Morning by Pablo Neruda
The very beautiful and perhaps most famous of Neruda’s shorter works.
Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round.
You’ve moon-lines, apple pathways
Naked you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.
Naked you are blue as a night in Cuba;
You’ve vines and stars in your hair.
Naked you are spacious and yellow
As summer in a golden church.
Naked you are tiny as one of your nails;
Curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
And you withdraw to the underground world.
As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores;
Your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,
And becomes a naked hand again.
I had the good fortune of having a very beautiful copy of Neruda’s 100 sonnets in Spanish and Italian – and had the even better fortune of being able to give it to a friend who enjoyed them as much as I did.
Allende’s homeboy – Orpheus of Il Postino – Grande NERUDA!
Oh Radical Dandies of Little Faith!
We poets,
the failed pragmatists,
the cloak and dagger nihilists,
pint driven, punch drunk -
half sunk
madmen.
Grandiloquent monkeys of a primate pomp,
footsteps behind our gods -
somewhere between hither and thither,
both being dust,
both being story,
both being seen in dazed company of the unbeloved.
Gods when we dream,
beggars when we think,
dancing jesuits on our crosses,
insane devils when we drink -
benedictions of faithless seeing when we sleep.
Dance Against The Deficit Lies – Having it Peaceful
Dance Against The Deficit Lies – Having it Peaceful.
A really great action on the day – anybody who can make it down, please come along.
Links of the Day 4th January
1) Facebook is now supposedly worth $50 billion and Zuckerberg is considering a floatation
2) How arts cuts are like ‘ripping up the Magna Carta‘
3) Tim Montgomerie on a potential Lib-Con party amalgamation
4) How the cuts will hit various London Councils
5) New York rappers ‘Das Racist’ who cite Foucault and DaDa as influences
6) The Invisible – can’t work out if this song is amazing or ordinary. Great video though.
Kundera and Foucault on Dogma, Ideology and Intellectuals
For Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, the novelist is akin to an explorer of existence, rather than a historian or documentarian, with such ‘explorers’ having a preference for questions over answers.
“Outside the novel, we’re in the realm of affirmation: everyone is sure of his statements: the politician, the philosopher, the concierge. Within the universe of the novel, however, no one affirms: it is the realm of play and of hypotheses. In the novel, then, reflection is essentially inquiring, hypothetical.”
Similar to the thinking of Lukacs on the novel, Kundera believes that this interrogation is performed through what he calls ‘experimental thought’ by which he means, essentially, a non-systematic and inherently agonistic mode of ironic thinking.
“…a person who thinks is automatically prompted to systematize; it is his eternal temptation (mine too, even in writing this book): a temptation to describe all the implications of his ideas; to pre-empt any objections and refute them in advance; thus to barricade his ideas. Now, a person who thinks should not try to persuade others of his belief; that is what puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the “man of conviction”; politicians like to call themselves that; but what is a conviction? It is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed, and the “man of conviction” is a man restricted; experimental thought seeks not to persuade but to inspire; to inspire another thought, to set thought moving; that is why a novelist must systematically desystematize his thought, kick at the barricade that he himself has erected around his ideas.“
Conviction is, argues Kundera, the death of thought and dialectic. It is the rendering of the living and supple body of one’s imagination and turning it to a statue that may last forever albeit at a cost…that it is no longer human.
Such thinking is not dissimilar to Foucault’s views on the role of the intellectual when he briefly touched on this issue in his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?‘
“The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).”
Perhaps the role of the intellectual is by neccesity to maintain thought that is that living body of agonistic, dialectical and contrary thinking as opposed to the statue of ossified convictions that belong to the rest of us.
Links of the Day January 3rd
1) An event that is scheduled for the 14th of January that has enjoyed far less criticism and far more support than one that had been proposed for the following day can be found here
2) Welfare bill soars as coalition counts cost of austerity drive here (And I personally think that unemployment figures for 2010 will be far in excess of what the OBR is predicting)
3) Great article by Michael Chessum of UCL on mass direct action here
4) The kind of irreverent direct action that one hopes will become very widespread as the year develops here
5) Great Articles about why the student movement should remain autonomous and decentraslized rather than become traditional hierarchical organisations
Marcus Malarkey at Ceasefire here
Guy Aitchison at OpenDemocracy here
Matt Hall at UCL Occupation here
Links of the Day – 2nd January
1)Dan “We, the Media” Gillmor’s latest book, Mediactive is a master-class in media literacy for the 21st century – article by Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.net here
2) Tech review of 2010 with CNN here
3) Amazing photos of post-industrial Detroit here
4) Royal wedding memoribilia that although still over-priced junk is at least funny here
5) Some wicked Portughese/ Angolan music from Buraka Som Sistema – big Brazilian electro influences here
6) Probably the best Italian tune of 2010 out there – Marrakash with some heavy duty Bloody Betroots instrumentals here Non me ne frega un cazzo! Heavy tune.
Educate and Win – The UKuncut event on the 15th January
Given the recent exchanges over the nature of the UKuncut event on the 15th of January in John Lewis and HSBC – I thought it worthy to point out the details of the events as written on the Uncut website.
