ABSTRACT ON BUTLER'S 'GENDER TROUBLE (SUBJECTS OF SEX/GENDER/DESIRE)'

ABSTRACT ON BUTLER'S 'GENDER TROUBLE (SUBJECTS OF SEX/GENDER/DESIRE)'

• Butler understands that 'existing identites' of women as the subject of feminism is only a representation, and this representation has a dual aspect
  a) Representation of the women as a subject serves as the operative term within a political process for visibility and legitimacy
  b) Representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women.
  • Foucault points out that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent
    • Juridical power inevitably produces what it claims merely to represent
    • the law produces and then conceals the notion of a subject before the law in order to invoke that discursive formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently legitimates that law's own regulatory hegemony
  • Apart from the foundationalist fictions that supports the notion of the subject, however, there is the political problem that feminism encounters in the assumption that the term women denotes a common identity
    • Denise Riley's 'Am I That Name?' criticizes that
    • it becomes impossible to separate out gender from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained
      • Universalist feminism colonializes non-Westerns ('Third World' and 'Orient') as essentialist barbarisms
        • Strategic uses of essentialism are criticezed for strategies always have meanings that exceed the purposes for which they are intended
• An uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of 'women' will be clearly self-defeating !!!
  • This doesn't imply refusing representational politics, which is impossible for her, but simply to operate a feminist genealogy of the practices legitimizing gender departing from what Marx calls the historical present
    • Feminist genealogy must contest reifications of gender and identity on bases of the variable methodologies and normativities through which they are founded.
  • Perhaps, paradoxically, representation will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of women in nowhere presumed

• Her genealogy criticizes the compulsory order of Sex/Gender/Desire
  • One way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain
    • It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category
    • In one such interpretation the cultural horizons of gender would thus remain determined by the anatomically differentiated bodies
  • While she criticizes this essentialism of the Sex (body) settling the grounds of gender, she doesn't agree with Simone de Beauvoir (variable and volitional constructivism) that one can simply construct and deconstruct the body to experience gender as it pleases one better
    • Beauvoir proposes that woman are the Other in a sense that they are marked out of universality to which man belong
    • Women become women when they are marked/ restricted by the society due to their bodies, while the male body flows disavowed and universal without being ever marked
      • Butler points that the very 'choice' of how to experience the body is itself a socialy contructed aspect
        • Butler asks: To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of gender? How do we reconceive the body no longer as a passive medium or instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinct material will?
      • Butler follows Irigary criticizing that women are not only the Other in a Saussurian (Sartrean, as she refers) relation of Self and Other but, instead, that women are unrepresentable in the phallogocentric language and its closed phallogocentric signifying economy
        • masculine constitute the closed circle of signifier and signified
        • The entire structure of representation is inadequate
        • Women as the sex which is not one, then, provides a point of departure for a criticism of hegemonic Western representation and of the metaphysics of substance that structures the very notion of the subject.
          • My personal comment is that here she follows Foucault on identifying a contest mechanism of power against the hegemonic one and, through it, develops its genealogy.
          • Butler points to a context of socially instituted gender asymetry
            • Butler finds Beauvoir feminism of a female body as the space of contestation and freedom to follow the philosophical tradition started with Plato and continued through Descartes, Husserl, and Sartre – that of distinction between soul (consciousness, mind) and body
              • This distinction invariably supports relations of political and psychic subordination and hierarchy
                • Mind subordinates the body, and eventually entertains the fantasy of fleeing its embodiment.
                  • Asymetry comes as masculinity is associated with mind and body with feminism.
            • Butler contrasts Beauvoir and Irigary as the first points to an asymmetrical dialectic and the second to the dialectic itself as the monologic elaboration of a masculinist signifying economy
        • Butler, however, extends her critiques to Irigary for, despite broadening the scope of feminist critique, her analysis has a globalizing reach of a universalist aspect (as if she proposed another universality instead of the phallogocentric one)
          • Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism. The effort to identify the enmy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms
            • The colonizing gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist
          • Butler also criticizes the way Irigary pledges primacy to the 'dialectical appropriation and suppression of the Other' among the masculinist tacticts, for she – Butler – believes that not even the oppression operates itself in a universal linear and centralized way through which it sygnifies language;
          • Butler also claims that such oppressive tactique is also present on other opressions beyond the masculinist one.
      • Paradoxically, Beuvoir prefigured this impossibility [her own phallogocentrism] in The Second Sex when she argued that men could not settle the question of women because they would then be acting as both judge and party to the case
  • Butler also criticizes efforts to formulate coalitional politics towards ideal models of women without assuming in advance a content for 'women', because in the process they end up imposing the ideal in advance
    • Creation of womens through dialogue misses the point that dialogue is itself culturally specific and historic, so some speakers may feel secure that conversation is happening while anothers may be sure it is not.
      • She points that the power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities needs first to be interrogated
        • My personal comment here is to highlight a connection with Kaviraj's (not sure) concept that imagination is the limit of a social reality.
        • Butler than proposes an antifundationalist approach to coalitional politics: assuming that neither identity is a premise nor that the shape or meaning of a coalitional assemblage can be known prior to its achievement
          • An open coalition, then, will affirm identities that are alternately instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at hand; it will be an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure.
• As a result, Butler genealogy's aims at the issue of; to what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity?
  • Her genealogy shows that the heterosexualization of desire rquires and institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between feminine and masculine, where these are understood as expressive attributes of male and female
  • The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of identities cannot exist – that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not follow from either sex or gender

ABSTRACT ON BUTLER'S 'BODIES THAT MATTER (PREFACE + INTRODUCTION)'

ABSTRACT ON BUTLER'S 'BODIES THAT MATTER (PREFACE + INTRODUCTION)'

• Butler criticizes the humanist subject in its utopia of choosing the gender as she understands that gender chooses itself, but at the same time she rejects denying the possibility of critical agency
• Gender is the site of ritualistic repetition which generates itself but also the space of possible critique against those rituals and itself
• She reminds the constitutive constrains of construtivism, and therefore of the construction of the body
  • bodies depend on the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemas producing intelligible bodies and abject, unlivable bodies
    • heterosexual hegemony crafts what is sexual and political 'matter'
      • Foucault says that sex is a 'regulatory ideal' in which sense it's also a regulatory practice producing bodies
        • Production is made through demarcation, circulation and differentiation
        • Materialization is made through reproduction – rituals
          • Rituals of materializing gendered bodies are performative as they reiterate citational (interpellative on Butler's reading of Althusser) practices producing the very effects that it names
          • In philosophical terms; the constative claim is always to some degree performative
          • What constitute the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power
            • Once sex itself is understood in its normativity, the materiality of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materialization of that regulatory norm
              a) the matter of bodies will be indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization
              b) the understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains
              c) the construal of sex no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies
              d) the subject speaking ''I'', is informed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex
              e) the heterosexual imperative of identification enables certain sexed identifications (intelligible bodies) and forecloses and/or disavows other identifications (abjected bodies)
            • The necessity to reproduce bodies is a proof that material bodies as a product never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled
            • To the extent that certain productions of materialities escape those regulatory norms, Butler argues that the heterosexual hegemony can be contested by those very bodies an their dissent logics
    1) Intelligible bodies
    • Bodies which materiality conforms to the normativity of the 'regulatory ideal' of sex
    2) Abject, unlivable bodies
    • This is not the opposite of the former, for oppositions are, after all, part of intelligibility
    • The abject designs those unlivable and uninhabitable zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the unlivable is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject
      • An abjected outside, which is, after all, inside the subject as its own founding repudiation
      • It's the way subjects who don't perform the rites of gendered bodies quite well are lead to recognize themselves as inhabitants of abjected spaces, therefore carrying on with their lifes under threatening spectres
    • In a Foucauldian sense of criticizing hegemonies from their contending logics, those abjected bodies should not be seen as perpetual failures, but as critical resources in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility
      • In this sense, not only mobilizations under identity categories are important to rearticulate democratic contestation, but also disidentification.
        • She foresees here a link between feminists and queer movements.

