June 26th, 2024
Welcome to the third Obecność letter. In this letter we mourn and celebrate the sad passing of our friend and comrade Marina Vishmidt. Additionally, this letter contains info on our first publication, updates and insights from recent activities, as well as a video and text contribution from Underground Diasporic Committee for the Dispersion of Abomination. The video and publication are available above.
1. Letter to the Historical Party — Memorial for Marina Vishmidt.
2. Kawkab Hassan on Liberating the Levant.
3. Rehearsing Our Autonomy: “We aren’t theirs, and it isn’t for them to say where we are. We only belong to the world”.
4. The Movement to Come: Notes on the Riga Anarchist Book Fair.
1.
Marina was involved from the beginning in conversations on the idea of Obecność. She provided erudite and well-informed advice on the concepts and ideas involved in our early efforts to “circulate autonomous forms.” As well as showing gratitude for her role in this and as a contributor to Obecność, this letter by Noah Brehmer draws attention to a more fundamental legacy that Marina leaves us with: a strategy of belonging to the historical party.
The network I encountered through and as Marina lacked cult leadership and master pedagogues, political cliques, and intellectual mafias fighting over territories and prestige as the officiated representatives of class and political interests. The bonds Marina persistently cultivated with me—and with so many others—can be evoked as a form of political belonging that echoes Marx’s account of the historical party: a network of comrades dispersed throughout the class struggle. This entails a correspondence between militants brought together on a common and equal ground to share strategies of revolt and their concrete, historical, developments as lived experiences. The historical party, as Marx noted, “is no school.”
Despite our correspondence almost never taking any public form, and being valorized as such, Marina remained profoundly committed to our decidedly nonprofessional exchanges of thought. These came to center on contemporary social movements, questions of class composition, and autonomy. Even while her life in London became increasingly busy, grinding and absorbing, Marina held a magnificent ability to steal time for such conspiracies. A theft, I’m well aware, that could only be consistently perpetrated with the help of her friends, her partner, union comrades and fellow travelers of the historical party. A few years ago she introduced me to the concept of obstinacy—a notion of historical agency within conditions of dependency—in Negt and Kluge, and Marina’s path of class struggle evoked a great deal of this. One of the many expressions of this was in her militant commitment to the non and para institutional correspondences of the historical party.
Finally, I begin to ask myself and ask you what the particular significance of our historical party is? For me the correspondence with Marina, as one of my most significant bases of belonging to the party—which I now share in various ways with some of you—has been integral to thinking and practicing a communist form of life. A way of thinking and knowing the world that is radically situated in the concrete positionality of the historical totality. What I’m trying to say here is that the correspondence form that Marina cultivated, in its capacity to welcome intimacy and the personal, uniquely situated theorizations of the world within the concrete instances of their historical compositions. It is often noted that there is no theorizing the totality outside the totality, but it is far less emphasized in much of the Marxist communist camp—in which Marina remained firmly situated—that this in turn means navigating the domain of affect and the haptic particularities of singular lives in their struggles. Marina was critical of the misogynistic and didactic impulses that inform certain imperatives to gain an absolutizing knowledge of the object of reality (mechanistic periodizations), so as to liberate these theoretical imperatives from such limitations. She was equally critical towards the new paradigms of institutional care, which she saw as amounting to “the ruthless denial of political questions in favor of an etiolated ethics of care that somehow always affirms market subjectivity.” The correspondence form of the historical party, by contrast, is properly speaking dialectical. It is knowledge as a concrete-abstraction and as a violent negation directed toward the totality of capitalist determinations in historical revolts. As Anthony Iles aptly recounts in his own memorial and celebration:
“For Marina, everything was up for scrutiny and transformation. She believed and practiced that to think and speak about something was to transform it, whether ideas or relations, requiring a responsibility to actively refashion the object until it not only gave up its essence and name, but further until it was rendered completely plastic.”
Marina guided me over the years as I drifted deep into the noise of life with all its miseries, its beauties and truths. We theorized together the division of labor in the kitchens I worked at in Phily, a knowledge that would integrally help me as I began to cultivate the skills to organize a hospitality sector solidarity network with friends in Lithuanian. We broadly conspired together about the idea of communism, certainly not a world where all labor becomes artistic! Marina tirelessly helped me with my writing, as someone who was not connected to a university environment. Her incisive edits, references and always critical summations were integral to my ability to do militant research all of these years.
To conclude for now, I share a passage from our comrade Andreas’ memorial:
“No matter how painful it is to continue without one of our shining lights, as Goldman declared: ‘No, Durruti is not dead! He is more alive than living … He lives in us for ever and ever.’ Marina is more alive than living, and our struggles are stronger for it, because she put the whole world in there, in her work, in her friendships, and in her commitment to revolutionary horizons.”
Also see:
The Conditions of Possibility: Tributes to Marina Vishmidt, by Mute Collective
Marina Vishmidt: 1976–2024 by Andreas Petrossiants
Marina’s Cues, by Kerstin Stakmeier
2.
“Amidst the chaos of economic crisis, geopolitical realignment, climate change and state failure, emerged the conditions to foster rebellion. The prior decades had eroded the legitimacy of the parties of reform. By the beginning of the forties, some form of mass protests, riots, and armed movements had erupted on every continent. [...] Increasingly over the course of the decade, these insurrections took on a communist character. The first communes to rise out of the wreckage were in the Levant (2041) and in the Andes (2043). These insurrections became models for communization as more and more nation-states fell into disarray. The first commune of East and Central Asia emerged in Xinjiang in 2045, and the first commune of South Asia emerged in Chennai in 2047. The fall of China and India, enormous forces in Asian politics and economics, marked the end of nation-state power on the continent.”
Recorded on September 20, 2067, in Brooklyn, and released on May 1st, 2024 during a demo in Krakow, the broadsheet “Kawkab Hassan on Liberating the Levant” wishfully announces news of the future as though it were the present: Palestine liberated and global empire abolished. We publish this broadsheet amidst rapidly unfolding events in Palestine and beyond. The emergent international solidarity movement, a response to the unthinkable horrors and catastrophes of the latest imperial genocide, is an outburst of radiant paths of autonomy and international solidarity. We can only hope that our reality meets and outpaces the time-lines of O’Brien and Abdelhadi’s sci-fi account.
The content of the broadsheet was taken from the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Published by Common Notions Press the broadsheet is a collaboration.
