (and it may explain something more of this recent cryptic post):

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. - Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach”.

Thesis Eleven – what is ‘the point’? What is at stake? Eleventh - that moment beyond the neat ten, in excess of the theological commandments. Karl Marx’s eleventh comment on Feuerbach, while very far from being, as it is so often read to be, the purportedly a-theoretical pragmatic command which forestalls asking any significant or difficult questions about ‘how things are’ or, even less, amounting to a dialectics which seeks to project idealised versions of what exists into an infinite future, is nevertheless equivocal enough to have enabled interpretations of such varieties. Such are the contingencies of writing and reading, to be sure.

NB and update: Since there’s a strike on, I’m temporarily removing the links to LiveJournal [*.*] from the post and comments below, as requested - they’ll return after midnight UTC time on the 22nd.

A small collection of material on the Livejournal softwar: *Zero Tolerance Strikethrough* comes up against (Harry Potter) fandom/slash - see here also. | *Deletion of interest categories*, see table here - gone are Faeries, Porn, Fanfiction, Sex … | Flagging *as self-policing* | Blocking of searches, *a list*. | Migration to InsaneJournal and other portals, but also a good chronology. | Some fans move to develop alternative site.

There are a few questions here - the attempts to separate, ongoing since fandom.com disputes, good fans from bad ones, the latter being those who do slash, but also infringe copyrights more generally; the prompt to alternative site production occurring alongside increasing portalisation and buy-ups; quite possibly more … But the thing that particularly interests me here is the ways in which this softwar does - and does not - echo the Intervention, in the intersection of the normative and property. Something to ponder, so I’ll gather these links. If anyone knows of others, let me know.

A couple of lengthy fragments from Catherine Mills’ “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 107:1, 2008), following on from these meanderings around questions of norm and precariousness here and here:

Toward the end of his book State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben writes:

One day humanity will play with law just a children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.1

Sometimes people just need to go. Exit. This is Pip Starr’s documentary made during and around Woomera2002, which is where I met him - sweet, gentle, passionate, shy. More of his work here, and speaking about his most recent project here. His funeral is today, in Melbourne. Much of his work turned around the stark questions of escape and its confinements, life, death - from that on Woomera to his more recent project on the Carteret Islands. And the world is not a better place in this moment, it feels narrower, the sense of escape more difficult. Suicide will do that.

London 2012, who the fuck wants it except middle England pricks in their executive homes, WPC’s with names like Sally and Gaynor and a raft of deluded idiots who don’t realise local opportunities means shit jobs in the service industry. - We Are Bad.

More from the revellers here; and the waste-removalists here. See also Marina Vishmidt’s forthcoming Contrapolis project.

In “On Appropriation”, Marcus Boon writes:

Contemporary issues around copyright and intellectual property (whether related to downloading digital music “copies” or the right of artists to sample the work of others and use it in their own work — issues which Byrne and Eno were among the first to confront with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) result from a growing confusion as to the nature of the appropriate. As the evidence of the fundamental character of appropriation accumulates (revealed through technologies or otherwise), a crisis as to our relation to the appropriate and the appropriable becomes ever more apparent. Although Heidegger recognized this crisis, even in his late writings it has the character of something unknown. And Byrne and Eno didn’t know either. But this “not knowing” is not merely a general statement of confusion — Heidegger spoke of the event of appropriation; the status of the event is that it opens up into the not known. Our experiences of sound are precisely an example of such an event of appropriation. We do not know what it is that moves us in music, and we do not know from where it is that music speaks or sings to us. That which appears as sound in the sound world no longer belongs to the one who sung or played or composed it.

The entire is essay is here (via B).