It is our contention that it is time the British people began to have a genuine debate about how our banking sector is run and that all possibilities for our banks going forward should be scrutinized and thought over. In order to begin this debate we believe that the time has come to inform and educate the general public not only of the numerous failings of the existing system, where banks exist purely to advance short-term shareholder interest, but also of the many comparative advantages that other models might hold, be they mutuals, co-ops, credit unions or nationalized banks. Another financial world is possible.
Given the likelihood of an attempt to privatize both Northern Rock this year and the Royal Mail we feel it imperative to get such a debate started as soon as is possible.
This debate must be done on our terms and our streets. The people must define the debate about where we go with banking both retail and investment, this can no longer simply be left to media and political elites. In order to facilitate this we must educate and inform people of the alternatives. Banking reform and restructuring needs a movement, movements need people to participate, powerful participants need knowledge.
There will be a series of public lectures at both John Lewis and HSBC. We will also distribute flowers and sweets to those whom choose to shop and more importantly work at John Lewis given, despite its numerous imperfections, that it represents a different . way of doing business. We will proceed to disseminate information with regards to the comparative merits of co-operative banking, mutuals and credit unions over privately owned public shareholder banks, as well as highlighting HSBC’s own tax evasion outside the HSBC on 431 Oxford St and 196 Oxford Street.
The action will begin at 12:30 on Saturday, January 15th – we will meet outside John Lewis at 300 Oxford Street on the right hand corner of the front of the building as you face it. To self-identify and identify the group please bring your favourite book/ newspaper or flowers…look forward to seeing you all!
For what it is worth, and this is utterly irrelevant given this is an event predicated on starting debate, educating and infoming my personal opinions are as follows.
In the next 12 months I would like to see nationalization of RBS and Lloyds HBOs and Northern Rock put into workers hands. I would also like to stave off privatization of the post office – and this is a battle we can win – we just need to educate the public about the multiplicity of models and foster some proper public deliberation about these issues.
I would also like to see re-localized economies with local credit mutuals, staffed and owned by local people – community-based, community-owned finance.
Workers co-operatives where workers own not only profits but also the means of production is my preferred model regarding public services and enterprises.
However my opinions are just that, opinions – on the day we will begin a process of educating the public about the many alternatives – but we must start with something they recognize however imperfect it is.
ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE
A positive start is educating people about employee-owned enterprise and I think it makes perfect sense to get in the broader public conscience.
Attached are a few resources with regards to mass collaboration when it is facilitated by online networks. This new model is referred to as as ‘Open-source’ political economy by theorists such as Yochai Benkler at the Berkman Centre, Havard – a form of social production that is based on the same paradigm as open-source computer programming that has given us among other things Linux and Apache – with qualitatively new phenomenon such as ‘prosumption’ and the individual ‘pro-am‘ at it’s centre.
Elsewhere I have argued that political participation and protest is beginning to exhibit signs of this same open-source paradigm.
In recent weeks some people have asked for pointers with regards to useful content that looks at the ability for social movements and political protest groups to ‘organize without becoming organizations’. Below are a few brief articles and videos, I hope that they are of some use.
1) Yochai Benkler on the new open-source economics A good introduction to issues of open-source political economy and its relation to social production – Benkler’s stand out work hitherto is The Wealth of Networks.
2) Clay Shirky on the idea of this same paradigm facilitating ‘organizing without organizations‘
3) Shirky elsewhere arguing how such dynamics create a situation of ‘cognitive surplus‘ – a situation where previously unbelievable possibilities are rendered possible.
4) Shirky’s own thoughts on collaborations vs. organisations had a major impact on this piece on networks vs. organisations
5) Christakis on the awesome and unrealized power of social networks
6) Howard Rheingold on collective action, participation and online collaboration
7) Charlie Leadbetter on the rise of the pro-am – pivotal to the rise of prosumptive production – where distinctions between producers and consumers of social content, including social movements and protest, are dissolved.
Some useful texts for amuch broader context and historical sweep since 2000 -
1) The Cathedral and the Bazaar – Eric Raymond
2) The Anarchist in the Library – Sida Vaidhyanathan
3) The Hacker Ethic – Torvalds, Castells and Himanen
4) The Wealth of Networks – Yochai Benkler
5) The Power of Identity – Manuel Castells
Finally a very good piece on this topic recently is offered by Joss Hands with James Quinney discussing digital activism at the New Left Project
Three Direct Actions First Two Weeks of January
The first will be a celebration of Nick Clegg’s 43rd birthday, details of which can be found here
The second is a Dance Against the Deficit Lies event here
The third is a flashMob at John Lews and then a number of high street banks to highlight diverse business models and how banks in the country need not just be privatized but can be mutuals, credit unions, co-ops or natioanlized – there are alternatives – this event can be found here
I have a feeling we will be very quick out of the blocks doing what we are doing within the student movement and more generally the growing national anti-cuts movement.
Solidarity to all in 2011 – always forwards never back.
