wander // doecommunism will abolish humanity or it will remain, as most other 19th and 20th century Grand-Ideas for society have remained, a genocidal project
"Anyone who disparages this attack... should specify what he believes to be of positive value in the present society and worth preserving (it will turn out to be almost everything)..."
Situationist International, Theses on the Paris Commune
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/1962/paris-commune.htm
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in our society, the Subject that enacts recognized and "legitimate" justice is The State. so what is the object of The State's justice? prison facilities are often called "correctional" facilities. what is being corrected? the actions of the individuals deemed guilty.
what is guilt? how is guilt determined? is the method of justice the determination of guilt? or does justice come when the guilty are punished, corrected, fixed?
here, i think is the first great mistaken thesis of justice in the modern world; the attribution of guilt to individuals, as if their soul is blighted by their actions. as if it's their soul that needs to be cleansed by the unmoving gears of the State's Justice System.
what is the object of justice? well, at minimum, the object of the State's justice is the soul of the individual found guilty.
so far, in looking at our own world as it is, we see Justice as The State mediating a transformation of guilty individuals' souls.
so what is the method of transformation? the correctional facility. the separation from outer-society, and the monitoring and regulation of individuals activities at all times. here, the hope of getting out is determined by those in charge. the violent and armed enforcers who are in coordination with one another to keep prisoners acting the way they want even when an enforcer isn't around.
the method of transformation: forced submission. violence til compliance.
the justice of our world aspires, at its best, to be transformative domination.
how can we ever hope to be free from the consequences of domination if our own justice starts from premises resembling these?
#DeerTheory #WanderingTheory #philosophy #criticaltheory #justice #guilt
i've been asking questions off and on the last few weeks (*last year) about justice. nothing particularly incisive, just trying to get away from tired framings that left me wanting... justice has felt a fraught concept for me for some time and i want to elaborate why, and see what is salvageable in it.
who or what is the subject that can enact justice?
who or what is the object of justice?
what is the method of justice?
what is transformed by justice?
#DeerTheory #WanderingTheory #criticaltheory #philosophy #justice #guilt
a thread on justice - in part pulling from my prior posts on the topic
#DeerTheory #WanderingTheory #criticaltheory #philosophy #justice
As queers and exiles of all kinds, remember that it's up to us to preserve the memory our love and living practices.
Many of us had no practices instilled in us by any queers in our lives, since many of us grew up in an era without queer elders, without a history being communicated by anyone trusted in our lives. Instead, many of us were struggling alone against (in America at least) the heavily Christian-coded practices of capitalist, consumerist hegemony.
We had to develop our own practices.
To keep ourselves and each other safer.
To accept and express ourselves.
To develop community, and love.
It's up to us to protect the memory of these practices, their living history. We cannot expect our memory to be kept by the textbooks of machine that exists to Eat Worlds, to alienate peoples - to produce workers.
We keep the memory of our love, our life, alive. We have to.
And we have the power to do more than those that came before us, so that those after us can walk with our knowledge, our failures.
Celebrate around shrines of your love. Let them burn as bright as your heart.
Build temples of rest for exiles. Let them be sanctuaries of self-acceptance as endless becomings.
#WanderingTheory #DeerTheory #queer #QueerResistance #QueerCommunity #Exile #Becomings #Worldeater
> Providence and Sovereignty are united in birth.
> The Sovereign grants Providence at the same moment Providence grants Sovereignty. Out from His head Providence oozes.
> Providence is the Rule which corresponds to the form; Apparatus of Capture.
> The Worldeater promises great futures to them, as long as the Worldeater has more Worlds to consume.
> The police and military activities that characterize the maintenance of the Ordered World is an activity that, today, is seemingly separated from its ends. But, when the world is revealed as practice, it becomes apparent as the first musculature of the form-of-life that is the Worldeater.
#DeerTheory #WanderingTheory #criticaltheory #philosophy #worldeater #sovereignty
> From the head of Sovereignty, which bursts from the living ways of communities as the iron rule of law, outpours the substance of Providence.
> And here is the first body of the Worldeater!
> The Sovereign as the anarchic figure of law-creation and maintenance, who holds within him the power to suspend the law, on the basis of the law. Law as tradition turned mechanical. As a History of Ways is solidified into rigid organs and muscles, with rigid logics that correspond to the will of no man, but instead correspond to the substance of Providence.
> The Sovereign creates logics out of living activity through its army and police operations, by punishing and removing those who do not conform to its demanded logics, by removing the possibility for living life to be done to any satisfaction separate from it... By determining the world as something made to be administered. By Providence.
#DeerTheory #WanderingTheory #criticaltheory #philosophy #worldeater #sovereignty
i don't know where i sit any more with regards to 'form-of-life' philosophy - it helped me work my way out of certain assumptions i was operating under previously but i don't know if it's really a concept i want to continue with moving forward. i'm thinking about it now, in part, because i'm reading through my old posts on my last masto instance and deciding what i want to bring over.
one of my earliest philosophy threads over there is on form-of-life, a concept i was pulling from Tiqqun and Agamben. my thread reads:
> Time is not experienced singularly, as one uninterrupted flow. Nor is it felt the same way between bodies.
> A form-of-life, experienced as a form-of-life (that is to say, collectively), produces it's own time by its mechanisms of coordination.
> These mechanisms of coordination can be as varied as the individuals of a band relaying their own sensory information between each other or as regulated as the distribution of clocks for the timekeeping of labor.
> What i mean to say can be summed up as: All forms-of-life produce their own time.
> The State is a form-of-life, and it, too, produces its own time. We see this through the creation and distribution of clocks, regulated and scalable intervals. This is just a development of its earliest methods of limb-coordination.
> Monasteries understood this. They knowingly produced their own time for the purposes of coordination between the work of the many monks. And they produced it in a variety of fashions. Sometimes there was a sundial to count the hours in un-regulated fashion, changing with the seasons. Others were to be in prayer at all times, knowing the length of the prayer and the time the prayer took to get through to constantly be keeping time with one another. Others installed complex water clocks to begin to count the hours in regular fashion, with an "objective" outside measurement...
a little thread sharing a section of Guerin's "Fascism and Big Business"
"The fascist state is not satisfied with reducing the workers to slavery and making a general massacre of wages possible. It restores capitalist profits in another way: through various economic expedients.
"Expedients" is the word. It is not a question of taking measures to set in motion once more, however feebly, the "normal" machinery of capitalism. It is not a question of reestablishing profits from the production and distribution of new wealth. It is, quite simply, a matter of restoring their revenues to capitalist enterprises by artificial means and at the expense of the masses. These expedients, of course, are by no means specifically fascist or National Socialist. They are twin brothers to those used in other countries, differing only in degree and not in kind.
What we are about to describe is not peculiar to fascism, and there is not, contrary to what the plebeian demagogues say, any kind of "fascist" or "National Socialist" economy. The fascist economy is only a sharpened form of the so-called "guided" capitalist economy, first tried in Germany during the First World War under the name Kriegswirtschaft (War Economy)"
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