Print copies are currently available in Poland at Spoldzielnia Ogniwo (Krakow) and with Niecztelne Illegibles, in Copenhagen at the Book Cafe, as well as Luna6, Vilnius. It will soon be available at 56a London. For a digital copy scroll down, to pick up your own copies get in touch!
Marina was involved from the beginning in conversations on the idea of Obecność. She provided erudite and well-informed advice on the concepts and ideas involved in our early efforts to “circulate autonomous forms.” As well as showing gratitude for her role in this and as a contributor to Obecność, this letter by Noah Brehmer draws attention to a more fundamental legacy that Marina leaves us with: a strategy of belonging to the historical party.
The network I encountered through and as Marina lacked cult leadership and master pedagogues, political cliques, and intellectual mafias fighting over territories and prestige as the officiated representatives of class and political interests. The bonds Marina persistently cultivated with me—and with so many others—can be evoked as a form of political belonging that echoes Marx’s account of the historical party: a network of comrades dispersed throughout the class struggle. This entails a correspondence between militants brought together on a common and equal ground to share strategies of revolt and their concrete, historical, developments as lived experiences. The historical party, as Marx noted, “is no school.”
Despite our correspondence almost never taking any public form, and being valorized as such, Marina remained profoundly committed to our decidedly nonprofessional exchanges of thought. These came to center on contemporary social movements, questions of class composition, and autonomy. Even while her life in London became increasingly busy, grinding and absorbing, Marina held a magnificent ability to steal time for such conspiracies. A theft, I’m well aware, that could only be consistently perpetrated with the help of her friends, her partner, union comrades and fellow travelers of the historical party. A few years ago she introduced me to the concept of obstinacy—a notion of historical agency within conditions of dependency—in Negt and Kluge, and Marina’s path of class struggle evoked a great deal of this. One of the many expressions of this was in her militant commitment to the non and para institutional correspondences of the historical party.
Finally, I begin to ask myself and ask you what the particular significance of our historical party is? For me the correspondence with Marina, as one of my most significant bases of belonging to the party—which I now share in various ways with some of you—has been integral to thinking and practicing a communist form of life. A way of thinking and knowing the world that is radically situated in the concrete positionality of the historical totality. What I’m trying to say here is that the correspondence form that Marina cultivated, in its capacity to welcome intimacy and the personal, uniquely situated theorizations of the world within the concrete instances of their historical compositions. It is often noted that there is no theorizing the totality outside the totality, but it is far less emphasized in much of the Marxist communist camp—in which Marina remained firmly situated—that this in turn means navigating the domain of affect and the haptic particularities of singular lives in their struggles. Marina was critical of the misogynistic and didactic impulses that inform certain imperatives to gain an absolutizing knowledge of the object of reality (mechanistic periodizations), so as to liberate these theoretical imperatives from such limitations. She was equally critical towards the new paradigms of institutional care, which she saw as amounting to “the ruthless denial of political questions in favor of an etiolated ethics of care that somehow always affirms market subjectivity.” The correspondence form of the historical party, by contrast, is properly speaking dialectical. It is knowledge as a concrete-abstraction and as a violent negation directed toward the totality of capitalist determinations in historical revolts. As Anthony Iles aptly recounts in his own memorial and celebration:
“For Marina, everything was up for scrutiny and transformation. She believed and practiced that to think and speak about something was to transform it, whether ideas or relations, requiring a responsibility to actively refashion the object until it not only gave up its essence and name, but further until it was rendered completely plastic.”
Marina guided me over the years as I drifted deep into the noise of life with all its miseries, its beauties and truths. We theorized together the division of labor in the kitchens I worked at in Phily, a knowledge that would integrally help me as I began to cultivate the skills to organize a hospitality sector solidarity network with friends in Lithuanian. We broadly conspired together about the idea of communism, certainly not a world where all labor becomes artistic! Marina tirelessly helped me with my writing, as someone who was not connected to a university environment. Her incisive edits, references and always critical summations were integral to my ability to do militant research all of these years.
To conclude for now, I share a passage from our comrade Andreas’ memorial:
“No matter how painful it is to continue without one of our shining lights, as Goldman declared: ‘No, Durruti is not dead! He is more alive than living … He lives in us for ever and ever.’ Marina is more alive than living, and our struggles are stronger for it, because she put the whole world in there, in her work, in her friendships, and in her commitment to revolutionary horizons.”
Also see:
The Conditions of Possibility: Tributes to Marina Vishmidt, by Mute Collective
Marina Vishmidt: 1976–2024 by Andreas Petrossiants
Marina’s Cues, by Kerstin Stakmeier
2.
“Amidst the chaos of economic crisis, geopolitical realignment, climate change and state failure, emerged the conditions to foster rebellion. The prior decades had eroded the legitimacy of the parties of reform. By the beginning of the forties, some form of mass protests, riots, and armed movements had erupted on every continent. [...] Increasingly over the course of the decade, these insurrections took on a communist character. The first communes to rise out of the wreckage were in the Levant (2041) and in the Andes (2043). These insurrections became models for communization as more and more nation-states fell into disarray. The first commune of East and Central Asia emerged in Xinjiang in 2045, and the first commune of South Asia emerged in Chennai in 2047. The fall of China and India, enormous forces in Asian politics and economics, marked the end of nation-state power on the continent.”
Recorded on September 20, 2067, in Brooklyn, and released on May 1st, 2024 during a demo in Krakow, the broadsheet “Kawkab Hassan on Liberating the Levant” wishfully announces news of the future as though it were the present: Palestine liberated and global empire abolished. We publish this broadsheet amidst rapidly unfolding events in Palestine and beyond. The emergent international solidarity movement, a response to the unthinkable horrors and catastrophes of the latest imperial genocide, is an outburst of radiant paths of autonomy and international solidarity. We can only hope that our reality meets and outpaces the time-lines of O’Brien and Abdelhadi’s sci-fi account.
The content of the broadsheet was taken from the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Published by Common Notions Press the broadsheet is a collaboration.
Print copies are currently available in Poland at Spoldzielnia Ogniwo (Krakow) and with Niecztelne Illegibles, in Copenhagen at the Book Cafe, as well as Luna6, Vilnius. It will soon be available at 56a London. For a digital copy scroll down, to pick up your own copies get in touch!
3.
