not the motorcycle diaries

Operation Land Grab Successful.

With thanks to ana at uriohau.

… continued.

5. Unions
6. Monks

He has died, leaving a life in seeming stasis.

His body’s it-ness: weight, tactility, laboured breath - seems to transfer onto the bodies of all those with whom he lived. (Friendship is mourning).

His body is felt in the weight of grief (stop the clocks, put out the stars), in the regular rushes of familiarity: things we see, say, do, that are of him and our connection to him (for I am not gone).

To re-member is to re-configure our bodies to accommodate loss, and slowly; more in the order of phantom limbs than of prostheses …

“It would provide rights to a group of people which would be to the exclusion of others.”

That bastard UN, always trying to reinforce hierarchies.

¡NO A LOS PRODUCTOS GRINGOS!

Sal de ahí gringuito gringuito
Sal de ahí de ese lugar…

Finjo que no puedo escuchar oír, porque soy gringuita, gringa … y no este tipo de gringa. (Pero, claro, no importa, tengo piel blanca, y dinero, sin embargo)

Yo recuerdo quando el hombre brasileiro dicho: Não deve dizer que você é ‘primeiro mundo’, você é uma persona legal!

“A discipline is always something other than an exploitation of this territory, and therefore a demonstration of an idea of knowledge [savoir]. And this idea of knowledge [savoir] should be understood as a regulation of the rapport between … [knowledge and ignorance]. It is a way of defining an idea of the thinkable, an idea of what the objects of knowledge themselves can think and know. It is therefore always a certain regulation of dissensus, of its dehiscence [écart] in relation to the ethical order, according to which a certain type of condition implies a certain type of thought. (…)

… a discipline is always much more than an ensemble of procedures which permit the thought of a given territory of objects. It is first the constitution of this territory itself, and therefore the establishment of a certain distribution of the thinkable. As such, it supposes a cut in the common fabric of manifestations of thought and language. The disciplines found their territory by establishing a dehiscence between what the phrases of the woodworker say and what they mean, between what the woodworker describes to us and the truth hidden behind the description. (…)

In-disciplinary thought… must practice a certain ignorance. It must ignore disciplinary boundaries to thereby restore their status as weapons in a dispute. This is what I have done, for example, in taking the phrases of the joiner [woodworker] out of their normal context. This normal context is that of social history, which treats them as expressions of the worker’s condition. I have taken a different path: these phrases do not describe a lived situation. They reinvent the relation between a situation and the forms of visibility and capacities of thought which are attached to it. Put differently, this narrative [récit] is a myth in the Platonic sense: it is an anti-Platonic myth, a counter-story of destiny. The Platonic myth prescribes a relationship of reciprocal confirmation between a condition and a thought. The counter-myth of the joiner breaks the circle. The indisciplinary procedure must thus create the textual and signifying space in which this relation of myth to myth is visible and thinkable. (…)

This implies another practice - an indisciplinary practice - of philosophy, of its relation to the human sciences … seiz[ing] the moment in which the philosophical pretension to found the order of discourse is reversed, becoming the declaration … of the arbitrary nature of this order. (…)

… at the moment in which it [philosophy] wants to found its status as a discipline of disciplines, it produces this reversal: the foundation of foundation is a story. And philosophy says to those knowledges [savoir] who are certain of their methods: methods are recounted stories. This does not mean that they are null and void. It means that they are weapons in a war; they are not tools which facilitate the examination of a territory but weapons which serve to establish its always uncertain boundary.

There is no assured boundary separating the territory of sociology from that of philosophy of that of the historians from literature. No well-defined boundary separates the discourse of the woodworker who is the object of science from the discourse of science itself. After all is said and done, to trace these boundaries is to trace the boundary between those who have thought through this question and those who have not. This boundary is never traced other than in the form of a story. Only the language of stories can trace the boundary, forcing the aporia of absence of final reason from the reasons of the disciplines. (…)

The poetics of knowledges does not claim that the disciplines are false knowledges. It claims that they are disciplines, ways of intervening in the interminable war between ways of declaring what a body can do, in the interminable war between the reasons of equality and those of inequality. It does not claim that they are invalid because they tell stories. It claims that they must borrow their presentations of objects, their procedures for interaction and their forms of argument from language and common thought.”

- Jacques Rancière, trans. Jon Roffe, Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge, Parrhesia, No.1, 2006, pp.1-12.

“The lesbian critique of woman-identification and the queer critique of the lesbian feminist critique of sadomasochist practices has been so embracing that it is now hard to imagine that lesbian feminists had any fun in the 1970s. While I share the view that lesbianism is a sexual orientation, which is about desire rather than identification (or desire as well as identification), I would question the distinction between “prosex” and “antisex” within some queer work. Such work tends to posit a new set of “sexual ideals” premised on liberation from what has become known as the moralizing terms of radical lesbian feminism (…). In fact, in reading backward from queer studies to the earlier work of radical feminism I was surprised to find that the most erotic and daring work, the work that moved me the most, was the earlier writing. I found the work of radical lesbian feminists both erotic and demanding, even in the mode of its critique between sex and power. Such lesbian feminists, in writing about male power, also search beyond their critiques for a new sexual vocabulary in which women’s desire for women can be put in other words [and, I would add, in which sexual desire in general can be put in other words, as far as that does not co-opt or appropriate spaces occupied by lesbian desire].

Marilyn Frye, for example, calls for a sexual vocabulary that is open to the different possibilities for action when women’s bodies get closer: “Let it be an open, generous, commodious concept emcompassing all the acts and activities by which we generate with each other pleasures and thrills, tenderness and ectsasy, passages of passionate carnality of whatever duration or profundity. Everything from vanilla to liquorice, from pure to chanteuse, from velvet to ice, from cuddles to cunts, from chortles to tears” (1990:314). In offering a vocabulary for lesbian sex, Frye and other radical lesbian feminists embrace how lesbian orientations can take many social and sexual forms precisely because they do not depend on the terms available within existing sexual vocabularies.”

- Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, pp.194-195.

g-string feminism: this category is dedicated to the g-wearin’ woman who told the g-watchin’ man she was with that she wore g-strings because they stimulated her sexually, and the man who then used this anecdote to encourage his new female partner to wear them (c’mon, some women find it really sexual! it’s empowering! it’s not about being pleasing to the hetero male gaze at the expense of your own physical pleasure at all … wedgies are totally hot right now! et cetera). Likewise dedicated to those gender & sexuality academics and activists who use prosex, queer and BDSM to run down other forms of desire and intimacy - or, as Ahmed puts it, “to posit a new set of sexual ideals”; a project which strikes me as, above and beyond anything else, rather lacking in imagination.

And with my sincere apologies to readers who love the string in their/its own right.

1. Drugs

2. Terrorists

3. The Internet

4. Violent minority groups and other fare evaders

*List constantly being updated

“MILITANT APEC protesters are secretly plotting an outbreak of violence for US President George W. Bush’s arrival in Sydney tomorrow, distributing a rioter’s training manual on how to wear gas masks, confront police and even evade fares.”

As you can see from this image of police and protester interaction at the G20 protests in 2006, having some notion of how one might minimise the negative effects of this interaction would NEVER be part of any protester’s preparations for APEC.

PS. OMG! Rayte my fenz!!1!1!