• Butler's genealogy shows that the materiality of bodies is contested by two different trends: 1) A materialist critique of Beauvoirian constructivism; which assumes the sexed body before the gender but notices its desubstantiation through culture
  • This kind of feminism assumes the sexed body as a given matter and problematizes the extent to which, even assuming its giveness, the role of cultural aspect is so much as to relinquish sex in the course of its assumption
  • In such approaches, gender emerges not as a term in a continued relationship of opposition to sex, but as the term which absorbs and displaces ''sex'', the mark of its full substantiation into gender or, from a materialist point of view, its full desubstantiation
    • She presents some feminists who criticize constructivism on the bases that woman bodies being passively the object of imprinted sexualities is a disempowering notion
    • Other feminists criticize the modern view of nature, which they link to feminine, as a mere instrument of technology, thus creating connections with Deleuze on what they claim for a distinct paradigm emphasizing dynamism and interrelations of nature.
      • This is also the base for much feminist critics on Beauvoir and her view of woman as marked bodies
        • Butler criticizes, however, the fact that those approaches miss that nature has a history of its own and that sex is positioned ambiguously in relation to that concept and its history
  2) A deconstructivism which preserves agency as it sees the socially constructed as operating through exclusions of non-ontological outsides. That's where she locates herself among those who consider the sexed body to be a creation of gender coming previous to gender (contingency of body/sex and gender).
  • If the first version of constructivism presumes that construction operates deterministically, making a mockery of human agency, the second understands constructivism as presupposing a voluntarist subject who makes its gender through an instrumental action
    • A construction is understood in this latter case to be a kind of manipulable artifice, a conception that not only pressuposes a subject, but rehabilitates precisely the voluntarist subject of humanism that constructivism has, on occasion, sought to put into question
      • The “I” neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves
        • This doesn't imply doing away with the subject, but only to ask after the conditions of its emergence and operation
          • In this sense, the matrix of gender relations is prior to the emergence of the human
          • In what can be related to the Althusserian concept of ideology as interpellation (to which hailing does one attend), Butler suggests that interpellation (citationality) is reiterated by various authorities and through various intervals of time to reinforce or contest this naturalized effect
            • Attending the hailing, or the assumption, is compelled by a regulatory apparatus of heterosexuality
              • As subjects to her cannot exist before the hailing itself, she points, however, that this act is not primarily theatrical; indeed, its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated
                • In a critical reformulation of the performative, Derrida makes clear that this power is not the function of an originating will, but is always derivative
                  • The derivative power of the Lacanian symbolic law and, of God, following a Nietzschenian critique, steams from the mere attribution to those figures through linguistic norms.
                  • And though the symbolic appears to be a force that cannot be contravened without psychosis, the symbolic ought to be rethought as a series of normativizing injunctions that secure the borders of sex through the threat of psychosis, abjection, psychic unlivability. And further, that this law can only remain a law to the extent that it compels the differentiated citations and approximations called feminine and masculine. The presumption that the symbolic law of sex enjoys a separable ontology priorand autonomous to its assumption is contravened by the notion that the citation of the law is the very mechanism of its production and articulation ---- THE BEST CRITIQUE OF LACAN!!!
  • It is not enough to claim that human subjects are constructed for the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less human, the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the human as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation
    • The debate between constructivism and essentialism thus misses the point of deconstruction
  • Constructivism is criticized as a discursive monism or linguisticism that refuses the constitutive force of exclusion within the very terms of discursive legitimacy
    • Indeed, the propositional form 'discourse constructs the subject' retains the subject-position of the grammatical formulation even as it reverses the place of subject and discourse
    • There are defenders and critics of construction, who construe that position along structuralist lines in which impersonal forces, such as Culture or Discourse or Power occupy the grammatical site of the subject after the human has been dislodged from its place.
      • As a result, construction is still understood as a unilateral process initiated by a prior subject, fortifying that presumption of the metaphysics of the subject that where there is activity, there lurks behind it an initiating and willful subject
        • This reconsolidates the metaphysics of the subject
          • This view informs a misreading by which Foucault is criticized for personifying power. But as Butler puts, Foucault didn't relocate subjectivity into power, because for him there's no power that act, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability
            • Foucault's view is rather close to the previously mentioned derivative concept of power of Derrida (power is not the function of an originating will, but is always derivative)
  • What Butler proposes instead of constructivism is a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter --- NEW MATERIALISM
    • She than stresses that, the process of materiality is both produced and destabilized in the course of its reiteration
      • In this sense, the agency denoted by the performativity of sex will be directly counter to any notion of a voluntarist subject who exists quite apart from the regulatory norms which she/he opposes. The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power
      • it will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed as is it will be to think about how and to what end bodies are not constructed and, further, to ask after how bodies which fail to materialize provide the necessary outside, if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter
        • I find interesting to think how anarchism as a historical failure could fit her description of a failed materialization which can reveal norms of exclusion !!!.
        • What challenge does that excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter?
• The historical range of materials is not meant to suggest that a single heterosexualizing imperative persists in each of these contexts, but only that the instability produced by the effort to fix the site of the sexed body challenges the boundaries of discursive intelligibility in each of these contexts
  • Identificatory processes are crucial to the forming of sexed materiality
  • Given that normative heterossexuality is clearly not the only regulatory regime operative in the production of bodily contours or setting the limits to bodily intelligibility, it makes sense to ask what other regimes of regulatory production contour the matteriality of bodies.

ABSTRACT ON AGAMBEN'S 'HOMO SACER (CHAPTER 1 – THE PARADOX OF SOVEREIGNTY)'

ABSTRACT ON AGAMBEN'S 'BARE LIFE (CHAPTER 1 – THE PARADOX OF SOVEREIGNTY)'