Obecność circulates a new video work “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora” [8:22m] by the Prague-based Underground Diasporic Committee for the Dispersion of Abomination. It is accompanied with a reflection by member Joe Grim Feinberg on the release of the Declaration as part of an action with Der Bund on May 1st in Krakow. In the following he explores the questions this performative rehearsal of autonomy raises on the relation between states and diasporas generally.
A band of us descended on Krakow, to join the city’s May 1st march. This was specifically to join its Jewish bloc, organized by elements close to the Jewish Labor Bund. The latter is a historically monumental force of Diaspora leftism in Europe, recently revived. We traveled from Vilnius, Berlin, London, and Prague. Why? To say that Diaspora is here. Do, דאָ. And it is marching forward. And it is not just about Jews.
May 1st is the world’s day to celebrate resistance, the day of all the workers of the world. We marched beside the Palestine solidarity bloc, saying: Diaspora is all over the world.
We’re not floating on clouds in the sky or in some faraway place that claims to be our home. Like the last words of the Yiddish partisan song “Zog nit keynmol”: mir zaynen do. We’re here. We are here and other people are there in Israel (the occupied territories). We refuse to let them justify their being there by promising to make us be there too. We aren’t there. We’re here. And some of us here prepared a “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora.” We announced this at an event after the march and released a video recording made by the clandestine committee that prepared the declaration. With this declaration, made on International Workers Day, we wanted to make it plain: we aren’t theirs, and it isn’t for them to say where we are. We only belong to the world.
Diaspora means: our home is where we are. Some of us may force states to secure our rights to be where we are. Some have to struggle against states that deny those rights. But the independence of Diaspora means we need no state to justify our being here. But why should Diaspora be independent? Diaspora is inherently opposed to separation, except under extreme circumstances. But the circumstances are extreme. Israel does not allow Diaspora to be Diaspora. Additionally, it makes Palestinians into a growing diaspora without granting them the right to independence. By declaring independence, we declare the autonomy of Palestinians and Jews everywhere, no matter what the states say.
However, declaring independence is, in itself, never a solution. It is only a way of more adequately posing a problem. The problem is to figure out how to be where we are and how to make it so others can be where they are: it is the question of autonomy. And this means being more than just here. We are here, mir zaynen do, but “do” is a kind of here that is also still there. We have to remember the there that is a part of here. But we should never be there without also being here. We are here and there, where we are and where we might be.
The Bundist ideal of doikayt was not imposed to keep people where they were, or to enclose people in an exclusive here, as if it were enough for them, and as if it were for them alone. Doikayt was invoked to let people dream without having to flee. To let them take trips to the clouds so that they could build their lands a little higher when they came back down.
There’s nothing wrong with taking trips to the clouds or excursions to promised lands, as long as we remember that promises are only promises and clouds are only clouds. As long as we still judge our clouds, whatever fantastical shape they take, by how much they rain. And as long as we still judge our lands by the life that they allow to grow on them.
Diaspora, etymologically, means the spreading of seeds. Seeds grow in soil but they scatter again. They know centers, stems and trunks, not borders. Diaspora has many centers. We sometimes call them “Jerusalems.” Salonika was once “the Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Vilnius “the Jerusalem of the North.” One place that definitely is no where’s Jerusalem today is Jerusalem. Perhaps someday Jerusalem could become the Jerusalem of Palestine, but it isn’t yet, and because of what Israel has done to it, it hasn’t been for a long time now.
Diaspora is here and Diaspora is there too. Israel and Palestine are Diaspora in equal measure. The more Palestinians are exiled, the more Israel becomes a land of exile, and no structure built on exile can be anybody’s home. But if Exile gives way to Diaspora, where people can be where they are, people can begin to be at home again.
Meanwhile, we’ll be building up our own Diaspora here. Not just for Jews. Jewishness is one of many paths to Diaspora. Jewishness is a legacy some of us claim because it is a way of being here without being only here—which is to say, without being whatever the rulers of this place declare that here should be. Jewishness does not have to be about being Jewish. It can be about not having to be fully and exclusively any one thing. The nation-states declare themselves complete and exclusive and pure, and the Jewish legacy answers, alongside other diasporic peoples: “No you aren’t, because we’re still here.”
This is also the legacy of the workers’ movement. The nation-states worship at the altar of the Bourgeoisie and Capital, which makes nations in its image. These states forget that they have also made workers, which they kicked out of Eden. They declare their Eden complete and pure without the workers, but the workers’ movement says: “No you aren’t complete, because we’re not done, and we’re still here.” Mir zaynen do.
4.
It was surprising for us all to hear word of the sudden appearance of a new movement of autonomy in Latvia. Well, surprising since over the past decade of movement activity in the Baltic territories, Latvia has been particularly inert. Besides an older initiative that holds a little space where Zapatista coffee is sold—an isolated tendency running on a seemingly indiscernible impetus from the past—and faint murmurs of Tiqqun followers on a farm, there has been little comradely connection to note.
The new grouping was in part mobilized into action by the recent genocide unfolding in Gaza. They speak of this as an “unprecedented protest for Latvia” with “many new comrades” joining the movement (you can read their full founding letter here). Yet, more than merely a spontaneous response to Gaza, one can discern the roots of this movement in older organizing precedents, found in Riga’s counterculture camp. This was a kind of Eastern European dissident infused artistic bohemia centered around entities like the infamous bar, bookshop, and press Bolderaja. While drawing from the countercultures’ infrastructures (both material and intellectual) the new composition marks an exciting break with them in grounding itself on a politics that sets its goals around more global and radical questions than the immediate existential task of living freely in your daily life. But rather than foreseeing this as a conflict of approaches, one can only hope that these two tendencies continue to learn from one another. That is, achieve their respective goals of connecting the region to international revolutionary movements, while developing new, more effective, strategies for truly practicing the kinds of autonomy the counterculture flirts with in its more fantastical, short-lived, expressions.
The book fair itself was well organized and attracted comrades from around the region and even a handful from far outside it. One can only hope that this will be the first of many fairs in Riga to come. The only critical commentary to note was that the urban tour of “leftist history”, informally organized by a few comrades, omitted the participation of Jews in the city’s radical history and even, alongside Roma, their very existence. That is, until the very end of the tour when we happened to stumble across a Roma museum which prompted our guides to note in passing the former existence of both of these minorities. The omission feels significant at a moment when we are fighting against a zionist ideology that is fundamentally founded on this very erasure of Jewish diasporic histories.
