OCUPE A PIEDADE

Occlupy and Public SpaceEntradax  Peter Marcuse pm35@columbia.edu02:00 (7 horas atrás) para nettime-l The occupation of key public spaces by Occupy Wall Street, as a meansof calling attention to more basic problems, raises questions of therole of public spaces that need to be urgently dealt with. The basicquestions about the organization of society, democracy, inequality,social justice, public priorities are deep-going and require long-termanswers. They should not be pre-empted by the immediate needs forspace, not should any space be fetishized. But spatial issues need tobe dealt with immediately and urgently. I have tried to deal with these immediate questions in a new piece. Iargue that cities should give priority to uses of public space thatincrease the ability of the people to participate actively and withinformation in democratic governance. Such a priority can includeconventional reasonable time, place, and manner regulations, and couldbe part of a comprehensive planned approach to the provision of publicspace. Similar decisions on priorities for the use of public spaceare constantly made in deciding on the placement of statues, memorialplaques, street parades, festivals, electioneering, etc. They need tobe considered here. Planners can have a significant role to play. See OCCUPY AND THE PROVISION OF PUBLIC SPACE: THE CITY'S RESPONSIBILITY,available at pmarcuse.wordpress.com. Comments more than welcome.

Protesters Need a Plan, Not Just a Complaint November 15, 2011 Lech Wałęsa San Francisco Chronicle Like millions of others around the world, I have been watching this year's protests in the Arab world, Europe and the United States. What has struck me the most as I have followed the protests on television and in the social media is that the protesters generally know that the status quo should not be tolerated, but are a lot less clear and unified about what they want to replace it with. In the war of ideas, it's not enough just to be against something; you have to be for something that is sound as well. Before you set out to alter the status quo, you ought to know how to replace it-and you need to be convinced, intellectually and in your heart, that the new system will actually be better. When we began our protests at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in 1980-protests that triggered the eventual collapse of Soviet communism throughout Central and Eastern Europe-we didn't have the benefit of the Internet and social media. What we had instead was a unifying idea: that men and woman have a God-given right to be free and that government has no right to deny them this freedom. We were fighting for individual freedoms that many Americans take for granted: freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom to organize unions, freedom to congregate in public places and express our views, freedom of the press, and freedom to contract, own property, have enterprises and work to uplift the lives of our families and communities. Those who opposed the status quo in Poland and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain were great in number. That was the source of our strength: when we realized we weren't alone and that others shared our concerns and views. This empowered us, as it empowered the protests in the Arab world, and today's protests in the United States and Europe. Today's protests seem more focused on the problems that are plaguing many of the world's advance

Capitalism and the Wall Street Protesters November 19, 2011 Dominick T. Armentano With at least 12 compulsory years in public schools, one would think that most of the twenty-something Wall Street protesters would have some understanding of capitalism, its actual history, and its accomplishments. Well, maybe not. One can only wonder what passes for economic education these days. So what is capitalism? Free market capitalism is based on the individual right to own and freely trade property. It permits owners of property (land, labor, capital, etc.) to enter (or exit) any contract on mutually agreeable terms. It gives entrepreneurs the freedom to start any business (without government permission) and to borrow money and develop products for consumers. It permits land owners to rent (or sell) their property for any peaceful purpose. It gives adult workers the liberty to lease their services to any business at any agreeable wage and to terminate that agreement at will; employers would have the same right. Capitalism allows firms to compete (and cooperate) with other firms; it allows firms to succeed and reinvest their profits; it allows firms to make losses and fail and go out of business. It allows consumers to choose any product or service and allows parents to educate their children in any manner and for any length of time that they decide is appropriate. Under capitalism, there would be no government bailouts; no Federal Reserve; no Fannie Mae or Freddy Mac; no state restrictions on competition (so-called antitrust laws); no tax-supported schools and no government supported monopolies of any kind. Crony capitalism, after all, is not real capitalism. As should be apparent, a capitalistic economic system is grounded on individual liberty. When and if individual rights are violated under capitalism (theft, harmful pollution, contract defaults, protesters breaking store windows) it would be legitimate to prosecute and punish rights-violaters (criminals) under the

Canal Encuentro: domingo 20 de noviembre, 20 hs., Ernesto Laclau dialoga con el psicoanalista Jorge Alemán ¿Qué entendemos por democracia?, ¿Cómo se la puede pensar más allá de los límites impuestos por la tradición liberal?, ¿Cuáles son los desafíos que hoy enfrenta la izquierda y cómo puede contribuir la experiencia latinoamericana de los últimos años?Una a una, las preguntas van surgiendo en esta serie de encuentros entre el filósofo argentino Ernesto Laclau y algunos de los más grandes intelectuales contemporáneos. Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri, Jorge Alemán, Gianni Vattimo y Étienne Balibar son tan sólo algunos de los nombres que logra reunir este ciclo de documentales formando un espacio inédito para la televisión, en el que a través del diálogo se busca construir conocimiento y también promover una reflexión crítica sobre el escenario político actual, marcado por la emergencia de los regímenes populares en América Latina, la crisis de la hegemonía de Estados Unidos y la gran incertidumbre que rodea al futuro de Europa. 