• Carl Schmitt defines sovereignty as the paradox wherein the sovereign is at the same time outside and inside the juridical order – as the sovereign can proclaim sates of exception
  • The law is outside itself – Schmitt's structure of exception
  • The exception appears in its absolute form when it is a question of creating a situation in which juridical rules can be valid
    • There is no rule that is applicable to chaos. Order must be established for juridical order to make sense
      • In this genealogy, authority proves itself not to need law to create law
        • This reveals that the exception is more interesting than the regular case to understand the substance and limits of politics.
        • The exception does not only confirm the rule; the rule as such lives off the exception alone
          • I find this proposition very deconstructivist in the sense given by Butler
    • The exception is to positive law what negative theology is to positive theology
      • The state of exception is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension
      • It has been observed that the juridico-political order has the structure of an inclusion of what is simultaneously pushed outside
        • Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri were thus able to write 'sovereignty only rules over what it is capable of interiorizing'
        • Maurice Blanchot says that modern politics tries to constitute the outside into an interiority of expectation or of exception
        • Confronted with an excess, the system interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way 'designates itself as exterior to itself' (Foucault)
        • The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaning itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule.
          • The particular force of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority – relation of exception.
            • This is not a fact, since it is only created through the suspension of the rule
            • E.G: The 'ordering of space' that is, acording to Schinmitt, constitutive of the sovereign nomos, is therefore not only a 'taking of land' (landesnahme) – the determination of a juridical and a territorial ordering (of an ordnung and an ortung) – but above all a 'taking of the outside', an exception (ausnahme).
              • As such, the state of exception itself is thus essentially unlocalizable (even if definite spatiotemporal limits can be assigned to it from time to time)
                • When our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a permanent and visible localization, the result was the concentration camp
                  • The camp – and not the prision – is the space that corresponds to this originary structure of the nomos. This is shown, among other things, by the fact that while prision law only constitutes a particular sphere of penal law and is not outside the normal order/ the juridical constellation that guides the camp is martial law and the state of siege.
                  • This is why it is not possible to inscribe the analysis of the camp in the trail opened by the works of Foucault. As the absolute space of exception, the camp is topologically different from a simple space of confinement. And it is this space of exception, in which the link between localization and ordering is definitely broken, that has determined the crisis of the nomos of the earth
• The main problematization to be made about sovereignty is not about who exercise it, but rather about 'over what is it being exercized'. In which case Agamben suggests that sovereignty is exercised against life as its sacralization doesn't prevent its murder – just its sacrifice – and subsequently orbitates the very possibility that it can be taken away. The possibility of emergency structures the juridico-normative power and, at the same time, derives from it.

ABSTRACT OF AGAMBEN'S 'HOMO SACER (INTRODUCTION)'

ABSTRACT OF AGAMBEN'S 'HOMO SACER (INTRODUCTION)'

• The greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the world life, which was splat between:
  a) Zoe: which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)
  b) Bios : which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group
  • But to speak of a zoe politike of the citizens of Athens would have made no sense
    • In the classical world, however, simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined – as merely reproductive life – to the sphere of the oikos, 'home'
    • At the beginning of The Politics, Aristotle takes the greatest care to distinguish the oikonomos (the head of an state) and the despotes (the head of the family), both of whom are concerned with the reproduction and the subsistence of life, from the politician, and he scorns those who think the difference between the two is one of quantity and not of kind.
    • He opposes the simple fact of living (to zen) to politically qualified life (to eu zen) of the politician
  • It's for a society of politicians and politicity tied to language that Aristotle defines man as a politikon zoon, not for the ideal society, not for a society of only Zoe and Bios
  • Foucault refers to this very definition at the end of History of Sexuality as he summarizes the process by which, at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power and politics turns into Biopolitics
    • For millenia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question
    • For Foucault this shift occurred along with the passage from the 'territorial state' to the 'state of population', and the creation of a 'government of men'.
      • Agamben points that as a result of such process, by the first time in history it was possible for one same rationality to protect life and to authorize holocaust
      • Foucault notes that the triumph of capitalism would not have been possible without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak created the 'docile bodies' that it needed.
        • Almost twenty years before Foucault, Hannah Arendt through her concept of homo laborans have noted that the decadence of modern politics was due to the overshadow of natural life, which she considers primary, by political action.
    • Agamben agrees with Foucault that the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis – the politicization of bare life as such – constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought
    • Agamben criticizes Foucault for not addressing certain key places of modernity, like the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century
      • Agamben says that the enigmas that our century has proposed to historical reason and that remains with us (nazism is only the most disquieting among them) will be solved only on the terrain – biopolitics – on which they were formed
        • Only within a biopolitical horizon will it be possible to decide whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left, private/public, absolutism/democracy, etc) – and which have been steadily dissolving, to the point of entering today into a real zone of indistinction – will have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost in that very horizon.
        • Only a reflection that, taking up Foucault's and Benjamin's suggestion, thematically interrogates the link between bare life and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one another, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to this political practical calling
    • Agamben criticizes Foucault also for not clearly pointing at which space the individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power meet each other – Agamben even recalls some critiques according to which Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power.
      • This mismatch is one between Foucault's studies on political techniques (totalizing state) and his studies on the technologies of the self (individualization)
      • If Foucault calls for a liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code then where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge?
        • Agamben points that certain subjective aspects in the genesis of power were already implicit in the concept of servitude volontaire in Etienne de La Boetie
        • Agamben proposition thus is to enquire precisely the hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power – the two analyses cannot be separeted
          • The inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power
            • In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception.
              • The modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii.
            • What remains to be interrogated in the Aristotelian definition is not merely – as has been assumed until now – the sense, the modes, and the possible articulations of the good life as the telos of the political. We must instead ask why Western politics first constitutes itself through an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life.
              • I particularly find this very close to the Deconstructivist approach of Butler.
              • It is not by chance, then, that a passage of the Politics situates the proper place of the polis in the transition from voice to language
              • The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it
                • Politics therefore appears to be the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized
                • The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/ political existence, zoe/ bios, exclusion/ inclusion.
                  • There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an exclusive exclusion
                  • If we match this with Deleuzze's explanation for the universality of castration as a necessity to articulate language, than politics can also be said to be an universal structure?
• With this framework of understanding, Agamben suggests to analyse the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed
  • This is an obscure figure of archaic Roman Law, in which human life is included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed), which Agamben believes to be useful on revealing the sacrament of sovereignty and the codes of political power.
  • The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zoē in the polis – which is, in itself, absolutely ancient – nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.
    • In this process the disciplinary process of State power posing the subject as object is made indistinguishable from the democratic process of subjects as agents.
    • Modern politics is based on zones of indistinction between the exclusive poles
    • To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests and accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoē, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin.
    • Today politics knows no value (and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the contradictions that this fact implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism – which transformed the decision on bare life into the supreme political principle – will remain stubbornly with us
    • Points to the inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarism but without denying their divergences as well
    • Bare life remains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion
    • Until a completely new politics – that is, a politics no longer founded on the exception of bare life – is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the “beautiful day” of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it
    • He says that the limits of sovereignty, as every limit, is a conceptual one, in this case opposing the sovereign to life
    • The problem of sovereignty was reduced [by orthodox Marxism] to the question of who within the political order was invested with certain powers, and the very threshold of the political order itself was never called into question
      • As State gets increasingly dissolved due to emergencies he suggests that one should inquire about the substance of the state and its limits rather than its leading rulers
        • For one such task he advises to revise all notions claimed to be evident, just like he was lead to revise the sacredness of life to understand how the construct of this argument reifyied life and at the same time enabled it to be killed
          • The Homo Sacer may be killed, but yet not sacrificed.
• Overall coments and dunderstandings about the chapter:
  • Bare life is the politicized form of zoe
  • Agamben uses the Homo Sacer to explain bare life
    • Homo Sacer is abandoned by the divine (zoe) and profane law (bios)
      • Bare life doesn't belong neither to zoe nor to bios
• For Agamben the Biopower has always existed as tyrans used to exert political control over bodies. What marks the uniqueness of modern politics, however, is the generalization of Homo Sacer in the sense that the categorizations operated through Biopolitics get blured and politics become a space of indistinction centered on those very blurings.
  • In one such space everyone is subjected to become Bare life.

PLAN OF ACTION TO DEVELOP A RESEARCH ON TAZ AMONG INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF DELHI

As easily noticed by comparing the project and the final essay, we restricted our final work to a few suggested investigations. Ideally one reviewed essay must incorporate the other suggested aspects, even because the interviews provided us with interesting material for that. However, for now we choose simplicity.

Bellow we have the plan of action which guided us to produce the article “SEARCHING FOR TAZs AMONG FACTORY WORKERS: LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM HOLES IN A ROUTINE BOUND WORLD”, also available here in the blog.