Obecność circulates a new video work “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora” [8:22m] by the Prague-based Underground Diasporic Committee for the Dispersion of Abomination. It is accompanied with a reflection by member Joe Grim Feinberg on the release of the Declaration as part of an action with Der Bund on May 1st in Krakow. In the following he explores the questions this performative rehearsal of autonomy raises on the relation between states and diasporas generally.
A band of us descended on Krakow, to join the city’s May 1st march. This was specifically to join its Jewish bloc, organized by elements close to the Jewish Labor Bund. The latter is a historically monumental force of Diaspora leftism in Europe, recently revived. We traveled from Vilnius, Berlin, London, and Prague. Why? To say that Diaspora is here. Do, דאָ. And it is marching forward. And it is not just about Jews.
May 1st is the world’s day to celebrate resistance, the day of all the workers of the world. We marched beside the Palestine solidarity bloc, saying: Diaspora is all over the world.
We’re not floating on clouds in the sky or in some faraway place that claims to be our home. Like the last words of the Yiddish partisan song “Zog nit keynmol”: mir zaynen do. We’re here. We are here and other people are there in Israel (the occupied territories). We refuse to let them justify their being there by promising to make us be there too. We aren’t there. We’re here. And some of us here prepared a “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora.” We announced this at an event after the march and released a video recording made by the clandestine committee that prepared the declaration. With this declaration, made on International Workers Day, we wanted to make it plain: we aren’t theirs, and it isn’t for them to say where we are. We only belong to the world.
Diaspora means: our home is where we are. Some of us may force states to secure our rights to be where we are. Some have to struggle against states that deny those rights. But the independence of Diaspora means we need no state to justify our being here. But why should Diaspora be independent? Diaspora is inherently opposed to separation, except under extreme circumstances. But the circumstances are extreme. Israel does not allow Diaspora to be Diaspora. Additionally, it makes Palestinians into a growing diaspora without granting them the right to independence. By declaring independence, we declare the autonomy of Palestinians and Jews everywhere, no matter what the states say.
However, declaring independence is, in itself, never a solution. It is only a way of more adequately posing a problem. The problem is to figure out how to be where we are and how to make it so others can be where they are: it is the question of autonomy. And this means being more than just here. We are here, mir zaynen do, but “do” is a kind of here that is also still there. We have to remember the there that is a part of here. But we should never be there without also being here. We are here and there, where we are and where we might be.
The Bundist ideal of doikayt was not imposed to keep people where they were, or to enclose people in an exclusive here, as if it were enough for them, and as if it were for them alone. Doikayt was invoked to let people dream without having to flee. To let them take trips to the clouds so that they could build their lands a little higher when they came back down.
There’s nothing wrong with taking trips to the clouds or excursions to promised lands, as long as we remember that promises are only promises and clouds are only clouds. As long as we still judge our clouds, whatever fantastical shape they take, by how much they rain. And as long as we still judge our lands by the life that they allow to grow on them.
Diaspora, etymologically, means the spreading of seeds. Seeds grow in soil but they scatter again. They know centers, stems and trunks, not borders. Diaspora has many centers. We sometimes call them “Jerusalems.” Salonika was once “the Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Vilnius “the Jerusalem of the North.” One place that definitely is no where’s Jerusalem today is Jerusalem. Perhaps someday Jerusalem could become the Jerusalem of Palestine, but it isn’t yet, and because of what Israel has done to it, it hasn’t been for a long time now.
Diaspora is here and Diaspora is there too. Israel and Palestine are Diaspora in equal measure. The more Palestinians are exiled, the more Israel becomes a land of exile, and no structure built on exile can be anybody’s home. But if Exile gives way to Diaspora, where people can be where they are, people can begin to be at home again.
Meanwhile, we’ll be building up our own Diaspora here. Not just for Jews. Jewishness is one of many paths to Diaspora. Jewishness is a legacy some of us claim because it is a way of being here without being only here—which is to say, without being whatever the rulers of this place declare that here should be. Jewishness does not have to be about being Jewish. It can be about not having to be fully and exclusively any one thing. The nation-states declare themselves complete and exclusive and pure, and the Jewish legacy answers, alongside other diasporic peoples: “No you aren’t, because we’re still here.”
This is also the legacy of the workers’ movement. The nation-states worship at the altar of the Bourgeoisie and Capital, which makes nations in its image. These states forget that they have also made workers, which they kicked out of Eden. They declare their Eden complete and pure without the workers, but the workers’ movement says: “No you aren’t complete, because we’re not done, and we’re still here.” Mir zaynen do.
4.
It was surprising for us all to hear word of the sudden appearance of a new movement of autonomy in Latvia. Well, surprising since over the past decade of movement activity in the Baltic territories, Latvia has been particularly inert. Besides an older initiative that holds a little space where Zapatista coffee is sold—an isolated tendency running on a seemingly indiscernible impetus from the past—and faint murmurs of Tiqqun followers on a farm, there has been little comradely connection to note.
The new grouping was in part mobilized into action by the recent genocide unfolding in Gaza. They speak of this as an “unprecedented protest for Latvia” with “many new comrades” joining the movement (you can read their full founding letter here). Yet, more than merely a spontaneous response to Gaza, one can discern the roots of this movement in older organizing precedents, found in Riga’s counterculture camp. This was a kind of Eastern European dissident infused artistic bohemia centered around entities like the infamous bar, bookshop, and press Bolderaja. While drawing from the countercultures’ infrastructures (both material and intellectual) the new composition marks an exciting break with them in grounding itself on a politics that sets its goals around more global and radical questions than the immediate existential task of living freely in your daily life. But rather than foreseeing this as a conflict of approaches, one can only hope that these two tendencies continue to learn from one another. That is, achieve their respective goals of connecting the region to international revolutionary movements, while developing new, more effective, strategies for truly practicing the kinds of autonomy the counterculture flirts with in its more fantastical, short-lived, expressions.
The book fair itself was well organized and attracted comrades from around the region and even a handful from far outside it. One can only hope that this will be the first of many fairs in Riga to come. The only critical commentary to note was that the urban tour of “leftist history”, informally organized by a few comrades, omitted the participation of Jews in the city’s radical history and even, alongside Roma, their very existence. That is, until the very end of the tour when we happened to stumble across a Roma museum which prompted our guides to note in passing the former existence of both of these minorities. The omission feels significant at a moment when we are fighting against a zionist ideology that is fundamentally founded on this very erasure of Jewish diasporic histories.
March 21st, 2024
In this letter find notes from a discussion responding to a screening of Spaces of Exception; an open call for the anarchist bookfair Riga; an exploration of the relation between hereness and Benjamin’s concept of now-time; and finally some updates on the circulation of Looting.
1. Notes from the Spaces of Exception screening in Vilnius
2. Updates on Looting
3. Invitation to the Anachist Bookfair Riga
4. Hereness, jetztzeit, tämänhetkisyys, "this-momentness"
1.
At the end of Februrary we gathered for a screening and discussion of Matt and Malik’s film Spaces of Exception. The following notes are from the introduction to this discussion, which invited everyone to consider together adjancencies between the (recently demolished) roma ghetto, contemporary refuge camps and “zones of exclusion” on the border of Belarus; as well as the historical jewish ghetto of Vilna. We also took the time to compare the differences in the public response to spaces of exception in Ukraine to those in Palestine and elsewhere; starkly coming to terms with what hinders solidarities between peoples who face, in many ways, shared conditions—racism.
Somehow we don’t often encounter comparisons between histories of state violence and even genocide. Each case, we like to tell ourselves is an aberration, a monstrous and exceptional deviation from the so called humanitarian foundations of the nation-state. In comparing the experience of the native and the refuge, the film importantly brings this discourse into radical questioning. We are asked: does the nation-state, at its core, truly embody the humanitarian values it claims to? Or should we begin to consider its other possible foundations: that the state-form as a genocidal form in and of itself—a guardian of private property, a vehicle for violent, imperial, expansionism, ethno-supremacy, and resource extractivism.
Matt and Malik nicely introduce the concept of “spaces of exception” in their film to help us understand these genocidal foundations of the state-form and the manifold ways communities organize themselves against it. Spaces of exception are territories where the rule of law is suspended. These are spaces where the state can enact power over subjects without limit or accountability. And we can find such spaces all around us. From the migrant detainment facility down the street; to the now universal existence of prisons where individuals are violently torn from their communities and alienated from their basic human rights; to refuge camps, concentration camps, ghettos, reservations and warzones; the exception, as Carl Schmidt said, appears to be the rule.
Yet, rather than casting the inhabitants of these not so exceptional spaces of exception as helpless victims, the directors are careful to focus on the vitality and agency found in these communities. The native and the refuge are both excluded from the world — the world of the state, of rights, of citizenship— and are makers of worlds. And these worlds of resistance, the directors challenge us to believe, are informed by needs and desires far greater than the desire for a nation state. What these communities offer is a radically alternative practice of inhabiting the earth. An inhabitation that critically defies our understanding of borders, property, jails, labor, nuclear families, and many other categories of belonging we have inherited by the history of the imperialist nation-state.
2.
Looting is now availble at Hopscotch Berlin. Looting is also circulating at Biblio Cinètika and La Social in Barcelona. You can also get copies at Luna6 and Eureka in Vilnius. In March, friends from Vienna continued the Looting conversation in Europe with editor Jose Rosales in an event called Looting and Totality.
3.
A new group of anarcho-syndicalists in Riga, Latvia has released an open call to join them May 24–26 for the first ever anarchist bookfair in the city. Call is here: https://www.anarchistfederation.net/anarchist-bookfair-in-riga-latvia/
At the end of Februrary we gathered for a screening and discussion of Matt and Malik’s film Spaces of Exception. The following notes are from the introduction to this discussion, which invited everyone to consider together adjancencies between the (recently demolished) roma ghetto, contemporary refuge camps and “zones of exclusion” on the border of Belarus; as well as the historical jewish ghetto of Vilna. We also took the time to compare the differences in the public response to spaces of exception in Ukraine to those in Palestine and elsewhere; starkly coming to terms with what hinders solidarities between peoples who face, in many ways, shared conditions—racism.
Somehow we don’t often encounter comparisons between histories of state violence and even genocide. Each case, we like to tell ourselves is an aberration, a monstrous and exceptional deviation from the so called humanitarian foundations of the nation-state. In comparing the experience of the native and the refuge, the film importantly brings this discourse into radical questioning. We are asked: does the nation-state, at its core, truly embody the humanitarian values it claims to? Or should we begin to consider its other possible foundations: that the state-form as a genocidal form in and of itself—a guardian of private property, a vehicle for violent, imperial, expansionism, ethno-supremacy, and resource extractivism.
Matt and Malik nicely introduce the concept of “spaces of exception” in their film to help us understand these genocidal foundations of the state-form and the manifold ways communities organize themselves against it. Spaces of exception are territories where the rule of law is suspended. These are spaces where the state can enact power over subjects without limit or accountability. And we can find such spaces all around us. From the migrant detainment facility down the street; to the now universal existence of prisons where individuals are violently torn from their communities and alienated from their basic human rights; to refuge camps, concentration camps, ghettos, reservations and warzones; the exception, as Carl Schmidt said, appears to be the rule.
Yet, rather than casting the inhabitants of these not so exceptional spaces of exception as helpless victims, the directors are careful to focus on the vitality and agency found in these communities. The native and the refuge are both excluded from the world — the world of the state, of rights, of citizenship— and are makers of worlds. And these worlds of resistance, the directors challenge us to believe, are informed by needs and desires far greater than the desire for a nation state. What these communities offer is a radically alternative practice of inhabiting the earth. An inhabitation that critically defies our understanding of borders, property, jails, labor, nuclear families, and many other categories of belonging we have inherited by the history of the imperialist nation-state.
2.
Looting is now availble at Hopscotch Berlin. Looting is also circulating at Biblio Cinètika and La Social in Barcelona. You can also get copies at Luna6 and Eureka in Vilnius. In March, friends from Vienna continued the Looting conversation in Europe with editor Jose Rosales in an event called Looting and Totality.
3.
A new group of anarcho-syndicalists in Riga, Latvia has released an open call to join them May 24–26 for the first ever anarchist bookfair in the city. Call is here: https://www.anarchistfederation.net/anarchist-bookfair-in-riga-latvia/
4.
In the process of translating doikayt into our own here(s) and now(s), the question of what it essentially conveys and what aspects of this conveyance we wish to politically emphasize sharply arose. Whereas in the Lithuanian translation we decided on “the present” as indicative of the “here and now” of struggle from where one stands, the Polish translation wavered between this —obecnosc — and powszechnosc ["commoness"], which placed emphasis on the outcomes of this hereness as a making-in-common of the many against both the unifying territoriality of the nation-state and the separations imposed by capital. Initially taking a similar course as the Lithuanian, a critical question arose on the Finnish translation.
The first option, nykyisyyttä, is grammatically the singular partitive case of nykyisyys that could be translated as “present”, especially in the sense when the word is used to refer to the current era. In its partitive case nykyisyys turns into some more or less clearly defined element, feature or phenomenon that belongs essentially to “our days”.
In his article “Jewish Alternatives to Zionism” David Rosenberg1 tends to embrace this set of meanings in his emphasis on the "hereness" aspect of doikayt by defining it through diaspora: “There where we live, that is our country.” I don’t think this is incorrect, but there might be more to it than just that – or at least I hope so. Most likely it’s not Rosenberg’s intention, but I see in such a definition a risk to understand the matter in the terms of a “happily ever after” of integration. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz follows this path with the definition given in her book The Colors of Jews: “Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don’t belong.” Fair enough, of course, but this feels quite a diluted version of what the concept has historically meant – and could potentially mean here and now. Indeed, it doesn’t do justice to the Bundists’ revolutionary internationalism, which it's commonly associated, nor the potentiality of “nowness” contained in the concept either. Understood along these lines, nykyisyyttä points implicitly towards a passive acceptance of the course of current affairs; I hear similar conclusiveness in it as when we say “that’s just how it is” or “it is what it is”.
Against this tradition of nykyisyyttä as a kind of harmonious national rooting, we could emphasize its potentiality for creating ruptures with(in) the continuity of history. We could see here similarity to Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit (“the here-and-now” in his theses on the Philosophy of History), which it seems to resonate. This here-and-now is so concentrated it is about to explode. Juxtaposing his historical materialism with the Jewish tradition, Benjamin recounts how "the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. [...] This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter." This shouldn't be understood as indicating passivity, as Löwy also notes in his Fire Alarm: "it is not a matter of awaiting the Messiah, as in the dominant tradition of rabbinical Judaism, but of bringing about his coming." In other words, it's all about "direct action on the historical plane". The goal might be, as Löwy claims, "to hasten the end of time", but I am not sure how important it eventually is. What matters more is the present moment, here and now, which might be the last.
Encountered in these terms, hereness would than ground itself on a revolutionary triple negation:
1. not the "thereness" of salvation’s here of an elsewhere (the zionist telos).
2. not the conservative here as a mere affirmation of what has been inherited to us by the past (cultural nationalism and integration).
3. not the "not like now" as a here of this place but not of this time, which places redemption as something distant I.e. an apocalyptism for which one must accept present sacrifices (e.g. revolutionary socialism).
Hereness insists that change cannot wait and calls for a "different here and now". A living communism of revolutionary class struggle, waged under and against the belongings ascribed to us by sovereignty and tradition. What could then be an alternative? In the Finnish edition of "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Jetztzeit is translated as nyt-hetki (“now-moment”), but intuitively I think perhaps tämänhetkisyys (“this-momentness”) could be closer to what is indicated by doikyat.
And rather than designating the form of life expressed here as a uniquely Jewish practice of inhabitation, we can see dabartis as but one contribution to an intensely variegated history of stateless, communist, internationalist, antifacist, ways of organizing ourselves. After all, the very core of jewish hereness designated an opening of my life, my struggle, my community, onto the universal terrain. From the Bund's central role in the founding of the RSDLP; to the decision of Jewish revolutionaries to join the international front against facism in Spain; disasporic jews contributed their lives and their knowledge to an anti-imperialist movement we are the inhertiors of today.
Another thing, not less interesting, would be to think further the autonome concept of here-and-now, which I connect first and foremost to various practices that can be seen to reflect the ‘immediate commuism’ – or ‘communization’ in the terms of another tradition – but of course also to the principled opposition to attentisme of the traditional far-left parties and even to the whole Grand soir itself. As far as I know, this hasn’t been theorized that much, but that isn’t necessarily a totally bad thing; eventually autonomy is primarily a practical matter, or that’s at least how I understand it.
In the process of translating doikayt into our own here(s) and now(s), the question of what it essentially conveys and what aspects of this conveyance we wish to politically emphasize sharply arose. Whereas in the Lithuanian translation we decided on “the present” as indicative of the “here and now” of struggle from where one stands, the Polish translation wavered between this —obecnosc — and powszechnosc ["commoness"], which placed emphasis on the outcomes of this hereness as a making-in-common of the many against both the unifying territoriality of the nation-state and the separations imposed by capital. Initially taking a similar course as the Lithuanian, a critical question arose on the Finnish translation.
The first option, nykyisyyttä, is grammatically the singular partitive case of nykyisyys that could be translated as “present”, especially in the sense when the word is used to refer to the current era. In its partitive case nykyisyys turns into some more or less clearly defined element, feature or phenomenon that belongs essentially to “our days”.
In his article “Jewish Alternatives to Zionism” David Rosenberg1 tends to embrace this set of meanings in his emphasis on the "hereness" aspect of doikayt by defining it through diaspora: “There where we live, that is our country.” I don’t think this is incorrect, but there might be more to it than just that – or at least I hope so. Most likely it’s not Rosenberg’s intention, but I see in such a definition a risk to understand the matter in the terms of a “happily ever after” of integration. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz follows this path with the definition given in her book The Colors of Jews: “Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don’t belong.” Fair enough, of course, but this feels quite a diluted version of what the concept has historically meant – and could potentially mean here and now. Indeed, it doesn’t do justice to the Bundists’ revolutionary internationalism, which it's commonly associated, nor the potentiality of “nowness” contained in the concept either. Understood along these lines, nykyisyyttä points implicitly towards a passive acceptance of the course of current affairs; I hear similar conclusiveness in it as when we say “that’s just how it is” or “it is what it is”.