Call For Papers: Conference: Science, Space, and the Environment Location: Smith Centre, Science Museum, LondonDate: Tuesday/Wednesday July 17-18, 2012 Sponsor: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich Organizers: Helmuth Trischler, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich; Ludmilla Jordanova, King's College London Department of History; Simon Werrett, University of Washington Department of History/ Science Studies Network, Seattle; Science Museum, London. Although the sciences have provided critical resources in environmental debates, their own role in environmental change has been little studied. This conference will explore how the sciences have affected the physical environment. How have scientific practices and ideas impacted on nature - for example do practices such as voyages of exploration or natural history collecting exploit plants and animals and their environments? Does scientific activity cause pollution, depletion of resources, or other forms of damage to ecosystems? How are such practices to be evaluated, and how are they related to scientific and other ideas of nature and the environment, e.g. notions of conquest, mastery, or interrogation. How should scientific ideas about the environment be related to the impacts of scientific research on it? In particular papers should address scientific activities involving the circulation of knowledge and materials. A growing body of work in the history of science has explored the issue of circulation, examining how physical specimens, books, people, and materials related to science have been made to move around the globe in the service of producing or disseminating scientific knowledge. What has been the environmental significance of such circulations? How has the movement of people, plants, animals, and scientific instruments, books and personnel affected environments, e.g. on voyages of exploration, in processes of establishing colonial scientific institutions, or in undert

​Este texto de Mishkin introduz de forma equiblirada a questão da despoliticaçãoda politica monetária, chamando atenção para os avanços teóricos e empíricos que fundamenta as pretensões de despolitização, ao mesmo tempo que chama atenção para as limitações de tais estudos e para a "arte da politica monetária

An Interview with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau READ LATER Hegemony and Socialism:An Interview with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau In the early to middle eighties, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau co-authored a book called, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics[London and New York: Verso, 1985], which has been translated into many languages and become influential in the theory of new social movements and their influence on contemporary societies.

The politics of identity SHARON SMITH argues that identity politics can't liberate the oppressed

The Øther 2009-2010 READ LATER By Daniel Tutt, American University Comments and or questions are welcome. Please direct them to danielp.tutt@gmail.com Proximity towards the jouissance of the Other, or the neighbor, in Lacan's seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis becomes a matter of ethical concern because the Other as das Ding (the thing) poses problems outside of the moral relationship. In this paper I will examine the ethical positions of two psychoanalytic theorists, Eric Santner and Slavoj Žižek. The proximity towards the excessive jouissance of the neighbor as das Ding presents a number of interesting ethical problems. Žižek's confrontation with das Ding is a complex procedure that remains ambiguous, particularly in light of his sympathies towards the Christian Pauline agape version of radical love. Žižek's treatment of proximity towards the Other seeks a total escape from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates of the oppressive symbolic order, whereas with Santner, in his text The Psychotheology of Everyday Life, the "mental excess" of jouissance caused by confrontation with the Other as das Ding is sought to be converted into an owning of the excessive proximity into a "blessings of more life." This paper first identifies and describes the Lacanian subject - a subject rooted in lack and the crisis of symbolic investiture and argues that Lacanian subjectivity is capable of radical freedom from the fantasmatic symbolic coordinates that sustain its relationship to its own freedom. There are several meta-ethical questions that arise in light of Lacan's notion of ethics for subjectivity inhabited by fantasmatic symptoms and a symbolic order structured by oppressive fantasy relations. These problems will be explored in this paper as they guide both Žižek's and Santner's work, particularly the superego demand to "love thy neighbor as thyself." The question of politics in relation to the Other for Santner is centered on how to convert