TEMPTATIVE ANALYSIS MODEL:

I suppose by now everybody may have read the suggested text.

In a very unclear language and through examples and illustrations which may be not fully familiar to most of us,

what Bey tries to show is that freedom can be achieved by ways which are not bonded to the traditional concepts of revolution. In fact, he points that traditional freedom struggle based on revolution are useless. He points that the main power struggle among sensitive beings (because it is not only restricted to the humans beings domination within theirselfs, but also envolves others species) didn’t lead the fighters to a world similar to their goals, but, instead, it just reshaped the reality of domination in other therms, eventually even worst.

He points that what bond us to this reality is basically the language, the methodology, action and perception patterns which conducts traditional movements against the system and, for this reason, drive one to a reality of continuously domination. For this he condemns the revolution concept. He also condemns revolution for its reticence, its millenary message which happens to drive individuals to a comfortable waiting behavior.

When pointing the failure of revolution in history he also points that attempts of invisibility and blossoming uprisings proved to be way more successful in the reality transformation. In a first moment it can be questioned by the simple fact that any uprising has existed continuously until now. However, Bey points that the merit of uprising and invisibility is exactly their non-dependence of perpetual structuralization of their bodies. More than this, their victorious role is to overcome language bonds and provide the sensitive actors a possibility of acting and experimenting linguistics, aesthetics and to freely express and experiment their flows and impetus.

According to Bey, the success of this tactics would lay in the fact that such achievements depend on buildings which took place in realities non-perceived by the domination world. For this, the society would be weakened by the loose of their dependent variable, the language actors and aesthetics performers. Complementary, this tactic would proof victorious because their ethos would work as an invisibility cloak which the modernity values would not be able to percept and, for consequence, would not be able to destroy.

Through his historic approach Bey sets the Pirates islands in the overseas world as a place of autonomous zones fostered in the scientific failures of the scientific society. Passing ahead time and evaluating the current situation, Bey points that nowadays there are no more virgin islands, that the science perception of world has no more unexplored caves to build secret freedom shelters. For this reason he points that the language shifting and the aesthetics and perceptions regarding basic institutions must be extremely critical and creative to foster observe and engage new meanings behind the traditional maping of what would be reality. According to him, this effort would highlight and give raise to what he calls Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ).

We will, them, explain more properly the ontology and the characteristics of the TAZ using the factory reality as a case study. First of all, however, we must, clear that the non-continuity of these events are not a proof of failure. In fact, the mere shifting towards another perception of time, without beginning and end, is already a victorious step towards a world which is not in the scientific map and clock offered by the reality.

We must also say to the class that Bey didn’t mean to offer any theory, but, instead, an essay, attempt, suggestion, almost a poetic fancy, which is just fully comprehensible through action. For this, our presentation will also try to scape patterns and, as an attempt to settle a space of freedom we would invite all to sit somewhere outside the class in a circle while somebody would serve tea and biscuits. This because, according to Beys, freedom to be achieved… or better, freedom to be communicated, needs a previous experimentation of the issues to which it refers.

Still following Beys challenge to observe the world through non-strictly meditative lenses, we will present his theory altogether with the workers experiences which show the practical basis of his thesis. Putting together abstract ideas (and not theories) and practice we will expose a sum of glimpses of this aesthetical irruption of freedom which, according to him, is the only possibility in the modern reality. And also, is the necessary step to make one aware of the possibilities of freedom.

We also explain in anticipation that his text is full of illustrative examples which goes from shamanism, religion and theater to deep philosophy, which is a way of speaking about another reality without contaminating it by our reality linguistic shapes and structures.

NOTE OF ORIENTATION TO THE GROUP:

The brief above brings ideas to be explained and, at the same time, contrasted, or compared, with the reality observed among the workers. Whenever it looks to be interesting, I added some question which I expect to raise answers which will be linked to the point being explained.

I expect and encourage any other questions to be added. As well as any other suggestion of interpretation of Bay’s ideas.

Also, it would be interesting if any colleague could link Beys theory with other authors. It was mentioned that feminist and local Indians ideas would be interesting. I totally agree, and wait for those suggestions. While suggesting such other contributions, please, also suggest possible questions which could drive to answers somehow related to the issue.

BRIEF OF THE TEXT: “THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE”, BY HAKIM BEY.

· The text takes piracy experiences in the overseas world to show that spaces of freedom and different patterns of civilization can occur by other means than the idea of revolution itself.

· He contextualizes the idea piracy to the reality where Cyberpunks praise the possibility of building freedom shelters through the tech development by marginal meanings and purposes.

o The decay of political systems will lead to a decentralized proliferation of experiments in living.

· Besides taking in account some Cyberpunk propositions, Bey believes that modern technology makes this kind of autonomy a romantic dream.

o Instead of Piracy Zones we should look for real possibilities of Autonomous Zones.

§ Modernity imposes a pattern of reality established according to generalizing patterns – everything must be structural and universal – rather than individual possibilities of reality experiences, of illegal freedom.

QUESTION: ASK ABOUT HOW THEY FEEL THEY ARE TREATED BY THEIR BOSSES. HOW THEY PERCEPT THEIR BOSSES DIFFERENTIATE THEM FROM THE OTHERS, IF THERE IS SUCH DIFFERENTIATION. ALSO ASK HOW THEY PERCEPT THEIRSELVES. THE AIM HERE IS TO HIGHLIGHT THEIR INDISTINCTION PERCEPTION.

§ So, to contest reality as it is we must shift the speech to a non-structural speech in which even the transition path is not defined on modernity patterns.

· Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom?

QUESTION: TRY TO HIGHLIGHT THEIR EXPECTATIONS IN THIS ISSUE

o ANSWER: Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a position. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices on our generation alone of humankind.

§ Here he is basically saying that we must experience freedom to fight for it, to build a structural general reality we must first know it in a individual level.

§ Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it.

· In the line of some pedagogical thoughts like Paulo Freire’s one.

QUESTION: TO ILUSTRATE THIS, WE COULD ASK THEM ABOUT WHAT THEY CONSIDER TO BE GOOD QUALITY OF LIFE. I’M EXPECTING THEM TO SAY IT AS SOME GENERALIZATION OF PUNCTUAL EXPERIENCES THEY HAVE HAD WITH GOOD FOOD, HOUSING, ETC… WHAT PROOFS THAT ONE JUST CAN REALIZE A DREM WHICH S/HE HAS ALREADY DREAMED WITH.

§ The realization of the TAZ begins with the simple act of realization.

· To say that “I will not be free till all human (or all sentiment creatures) are free” is simply to abdicate our humanity.

QUESTION: POSE THIS QUESTION TO THEM

· The TAZ is not more than an essay (“attempt”), a suggestion, almost a poetic fantasy… understood in action.

QUESTION: ASK THEM IF THEY NOW ANY EXAMPLE OF THINGS WHICH ARE LIKE THIS, JUST UNDERSTANDABLE BY THE ENGAGEMENT… AS A WAY TO HIGHLIGHT SOME CONCIOUS ABOUT THIS KNOLEDGE BIGGER THAN TRADITIONAL SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE

· Instead of the generalized and strict ruled revolution concept he suggest that shifts toward freedom come from UPRISINGS;

o Uprising, or the latin form insurrection, are words used by historians to label failed revolutions – movements which do not match the expected curve, the consensus-approved trajectory: Revolution, reaction, betrayal, the founding proof a stronger and even more oppressive State – the turning of the wheel, the return of history again and again to its highest form: jackboot on the face of humanity forever.

§ By failing to follow this curve, the up-rising suggests the possibility of a movement outside and beyond the Hegelian spiral of that “progress” which is secretly nothing more than a vicius circle.

QUESTION: ASK THEM IF THEY REMEMBER ANY CASE OF PROTEST WHICH FAILED, HOWEVER, LEFT A GOOD MEMORY ON THEM. GOOD TIMES WHICH HAPPENED DUE TO ANY KIND OF UPRISING THEY TOOK PART. TRY TO HIGHLIGHT THE FESTIVE FEATURE OF SUCH CASES.

“The slogan ‘Revolutionn’ has mutated from tocsin to toxin, a malign pseudo-Gnostic fate-trap, a nightmare where no matter how we struggle we never escape that evil Aeon that incubus the State, one State after another, every ‘heaven’ ruled by yet one more evil angel”.

· If History IS ‘time’ as it claims to be, then the uprising is a moment that springs up and out of Time, violates the law of History.

QUESTION: ASK THEM TO TELL A HISTORIC PERIOD, OF THE COUNTRY, OF THEIR FAMILIES, ANY KINF OF HISTORICAL SPEECH. AFTER THIS WE ASK ABOUT THINGS THEY ‘FORGOT MENTIONING’. WHATEVER THEY REMEMBER THEM MUST BE USED TO PUZZLE THEM WITH THE FACT THAT HISTORY IS A PATTERN TO CALCULATE TIME AND SO, IF THERE’S ‘LOST’ HISTORY, THAN THERE’S LOST TIME. MUST BE DONNE IN A VERY COMPREHENSIBLE LANGUAGE.

· If the State IS History, as it claims to be, than the insurrection is the forbidden moment, an untorgivable denial of the dialetic – shimmying up the pole and out of the smokehole, a shaman’s maneuver carried out at an ‘impossible angle’ to the universe. History says the Revolution attains ‘permanence’, or at least duration, while the uprising is ‘temporary’… the shaman returns, but hings have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred – a difference is made.

QUESTION: ASK THEM IF THEY BELIEVE IN THE EXISTENCE OF REALITY OTHER THAN THE STATES. AFTER THIS, ASK THEM TO DEFINE ANY STATE, INDIA OR WHATEVER. AFTER THEY DO SO, TELL THEM THAT, AS WELL AS IN THEIR PERSONAL HISTORY WHICH NEGLECTED SOME FACTS, THE HISTORY OF THE STATE IS ALSO MISSING SOMETHINGS… AND DROP THE QUESTION: IS THIS MISSING HISTORY SOMETHING OTHER THAN STATES?

· Are we to abandon the hope in return for some existentialist acte gratuity?

o The point is not to change consciousness but to change the world.

1. Revolution has never yet resulted in achieving this dream

QUESTION: ASK THEM IF THEY CAN QUOTE ANY REVOLUTION QHICH ACHIEVED THE OBJECTIVES

2. Even if we replace the revolutionary approach with a concept of insurrection blossoming spontaneously into anarchist culture, our own particular historical situation is not propitious for such vast undertaking.

a. The scientific era has developed powerful weapons against freedom fighters performing their acts in the modernist stage.

i. The field of positive knowledge is too sureveilled and known by the modernity civilization.

ii. The traditional geography and resources are favorable to the system permanence.

· Suggests that we should try shifting reality through uprisings, and says that fostering uprisings through questioning basically assumptions of modern language is the best option.

o For this he says that we should point in the direction of what he calls TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zones).

§ The TAZ denies even the time perception imposed by modernity

QUESTION: DRIVE THEM TO SPEAK ABOUT THEIR WORKING ROUTINE AND ABOUT SOME SPECIAL DAY IN THEIR LIFES, OR ABOUT WEEKENDS BROADLY, IN A WAY TO HIGHLIGHT THAT TIME SOMETIMES SEEMS NOT TO PASS AT ALL, AND OTHER TIMES JUST PASSES VERY QUICKLY.

· The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can ‘occupy’ these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relatively peace.

QUESTION: QUERY ABOUT POSSIBLE PATTERNS OF NON-ROUTINE CELEBRATIONS WICH TAKE PART IN THEIR LIFES AND HIGHLIGHT IT OCCURRENCE IN DIFFERENT PLACES AND LOCALS.

o Says that the mere fact of struggling against the state creates a space for State performance. By so, he suggests that we must abandon the state rather than directly struggling against it.

o Contextualizing to our work, we can say that Bey buys the idea of Society of Spetacle, created by Guy Debord, according to which the modernity is ephemerus and consists only of domination through aesthetical performances not linked to content or efforts to give raise to eventual contents believed to exist.

QUESTION: COLECT IMPRESSIONS ABOUT LIFE SHOWING THAT THEY FEEL LIKE JUST STAYING IN THE SURFACE, AS IF THEY FEEL THEY COULD GO DEEPER IN, E.G., RELATIONSHIPS, JOY, ETC… (WE COULD ASK ABOUT THE NON MONETARY REWARDING THEY RECEIVE FOR THEIR WORKING, THE FRIENDSHIP AMONG MOST WORKERS, THE PLEASURE THEY ARE ABOUT TO HAVE ON WEEKENDS, ETC…)

§ This way, we could argue that the intense experimentations of TAZ is a way to abandon the stage and sink in the realities neglected by modern language.

QUESTION: TRY TO HIGHLIGHT HOW THE FRIENDSHIP SEEMS TO BE BIGGER IN TAZ MOMENTS. HAVING IDENTIFIED SOME TAZ IN THEIR LIFES, INQUIRE THEM ABOUT FEELINGS OF TRUSTNESS AND FRIENDSHIP, ASKING WETHER THEY INCREASE IN MOMENTS OF TAZ OR IN THE TRADITIONAL ROUTINE MEETINGS.

· What we want to highlight in the factory workers is that: “Perhaps certain small TAZ have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves – because they never intersect with the spectacle, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of Simulation”.

QUESTION: BE AWARE TO NOTICE IF OCASIONALY ANY TAZ EXPERIENCE FITS IN THIS MODEL.

· TAZ is not to play the Spetacle Society theater.

· Getting TAZ started may involve tactics of violence and defense, but its greatest strength lies in its invisibility – the State cannot recognize it because History has no definition of it.

QUESTION: HIGHLIGHT THOSE ASPECTS IN THEIR NARRATIVE OF OCCURRED TAZs.

· TAZ is a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies.

· TAZ must be capable of defense; but both the ‘strike’ and the ‘defense’ should, if possible, evade the violence of the State, which is no longer a meaningful violence.

o Also needed in order to abandon state. State is the weapons one uses to fight.

· REASONS FOR TAZ RATHER THAN REVOLUTION

o NEGATIVE ONES:

1. Uprising represents a far more interesting possibility, from the standard of psychology of liberation, than all the ‘successful’ revolutions of burgoisie, communists, fascists, etc

a. The TAZ must be the scene of our present autonomy, but it can only exist on the condition that we already know ourselves as free beings.

QUESTION: TRY TO HIGHLIGHT HOW THEY FEEL IN TAZ MOMENTS, AS TO SHOW THE FREEDOM SELF-PERCEPTIO.

2. The Closure of Map: There is no more freedom resorts within the modern language itself (traditional geography, politics, etc…)

QUESTION: TRY TO SHOW THAT THE LANGUAGE AND PERCEPTIONS BY WHICH THEY REACHED THEIRE TAZ WAS NOT THE TRADITIONAL ONE. HIGHLIGHT AVERY KIND OF ART AND UNCONVENCIONAL SPEECH PRESENT IN THE MOMENT OF THEIR TAZ (ANY FEELING THAT DROVE THEM, MUSIC THAT MARKED THE MOMENT, A BEAUTIFUL IMAGE THEY HAVE OF THEIRSELFS, DESIRES WHICH MOTIVATED THEM, ETC…).