Against this tradition of nykyisyyttä as a kind of harmonious national rooting, we could emphasize its potentiality for creating ruptures with(in) the continuity of history. We could see here similarity to Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit (“the here-and-now” in his theses on the Philosophy of History), which it seems to resonate. This here-and-now is so concentrated it is about to explode. Juxtaposing his historical materialism with the Jewish tradition, Benjamin recounts how "the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. [...] This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter." This shouldn't be understood as indicating passivity, as Löwy also notes in his Fire Alarm: "it is not a matter of awaiting the Messiah, as in the dominant tradition of rabbinical Judaism, but of bringing about his coming." In other words, it's all about "direct action on the historical plane". The goal might be, as Löwy claims, "to hasten the end of time", but I am not sure how important it eventually is. What matters more is the present moment, here and now, which might be the last.
Encountered in these terms, hereness would than ground itself on a revolutionary triple negation:
1. not the "thereness" of salvation’s here of an elsewhere (the zionist telos).
2. not the conservative here as a mere affirmation of what has been inherited to us by the past (cultural nationalism and integration).
3. not the "not like now" as a here of this place but not of this time, which places redemption as something distant I.e. an apocalyptism for which one must accept present sacrifices (e.g. revolutionary socialism).
Hereness insists that change cannot wait and calls for a "different here and now". A living communism of revolutionary class struggle, waged under and against the belongings ascribed to us by sovereignty and tradition. What could then be an alternative? In the Finnish edition of "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Jetztzeit is translated as nyt-hetki (“now-moment”), but intuitively I think perhaps tämänhetkisyys (“this-momentness”) could be closer to what is indicated by doikyat.
And rather than designating the form of life expressed here as a uniquely Jewish practice of inhabitation, we can see dabartis as but one contribution to an intensely variegated history of stateless, communist, internationalist, antifacist, ways of organizing ourselves. After all, the very core of jewish hereness designated an opening of my life, my struggle, my community, onto the universal terrain. From the Bund's central role in the founding of the RSDLP; to the decision of Jewish revolutionaries to join the international front against facism in Spain; disasporic jews contributed their lives and their knowledge to an anti-imperialist movement we are the inhertiors of today.
Another thing, not less interesting, would be to think further the autonome concept of here-and-now, which I connect first and foremost to various practices that can be seen to reflect the ‘immediate commuism’ – or ‘communization’ in the terms of another tradition – but of course also to the principled opposition to attentisme of the traditional far-left parties and even to the whole Grand soir itself. As far as I know, this hasn’t been theorized that much, but that isn’t necessarily a totally bad thing; eventually autonomy is primarily a practical matter, or that’s at least how I understand it.
January 15th, 2024
In the first letter, we introduce Dabartis and announce a call for responses to “Looting.” We also include notes from a film screening in Wrocław, a reading in Berlin and a silkscreen workshop in Vilnius.
- The beginning of a conversation
- Own nothing! A call for responses to “Looting”
- Notes from gatherings at Agit (Berlin) Autonomous Fair (Wroclav) and Luna6 (Vilnius)
1.
A few years ago the idea of doikayt (hereness) was seeded in a conversation between a few friends on autonomy and the politics of its inheritance in our movements. Historically conceived by Eastern European jews to enact the “we” of political existence as a practice of multiplicity and immanence against the genocidal imperative of the nation-state. We were struck by its resonance with the forms of life being conceptualized against this very genocidal supremacy by Palestinians and other stateless peoples today. And asked:
“Do we need to invent new concepts today in the way the Bund invented doykayt as encapsulating an affirmative desire for a life in common and fighting fascism at the same time. Can we also look into various histories to find and reclaim these ways of conceiving a common life? How can we start thinking further and putting into play those concepts? We, as autonomists, as communists, as anarchists, as whatever we want to call ourselves, as those who are interested in a world-in-common, a world of a here-and-now, a world-in-a-revolutionary becoming. What is it that we need to invent, create, recover and what is the need for it, what moves us to create it. And what is that revolution or even revolutionary organization when it is centered at the level of a form of life?”
Obecność is an invitation to join this conversation, to contribute to the urgent need of circulating and propagating a “life in common” and “fighting a facism” that risks now, perhaps more than ever, the destruction of our world, the destruction of Palestinian life—a destruction we must see more broadly as the threat of the erasure of anti-imperialist life in general.
Tämänhetkisyys is a research organ, a circulator, and a mender between autonomous forms. More than a distributor or producer of research, Dabartis can be approached as an effort circulate autonomy in its myriad forms. Its name, translated and transfigured in its encounters, will be shaped by those that join it—evading capture as one value, signifier, need or territory.
A few years ago the idea of doikayt (hereness) was seeded in a conversation between a few friends on autonomy and the politics of its inheritance in our movements. Historically conceived by Eastern European jews to enact the “we” of political existence as a practice of multiplicity and immanence against the genocidal imperative of the nation-state. We were struck by its resonance with the forms of life being conceptualized against this very genocidal supremacy by Palestinians and other stateless peoples today. And asked:
“Do we need to invent new concepts today in the way the Bund invented doykayt as encapsulating an affirmative desire for a life in common and fighting fascism at the same time. Can we also look into various histories to find and reclaim these ways of conceiving a common life? How can we start thinking further and putting into play those concepts? We, as autonomists, as communists, as anarchists, as whatever we want to call ourselves, as those who are interested in a world-in-common, a world of a here-and-now, a world-in-a-revolutionary becoming. What is it that we need to invent, create, recover and what is the need for it, what moves us to create it. And what is that revolution or even revolutionary organization when it is centered at the level of a form of life?”
Obecność is an invitation to join this conversation, to contribute to the urgent need of circulating and propagating a “life in common” and “fighting a facism” that risks now, perhaps more than ever, the destruction of our world, the destruction of Palestinian life—a destruction we must see more broadly as the threat of the erasure of anti-imperialist life in general.
Tämänhetkisyys is a research organ, a circulator, and a mender between autonomous forms. More than a distributor or producer of research, Dabartis can be approached as an effort circulate autonomy in its myriad forms. Its name, translated and transfigured in its encounters, will be shaped by those that join it—evading capture as one value, signifier, need or territory.
2.
What form does political belonging take for those expelled from the dominant nomos of the nation-state? While Dabartis was prompted by the particular strategy of hereness as response to this question, history will tell us that the very idea of the commons – understood as a stateless practice of the earth’s inhabitation – was articulated by those vastly excluded from the state. Starting from this thesis, we call for a response to “Looting”, a booklet that features a conversation between Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott and Vicky Osterweil (mod) Editors: Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales.