What is the Revolutionary Subject? Posted on November 11, 2011 by Daniel Tutt The revolutionary subject, who defines its politics in terms of the lack of the system's structural excesses, is always caught between impatience and courage in Badiou's Theory of the Subject. We should not forget that Badiou is developing a subject outside of identity, class, and gender. Badiou presents two primary historical and structural versions of the subject, that of Aeschylus and that of Sophocles. Of the four mathemes that constitute the subject, (courage, justice, anxiety and superego) it is courage that sustains the division of the one that founds political subjectivity writ large, and it is courage that sustains allegiance to the event for the revolutionary subject. If we lean on Holderlin's reading of Sophocles, which articulates precisely how the subject formation is always rooted in an insurrection from the law, we find a subject that is rooted in a split subject. Knowledge, for Oedipus is posed to an object that Oedipus knows not (the Sphinx), from which the unknown is generated. Aeschylus' subjet is on the side (to the contrary) of the thinkable and on the side of right, of being diverted from the law. It is Sophocles' subject that is rooted in overcoming the superego, that argues the subject is subverted by the law of superego (Creon or the state) and the law of anxiety (Antigone or the subject before the law) where the internal division of that which constitutes them, is a division beyond the law of anything that can have a legal value (TOS, 164). The political locus that constitutes the subject for Sophocles is two, not one. Aeschylus, on the contrary, posits that the subjects interrupts, through justice, this division of the One that the political subject is founded upon. How else did Freud choose Oedipus as the subject of two, of a subject that is constituted by the law of the unconscious, of the internal split? In the Aeschylian subject formation, th

danieltutt.com The #Occupy Movement and Gramsci OCT. 16, 2011 READ LATER As we enter the second or third week of the #Occupy movement, I'm beginning to sense that the momentum is no longer an issue. The movement seems to have gotten past the hump of legitimacy and we're now into a bona fide new wave of social protest. At this point, the movement has already succeeded, purely in its capacity to incite a new potential into political discourse. It is fair to categorize the #Occupy movement as a form of 'political disobedience', as distinct from 'civl disobedience' insofar as it is purely concerned about the deadlock of politics, after politics, with creating the space for a new possibility of politics. The #Occupy movement is a form of agonistic democracy a la Laclau and Mouffe in On Populist Reason, and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. What is crucial for the movement to maintain its vibrancy is that it continue to keep the demand closed, or if you like, to keep the crisis exposed. The crisis of the system is the problem, and the idea of any modicum of policymakers creating reform is not sufficient. The idea of #Occupy when thought as a visual metaphor is perhaps best envisioned as a collection of struggles that are gathered under a single umbrella. The wider and more able to cover the space of struggles, contradictions, and inadequiecies that politics has provided in recent times, the more potent the power of the movement will gain. In other words, if #Occupy does not open space for the Tea Party, Ron Paul'ies, alter-globalization activists, greenies, identity politics, anarchists, etc, then it will fail. No one struggle can define this movement, especially not entrenched institutional interests such as organized labor or MoveOn.org. From the standpoint of strategy, the #Occupy movement has expanded on the idea of following power to various summits and protesting physical space (IMF, World Bank, Seattle in 99′ etc) and has sought to directly occup

Ernesto Laclau An interview with Ernesto Laclau READ LATER Ernesto Laclau talks to the Greek journal Intellectum about the uses of populism, why radical democracy has nothing to do with liberalism, and how lack of political competition benefits the far-Right. Intellectum: In probably your most famous book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-authored with Chantal Mouffe, you attempted to deconstruct both Marxist theory and liberal democratic thought in order to reinterpret them in such a way that they could contribute to a more sufficient understanding of contemporary politics. What is the significance of the concept of identity for the comprehension of modern reality? Ernesto Laclau: Well I think that the concept of identity can be analysed from different sides. One side would be to identify identity with particularity. There are some difficulties obviously in this type of identification of the two categories. But there are also advantages, because obviously the political problem that presents itself is a problem of general articulation, and general articulation has to rely on some kind of category of identity. So this is the way in which the question of identity emerges today. It can be related to a variety of intellectual contexts, but I think that the essential point is that there are no obvious forms of universality that can replace the notion of identity. Intellectum: In your first book Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), you discussed the phenomenon of populism. In 2005 you published On Populist Reason. It seems that populism has remained at the centre of your interest. In a country that is governed by a populist party, what can we assume about the political identity of that people? How is popular subjectivity constructed? EL: I think we have to introduce a classical distinction: the distinction between populus and plebs. Populus is the totality of the community; plebs are those at the bottom of the social pyramid. A characteristic of plebeian

The Vision & Goals group's much-vaunted Blueprint: An annotated guide to the half-literate blob assembled by the self-appointed anarchoid vanguard of OWS (an annotated guide)