· Revolution is closed, but insurgency is open

· PSYCHOTOPOLOGY(-TOPOGRAPHY) is the art of downsizing for potential arts

o Process of exploring different psychological perception revealing unexplored possible realities, as a way to map the non-scientific shelter of the world which could host ‘invisible’ freedom experiences.

o TAZ unfolds within the fractal dimension invisible to the cartography of Control

§ We can quote the Zapatistas Uprising in Mexico, where their ideas are expressed through folklore and child stories of invented new geographies, color and other ‘basic’ stand points or the modern building.

QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT POSSIBLE CONDITION TO THE IRUPTIONS OF FESTIVE UNEXPECTED ROUTINE-BRACKER MOMENTS – TAZ. THE EFFORT IS TO SHOW THAT THEY ALSO HAVE THIS ALTERNATIVE MAP, THAT THEY ALSO SEE PLACES, SPACES AND TIMES WITH A DIFFERENT PERCEPTION OF IT, WHAT DRIVE THEM TO LOCALIZE THOSE REGIONS AS POSSIBLE TAZ AREAS.

o POSITIVE ONES:

1. Natural anthropology of the TAZ: Paleolitic ‘Band Model’ (based on abundance and natural affinity group) VS Neolitical nuclear Family Invention (based on scarcity and hierarchical imposition, settled by genetics)

a. Quotes the “more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of the band”.

QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT THE GROUPS GENERALY PRESENT IN THEIR TAZ, MAINLY IN THOSE LINKED TO THEIR WORK. TRYING TO HIGHLIGHT THEIR BAND BEHAVIOUR, THEIR AFFINITY FREE APROXIMATION AND THE IDEA OF ABUNDANCE WHICH GENERALY TAKES PART IN TAZ MOMENTS. WE CAN ARGUE THAT, BESIDES THE BROADLY AND GENERAL POOVERTY AMONG THEM, THERE IS ALSO MOMENTS WHERE THEY BEHAVE AS IF THEY WERE IN ABUNDANCE, BEING NOT-SELFISH, OFFERING AND SHARING WITH PLEASURE. JUST LIKE IN PARTIES WHERE WE OFFER AVERITHING AND ‘WASTE’ IN PROPORTIONS WHICH WE NORMALLY COULDN’T.

2. The TAZ as a festival: The ancient concepts of jubilee and saturnalia originate in an intuition that certain events lay outside the scope of ‘profane time’.

a. By the middle ages, nearly a third of the year was given over the holidays. Perhaps the riots against calendar reform had less to do with the ‘eleven lost days’ than with a sense that imperial science was conspiring to close up these gaps in the calendar where the people’s freedoms had accumulated – a coup d’ètat, a mapping of the year, a seizure of time itself, turning the organic cosmos into a clockwork universe. The death of the festival.

b. The media invites us to “come celebrate the moments of your life” with the spurious unification of commodity and spectacle, the famous non-event of pure representation. In response to this obscenity we have, on the one hand, the spectrum of refusal (chronicled by the Situationists, John Zerzan, Bob Black et al) – and on the other hand, the emergence of a festal culture removed and even hidden from the would –be managers of our leisure.

QUESTION: TRY TO COMPARE THE HAPPINESS AND FEELING OF FREEDOM IN TAZ SPONTANEOUSLY BORN AND ON SETTLED FESTIVE DAYS AND ORGANIZED PARTIES.

c. Peter Andrew said that “dinner parties are the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old”.

i. In parties we recognize some kind of humanism as natural human identification and attraction which can be explained by most distinct modes, both them pointing to the blossoming of intense human feelings experiences.

1. Stirner ‘Union of Egoists’; Kropotkin ‘Mutual Aid’; and Bataille ‘Economy of Excess’.

3. Psychic Nomadism (Rootless Cosmopolitanism): “The Death of God”, in some ways a de-centering of the entire “European” project, opened a multi-perspective post-ideological worldview able to move ‘rootlesly’ from philosophy to tribal myth, from natural science to Taoism – able to see for the first time through eyes like some golden insect’s, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world.

a. But this vision was attained at the expense of inhabiting an epoch where speed and “commodity fetishism” have created a tyrannical false unity which tends to blur all cultural diversity and individuality, so that “one’s place is as good as another”.

i. We kind of loose the capacity to evaluate how comfortable we could be in the other realities. We gain the ‘insect view’ but loose our judge capacity.

b. God’s last throes and deathbed rattles have been going on for such a long time – in the form of Capitalism, Fascism and Comunism, for exemple – that there’s still a lot of ‘creative destruction’ to be carried out of post-Bakuninist post-Nietzschean commandos or apaches (literally ‘enemies’) of the old Consensus.

QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT OTHER WAYS OF LIFE FEASIBLE TO THEM, LIKE STREET BEGGERS, RURAL WORKERS, TRIBAL LIFE, ETC… AND TRY TO SHOW HOW THEY ARE RESILIENTLY ACOMODATED IN THEIR OWN WORLD, AS I EXPECT THEM TO ANSWER (IN CASE THEY DON’T KNOW ANY POSSIBILITY OF LIFE THEY COULD HAVE, TELL THEM ABOUT HIPPIE LIFE, ETC…).

c. These nomads chart their courses by strange stars, which might be luminous clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of the NET, specially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics – and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values.

QUESTION: ASK THEM TO DESCRIBE THEIR FACTORY ACCORDING TO BRIEF STORIES WHICH RELATE THEM TO EVERY PART OF IT, AS TO SHOW THAT SOME AREAS ARE BIGGER OR SMALLER ACCORDING TO THE FEELINGS INVOLVING IT. WHAT WE ARE INTERESTED IN HERE ARE SIMPLE THINGS, LIKE, A STORY OCCURRED IN THE LAUNCHERY, IN THE BATHROOM, IN THE WORKING PLACE, IN THE WAY OUT, ETC…

4. The NET and the WEB: WEB, or Anti-NET, refers to the Marginal links struggling against the established wires – NET.

a. The TAZ tends to view the Tech/anti-Tech dichotomy as misleading, like most dichotomies, in which apparent opposites turn out to be falsifications or even hallucinations caused by semantics.

b. The TAZ is utopian in the sense that it envisions an intensification of everyday life, or as the Surrealists might have Said, life’s penetration by the Marvelous. But it cannot be utopian in the actual meaning of the word, nowhere or No Place Place.

i. The TAZ by its very nature seizes every available means to realize itself - it will come to life whether in a cave or in an L-5 Space City – but above all it will live, now, or as soon as possible, in however suspect or ramshackle a form, spontaneously, without regard for ideology or even anti-ideology. It will use a computer because the computer exists, but it will also use powers which are so completely unrelated to alienation or simulation that they guarantee a certain psychic paleolithism to the TAZ, a primordial-shamanic spirit which will ‘infect’ even the Net itself (the real meaning of Cyberpunk as I read it).

c. The TAZ hs occurred, is occurring and will occur with or without the computer. But for the TAZ to reach its full potential it must become less a matter of spontaneous combustion and more a matter of ‘islands in the Net’. The WEB is a quantum jump for the TAZ.

d. The full potential of non-hierarchic information networking logically leads to the computer as the tool par excellence.

QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT OCCASION EHRE THEY ‘MISUSED’ THINGS OF THEIR WORK OR OTHER TOOLS TO ACHIEVE MOMENTS OF ROUTINE-BREAK. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR HERE IS, FOR EXAMPLE, THE USE OF FACTORY SPACES FOR A SMALL PARTY OR CELEBRATION; THE USE OF A FACTORY TO COMMUNICATE A MESSAGE TO THE GROUP OF LABOR OR, IF IT HAPPENS TO BE, THE STEALING OF SOME THINGS FOR TAZ POURPOSES.

QUESTION: ASK ABOUT THEIR LINK WITH TECHNOLOGYM AMINLY COMPUTER, TO EVALUATE WHETHER THIS SPECIFIC TREND OF TAZ IS MISSING OR NOT IN THE FACTORY LABOURS EXPERIENCE.

· When tracking the ontology of the uprising movements which drove to the current TAZ shape, he denies any sort of encyclopaedism and, instead, adopted a scatter-shot technique, a mosaic of glimpses, beginning quite arbitrary with the 16^th-17^th centuries and the settlement of the New World.

o We will also use this interview technique with the workers.

o Proves, along the history of uprisings and marginal freedom building, that the aesthetics of the autonomy marginalization exerces a convincingly and attractive influence all over society.

QUESTION: ASK THEM IF THEI NPOTICED THEIR TAZ SEEMED ATRACTIVE TO OUTSIDERS.

QUESTION: IF SOME OF THEM EVER WERE LEFT BACK IN ANY TAZ ENJOYED BY THE OTHERS, TRY TO HIGHLIGHTS THE WILL THEY FELT TO TAKE PART.

QUESTION: QUOTE SOME TAZ EXAMPLES AND NOTICE IF THEY FEEL ATRACTED SOMEHOW.

o Quotes the autonomous zones of:

§ Buccaneers; Maroons; Ishmaels; Moors; Ramapaughs; Kalliaks

· Aims to prove the Nieztchean “Will to Power as Disappearance”.

o When the theorists speak of the disappearance of the Social they mean in part the impossibility of the ‘Social Revolution’ and in part the ‘impossibility of the State’.

o The end of the speech depends on the shutting up of the speaker.

§ Why bother to confront a ‘power’ wich has lost all meaning and become sheer Simulation?

· I noted some similarity with the new-French School of IR.

o “As I read it, disappearance seems to be a very logical radical option for our time, not at all a disaster or death for the radical project. Unlike the morbid deathfreack nihilistic interpretation of Theory, mine intends to mine it for useful strategies in the always-ongoing ‘revolution of everyday life’.

o Zerzan and Black have independently noted certain ‘elements of Refusal’ which perhaps can be seen as somehow symptomatic of a radical culture of disappearance, partly unconscious but partly conscious, which influences far more people than any leftist or anarchist idea. These gestures are made against institutions, and in that sense are ‘negative’ – but each negative gesture also suggests a ‘positive’ tactic to replace rather than merely refuse the despised institutions.

QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT THEIR EXPECTATION IN CASE THEY DISAPEAR. WHAT THEY EXPECT WOULD HAPPEN SO. WHAT THEY BELIEVE WOULD HAPPEN IN THE FACTORY THEY WORK FOR, IN THEIR FAMILY, IN THEIR NEIGHBORHOOD, IN THE SOCIETY AS A HOLE.

QUESTION: AFTER THE LAST QUESTIONS, ASK THEM WHAT THEY BELIEVE WOULD HELP IF MORE PEOPLE LIKE HIM STARTED DISAPEARING. HIGHLIGHT THE WAY S/HE REACTS TO THE PERCEPTION THAT INVISIBILITY CAN THREATEN THE STATE.

o E.G:

è THE QUESTIONS ABOVE WILL TRY TO SHOW WHETHER THIS VANISHMENT IS ALREADY OCCURING IN THEIR LIFES AS A NATURAL OUTCOME OF THE WORLDS POWER DOMINATION REALITY.

1. Voluntary Illiteracy: Home-schooling and craft-apprenticeship, like truancy, result in an absence.

QUESTION: OF COURSE THIS PEOPLE WON’T REALLY CHOOSE ILLITERACY IN A CLASSIC WAY… THEIR SOONS AND DAUGHTERS DON’T STUDY BECOUSE THEY DON’T HAVE MEANS. HOWEVER, WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT THE TRADITIONAL INSTITUTION OF EDUCATIONS AND THEIR PERSONAL BELIEFS OF WHAT IS ESSENTIAL TO THEIR SOONS DEVELOPMENT, HIGHLIGHTING THE SITUATIONS WHERE THEY VALORIZE THE POSSIBILITIES OF ‘TEACHING’ THEIRSELFS SO THEIR SPRINGS.

2. Not voting (‘Apathy’): Networking as an alternative to politics, on-hierarchic organization.

QUESTION: ASK ABOUT THEIR POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR, NOT PROPERLY THEIR POSITION IN THE LEFT-RIGHT AXIS, BUT ABOUT HOW HAPPY AND STIMULATED THEY FEEL TO GET INFORMATION ABOUT POLITICS, TO TRUST IN POLITICIANS AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS AND TO PROPERLY VOTE. HIGHLIGHT WHETHER THEIR POLITICAL ACTS ARE SOURCES OF FEAR AND IMPOSED TRADITION OR REALLY POLITICAL IMPETUS. THE IDEA IS TO TAKE OF THE MASK WHICH HIDDE AN EVENTUAL APATHY RELATED TO POLITICS.

3. Refusal to Work: Can take the forms of absenteeism, on job-drunkness, sabotage, and sheer inattention… or more creative alternatives, such as: self-employment, participation in the black economy and ‘lavoro nero’, welfare scams and other criminal options, pot farming, etc.

QUESTION: IN A VERY SENSITIVE WAY, ASK THEM ABOUT THEIR INVOLVEMENT EITH EVERY ONE OF THOSE KINDS OF ACTIVITIES. NOT PROPERLY BY POINTING THE NAMES, BUT, FOR EXAMPLE, ASKING IF THEY HAVE SOME COMPLEMENTARY SOURCE OF MONEY AND FITING IN THIS CASES. THE CASES OF SABOTAGE, DRUNKNESS AND SHEER INATENTION DEMANDS EVEN MORE CONFIDENCE AND SKILLS OF THE INTERVIEWER. ALSO KEEP SPACE FOR ANY OTHER KIND OF NON-TRADITIONAL EXPERIENCE RELATING TO THE WORK ROUTINE.

MOST IMPORTANTE QUESTIONS FOR OUR WORK BECOUSE IT IS DIRECTLY FOCUSED IN THE WORK FIELD.

ð Activities which are more or less ‘invisible’ compared tp traditional leftist confrontational tactics such as the general strike.

4. Refusal to Church: Non authoritarian forms of spirituality.

QUESTION: COMPARATIVELY ASK ABOUT THEIR INSTITUTIONALIZED FAITH ACTS AND THOSE THEY TOOKED BY THEIRSELFS OR AMONG FRINDS, WITHOUT THE INSTITUTIONAL INTERVENTION. TRY TO HIGHLIGHT IN WHICH CASE THEY FEEL MORE FREE AND ALSO TO MEASURE THE EXTEND OF WHICH ONE IN THEIR LIFES

5. Refusal to Home: Homelesness as an alternative or, instead, more creatively Hobos and similar trends.

QUESTION: SEE IF ONE OF THE WORKERS HAS A MIGRATION STORY AND, IF SO, TRY TO GO BEYOND THE STRICLTLY MATERIAL CAUSES OF THAT AND HIGHLIGHT THEIR SELF PERCEPTION OF HAPINESS AND FREEDOM DUE TO THIS, MEASURING THE INFLUENCE OF COGNITIVE ASPECTS IN THEIR DECISION OF MOOVING (THE MOOVE CAN BE FROM HOME, NEIBORHOOD, CITY OR COUNTRY). ALSO ASK THOSE WHO NEVER MOOVED ABOUT HIPOTHETICAL SITUATIONS OF MOVVING, AND EVEN OF MOOVING FOR PLACES WHICH ARE NOT REALLY BETTER, JUST TO MEASURE HOW THEY WELCOME THE IDEA OF CHANGING HOME.

6. Refusal of Family: Divorce situations are the most obvious when the reasons are self pleasure, however, the family identification with affinity groups is a parallel to family which, somehow, expresses the unsatisfaction with family.

QUESTION: OF COURSE THEY WON’T EXPRESS THEIR FAMILIES UNSATISFACTIONS IN A BRIEF INTERVIEW. WE CAN TRY, ASK ABOUT HOME AND TRY TO GET SOME INFORMATIONS ABOUT HOW CONFORTABLE THEY FEEL AT HOME. HOWEVER, WE MAY GET MORE POSITIVE ANSWER BY COMPARING THEIR EXITMENT WHILE TALKING ABOUT AFFINITY GROUPS AND AWHILE TALKING ABOUT FAMILY… THIS WAY WE CAN TRY TO MEASURE THE IMPORTANCE OF THOSE REALITIES IN THEIR LIFES.

7. Refusal of Arts: Theoretically it is an art which removes itself from History and even from Market. However, he asks whether it is possible.

QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT BEAUTIFUL AESTHETICS THEY MAY POINT IN THEIR TAZ HISTORIES, LIKE MUSICS SONG BY THEIRSELFS, LANDSCAPES WHICH MARKED THEIR STORYES, TASTES AND SMELLS THEY REMIND IN THE TAZ STORIES. THAN ASK ABOU TRADITIONAL MARKET-HISTORIC ART, QUOTE, FOR EXAMPLE, POPULAR SINGERS FROM THE RADIO, NOVELS, TV SHOWS AND OTHER COMERCIAL EXAMPLES, AND TRY TO GET THE INTENSITY THEY GET AFECTED BY THE A-HISTORIC ART AND BY THE TRADITIONAL ONE.

QUESTION: BEFORE GIVING ANY DEFINITION OF ART, TRY TO ASK THEM ABOUT THINGS WHICH MAKE THEY FEEL MORE CONFORTABLE OR DRIVE THEM TO DISTANT THOUGHTS. TRY TO MAKE THEM SPEACK ABOUT THE ART PRESENT IN THE TAZ THEY QUOTED BEFORE.

ð “I believe, or at least like to propose, that the only solution to the ‘suppression and realization’ of Art lies in the emergence of the TAZ. I would strongly reject the criticism that the TAZ itself is ‘nothing but’ a work of art, although it may have some of the trappings. I do suggest that the TAZ is the only possible ‘time’ and ‘place’ for art to happen for the sheer pleasure of creative play, and as an actual contribution to the forces which allow the TAZ to cohere and manifest”.

ð In the TAZ, art as a commodity will simply become impossible; it will instead be a condition of life.

ð Mediation is hard to overcome but the suppression of barriers between artists and users of art will tend toward a condition in which ‘the artist is not a special sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist’ (Coomaraswamy).

ð The disappearance of the artist IS the suppression and realization of art, in Situationist terms.

8. Chaos Linguistics: Language should be viewed as a complex dynamical system of “Chaos field”.

QUESTION: ALL OVER THE INTERVIEW NOTICE THE LANGUAGE PARTICULARITIES OF THEM, INQUIRING THAM ABOUT SOME SPECIFIC LANGUAGES THEY MAY USE, TECHNICAL WORDS USED IN THEIR ROUTINE AND THE MOS KEY WORDS USED TO DEFINE IMPORTANTE PATTERNS OF THEIR LIFES AND ALSO USED TO DESCRIBE THEIR FEELINGS DURING TAZs. AFTER THIS WE MAY ARRANGE THEIR PERCEPTION TRENDS IN THE TWO TRADITIONAL LINGUISTIC VIEWS AND, IF THERE IS STILL UNCOMPREHENSION, WE MAY USE BEYS LINGUISTIC CHAOS THEORY.

ð Two possible answers to Saussure’s linguistics of sign/signifier:

a) Antiliguistics: Rimbaud; Nieztche; Dadaism; Korzybski’s; Burroughs; Zerzan.

b) Chonskyan Linguistics: Belief in a universal grammar depending on hidden invariables (Bey considers to be mataphisical).

ð Bey points to a third answer which takes the believe that meaning is elusive and, therefore, language is fractal and, for that, linguistic is not established or created, but a Chaos in which creation and reality are not pure categories and exist or not according to the links one choose to establish among selected fractions.

ð This way, it is suggested that language can overcome representation and mediation, not because it is innate but because it is chaos.

ð This points that the Dadaist experience was not destroying or discovering language, but creating it.

ð The language perception behind the concept of TAZ points that if freedom can exist than it does exist – but perhaps only as a sort of alternate reality which we so far have not learned to perceive.

· Sets music as the organization principle of TAZ.

o Quotes that, when escapade beyond the frontier proved impossible, the era of revolutionary urban Communes began in Europe.

o Quotes Fiume

o Quotes Munich Soviet (or Council Republic)/ also called critically by “Cofeehouse Republic” – 1919.

QUESTION: HIGHLIGHT ALL THE OCCASION IN WHICH THEY CAN’T EXPLAIN THE INTERNAL COHERENCE OF THEIR TAZs, BUT JUST JUSTIFY THE PLEASURE OF IT BY LOOKING THE BROAD PORTRAIT. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT BEY MEANS BY MUSIC ORGANIZATION.

· Reserves a special role to be played by the perception of time.

QUESTION: ASK ABOUT THEIR PERCEPTION OF TIME DURING THEIR TAZs. IF IT PASSED THE SAME WAY AS WHEN THEY ARE WORKING, ETC…

· Disappearance is not necessarily a ‘catastrophe’ – except in the mathematical sense of a sudden topological change. All the positive gestures sketched here seem to involve various degrees of invisibility rather than traditional revolutionary confrontation.

The traditional New Left never really believed in its own existence till it saw itself on the Evening News. The New Autonomy, by contrast, will either infiltrate the media and subvert it from within – or else never be ‘seem’ at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond control but also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the understanding of the State, beyond the State’s ability to see.

QUESTION: INQUIRE THAN RATHER STRONG FEELINGS IN WHICH THEY ARE VERY CONFIDENT DEPEND ON THE OTHER APROVAL. FOR EXAMPLE, IF LOVE, FRIENDSHIP AND FEAR NEEDS CONFIRMATION FROM OTHERS. THAN ASK THEM ABOUT WHETHER FREEDOM AS A FEELING ALSO NEED TO BE CONFIRMED BY OTHERS (I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT OF THIS ANSWER, BUT IT MAY BE INTERESTING).

· We’ve mentioned the festal aspect of the moment which is UnControled, and which adheres in spontaneous self-ordering, however brief. It is ‘epiphanic’ – a peak experience on the social as well as individual scale.

· We can foresee a whole new geography, a kind of pilgrimage-map in which holy sites are replaced by peak experiences and TAZs: a real science of psychotopography, perhaps to be called geoautonomy or anarchomancy.