The contributors’ see Looting as more than an isolated tactical practice, but as the expression of “black socialities” antipolitics. Destituting capital’s violent imposition of need as a “laboratory of managed depletion” looting gives expression to forms of life in absolute antagonism to the modern institution of private property and the civil subject of politics. Through looting, the contributors open a conversation on how this schism with the dominant topos of politics could be conceptualized as a destituent practice of communism. Against a restitutional politics: reappropriating what was unjustly seized through an alternative measure of state making; the authors explore destitution as a qualitative transformation in our very understanding of the self as property.
Dabartis is circulating copies of “Looting” in Europe and we call for groups and individuals to respond to the booklet. If you would like to pick up a copy for your infoshop, social center, bookshop or for personal use, please get in touch. You can also find copies at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin and more locations soon.
3.
Activities began with a screening that Niecztelne (Illegibles) hosted at the Autonomous Book Fair last September in Wrocław, Poland. The film, Sashko Protyah’s 100% OFF (2022) looks at looting movements in Mariupol during the Russian siege in 2022. The film addresses how the crisis of capitalist governance in Mariupol—but also across Ukraine—has led to a massive outgrowth of mutual-aid, looting, and other practices that defy the holy laws of private property and profit; pointing to the possible path of communization as a practicable living alternative to the peace time return of Neo-liberal rule.
At Agit we collectively read excerpts of Looting and had an opening conversation on the basic themes of the book. The following are some notes from the conversation:
Genovese’s importance for the American Autonomist movements thinking around antipolitics as minor-modalities of everyday resistance.
The question of what a reader is and how to politically engage with a text not as a consumer but partisanlly, is approached as involving a kind of looting and communalization of the position as co-conspirator in a conversation.
We also picked up on the question of “need” in politics and how even some of the most militant practices found in demos like vandalising banks and shops remain within a certain austere militancy, only smashing capital but refraining from enriching oneself in these acts … the call for the desecration of politics as a desecration of the political as a domain of reason, intellect, and higher spirit. The emergence of needs as a central matrix of political sense.
The question of what the aesthetics of black sociality is in Silvia Wynter’s work. Mattin introduced it as a semiotics … was perhaps made more concrete in the case of Move where the “antagonism” between blackness and property is found to not only be a matter of the possession of things but the values tied to their correct maintenance and procurement. Move smashed the sidewalks around the houses. And kinda rejected the role of modern citizens, following hygiene standards and such.
The idea of destituent politics. Where it came from … Argentina and how it circulated around lately. How framing it from the standpoint of black sociality puts a different spin on things. Someone said it's a very privileged position this anti-politics of destituency and than left the space.
We ended with thinking around the question of the call for the inheritance reparations of the destituent over reparations as a counter-appropriation and an affirmation of the accumulation relation.
At the community resource center Luna6 in Vilnius we participated in a silkscreen workshop. Together with friends from a number of initatives we made bags, patches and posters that included an image from Looting, the dabartis logo, as well as some Palestine liberation propoganda.
What form does political belonging take for those expelled from the dominant nomos of the nation-state? While Dabartis was prompted by the particular strategy of hereness as response to this question, history will tell us that the very idea of the commons – understood as a stateless practice of the earth’s inhabitation – was articulated by those vastly excluded from the state. Starting from this thesis, we call for a response to “Looting”, a booklet that features a conversation between Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott and Vicky Osterweil (mod) Editors: Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales.
The contributors’ see Looting as more than an isolated tactical practice, but as the expression of “black socialities” antipolitics. Destituting capital’s violent imposition of need as a “laboratory of managed depletion” looting gives expression to forms of life in absolute antagonism to the modern institution of private property and the civil subject of politics. Through looting, the contributors open a conversation on how this schism with the dominant topos of politics could be conceptualized as a destituent practice of communism. Against a restitutional politics: reappropriating what was unjustly seized through an alternative measure of state making; the authors explore destitution as a qualitative transformation in our very understanding of the self as property.
Dabartis is circulating copies of “Looting” in Europe and we call for groups and individuals to respond to the booklet. If you would like to pick up a copy for your infoshop, social center, bookshop or for personal use, please get in touch. You can also find copies at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin and more locations soon.
3.
Activities began with a screening that Niecztelne (Illegibles) hosted at the Autonomous Book Fair last September in Wrocław, Poland. The film, Sashko Protyah’s 100% OFF (2022) looks at looting movements in Mariupol during the Russian siege in 2022. The film addresses how the crisis of capitalist governance in Mariupol—but also across Ukraine—has led to a massive outgrowth of mutual-aid, looting, and other practices that defy the holy laws of private property and profit; pointing to the possible path of communization as a practicable living alternative to the peace time return of Neo-liberal rule.
At Agit we collectively read excerpts of Looting and had an opening conversation on the basic themes of the book. The following are some notes from the conversation:
Genovese’s importance for the American Autonomist movements thinking around antipolitics as minor-modalities of everyday resistance.
The question of what a reader is and how to politically engage with a text not as a consumer but partisanlly, is approached as involving a kind of looting and communalization of the position as co-conspirator in a conversation.
We also picked up on the question of “need” in politics and how even some of the most militant practices found in demos like vandalising banks and shops remain within a certain austere militancy, only smashing capital but refraining from enriching oneself in these acts … the call for the desecration of politics as a desecration of the political as a domain of reason, intellect, and higher spirit. The emergence of needs as a central matrix of political sense.
The question of what the aesthetics of black sociality is in Silvia Wynter’s work. Mattin introduced it as a semiotics … was perhaps made more concrete in the case of Move where the “antagonism” between blackness and property is found to not only be a matter of the possession of things but the values tied to their correct maintenance and procurement. Move smashed the sidewalks around the houses. And kinda rejected the role of modern citizens, following hygiene standards and such.
The idea of destituent politics. Where it came from … Argentina and how it circulated around lately. How framing it from the standpoint of black sociality puts a different spin on things. Someone said it's a very privileged position this anti-politics of destituency and than left the space.
We ended with thinking around the question of the call for the inheritance reparations of the destituent over reparations as a counter-appropriation and an affirmation of the accumulation relation.
At the community resource center Luna6 in Vilnius we participated in a silkscreen workshop. Together with friends from a number of initatives we made bags, patches and posters that included an image from Looting, the dabartis logo, as well as some Palestine liberation propoganda.