Welcome to the Oakland General Strike (Wednesday, November 2)   [NOTE: This invitation was addressed primarily to friends and contacts in the San Francisco Bay Area (approx. 1000 people and groups), but I also sent it to some 3000 other friends and contacts across the country and around the world, as well as posting it at this website, because I believe that many other people will be interested in hearing about what has been going on here. -KK]   Dear Bay Area Friends, As most of you probably know, the police raid and destruction of the Occupy Oakland encampments last Tuesday, followed by the notorious police violence against protesters later the same day, provoked such an immense expression of outrage from thousands of people in the Bay Area and around the world that the Oakland city government was thrown completely on the defensive. The next day police were scarcely to be seen. The fence surrounding Frank Ogawa Plaza was still in place, but the occupiers calmly took it down and began reoccupying the same spot. That evening, by a vote of 1484 to 46 (with 77 abstentions), the general assembly decided to call for a General Strike in Oakland on Wednesday, November 2. You can see their declaration, a press conference, and other information at www.occupyoakland.org. [Note that that website is continually updated. To find the posts relevant to this text, you will need to scroll back to the entries for the period leading up to November 2. Numerous videos from the day of the strike can be found here.] The fact that they reoccupied the encampment less than 48 hours after it had been demolished is astonishing enough. But that they immediately shifted to the offensive with such a marvelously audacious venture leaves me almost speechless with admiration. I hope that their appeal meets with correspondingly large-minded and supportive responses by people in Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay Area. Occupiers in many other cities have already been venturing outside their

Yesterday in Oakland This seven-minute video gives a pretty good brief impression of what happened in Oakland yesterday, following the police destruction of the Occupy Oakland encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Among other things, I call your attention to a poignant interaction around 4:45 where a few marchers start pushing a dumpster, as if to start a barricade. A guy hugs one of them and pleads with them, "Oh, no, guys, come on, let's be civil." One of the others says, "Are they [the police] being fuckin' civil?!" Hugging that second guy, he says, "I know, brother, they're savages, they're fuckin' savages. But don't be like them! Don't be like them!" If you think that rhetoric is excessive, note the very end of the video, where lots of people are running away and one of them is hit by a tear gas canister and falls to the ground. Several of the others run back to help him, and as they are all crowding around, the police throw a flash-bang grenade right down into the group which explodes in the injured man's face. Here is a clearer view of the same incident. The young man, Scott Olsen, an Iraq war veteran, has a fractured skull and is in critical condition. But I guess this sort of thing has to be done in order to maintain "public peace" and keep the Plaza nice and "hygienic" . . . I was at the 4:00 rally outside the Oakland Public Library. It began with a report on the situation of the arrestees. We learned that there are 105 of them, and that two of them have broken hands and another one is in the hospital. Then there was an open mic for an hour or so, then a march. (The rally and the march ranged between 1000 and 2000 people, with many coming and going at various times.) We intended to pass by the jail where our friends were being held, but were blocked by police. In the process of pushing and shoving, the police grabbed two of us, threw them down and handcuffed them. Hundreds of us crowded around them, shouting: "Shame! S

The Situationists and the Occupation Movements (1968/2011)   One of the most notable characteristics of the "Occupy" movement is that it is just what it claims to be: leaderless and antihierarchical. Certain people have of course played significant roles in laying the groundwork for Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations, and others may have ended up playing significant roles in dealing with various tasks in committees or in coming up with ideas that are good enough to be adopted by the assemblies. But as far as I can tell, none of these people have claimed that such slightly disproportionate contributions mean that they should have any greater say than anyone else. Certain famous people have rallied to the movement and some of them have been invited to speak to the assemblies, but they have generally been quite aware that the participants are in charge and that nobody is telling them what to do. This puts the media in an awkward and unaccustomed position. They are used to relating with leaders. Since they have not been able to find any, they are forced to look a little deeper, to investigate for themselves and see if they can discover who or what may be behind all this. Since the initial concept and publicity for Occupy Wall Street came from the Canadian group and magazine Adbusters, the following passage from an interview with Adbusters editor and co-founder Kalle Lasn (Salon.com, October 4) has been widely noticed: We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of the Sp

Two positive visions of the OWS: Wolfe and Knabb, or the spectres of Debord POSTED BY SKEPOET ⋅ NOVEMBER 9, 2011 ⋅ LEAVE A COMMENT So while I critiqued the Goals and Visions, urm, "visions."  I will show two accounts about the positive end of things: Ken Knabb's The Situationists and the Occupation Movements (1968/2011): One of the most notable characteristics of the "Occupy" movement is that it is just what it claims to be: leaderless and antihierarchical. Certain people have of course played significant roles in laying the groundwork for Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations, and others may have ended up playing significant roles in dealing with various tasks in committees or in coming up with ideas that are good enough to be adopted by the assemblies. But as far as I can tell, none of these people have claimed that such slightly disproportionate contributions mean that they should have any greater say than anyone else. Certain famous people have rallied to the movement and some of them have been invited to speak to the assemblies, but they have generally been quite aware that the participants are in charge and that nobody is telling them what to do. This puts the media in an awkward and unaccustomed position. They are used to relating with leaders. Since they have not been able to find any, they are forced to look a little deeper, to investigate for themselves and see if they can discover who or what may be behind all this. Since the initial concept and publicity for Occupy Wall Street came from the Canadian group and magazine Adbusters, the following passage from an interview with Adbusters editor and co-founder Kalle Lasn(Salon.com, October 4) has been widely noticed: We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspire