Writing machines ::: thinking in the n-th power and writing a rhizome :::
:::: face-it ::::
from Azania via Australia via Brazil to the FACE
Protected: a plane : A manifesto for a new earth and a new people
THE DARK MOUNTAIN MANIFESTO
It is time to look down – embrace the earth.
Originally posted here: Out of the blue Like
The end of the human race will be that it will
eventually die of civilisation.Ralph Waldo Emerson
Presentation: The witch’s flight in Erehwon
FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM: JURISPRUDENCE AS CREATING RIGHTS
Presentation for Deleuze And Guattari And Africa: Southern Responses 15-16 July, UCT, Cape Town
JUST’IS’ & JUS’TEASE’ & JUST’EASE’ questions for “THE XF MANIFESTO”
These are questions not critique:
What is justice?
What is injustice?
What is the relationship between justice and injustice? (either/or ..?)
Is justice a concept or possibly an affect or possibly a function and possible all of the above?
How do one ‘think and do’ justice?
Put differently, how do one think justice as a concept, function and affect with a plurality of meanings when ‘agencements’ of power are triggered, allowing one to call an established position into question?
Does it imply the overcoming of current knowledge apparatus where habit and memory serves to fuel justice with resentment and false consciousness (the idea that one is necessarily guilty)?
Does it calls for a politics of the affirmation of the multiplicity?
The Xenofeminism Manifesto
The Laboria Cuboniks collective released their manifesto, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, via their #FF Twitter account. Read it, (… while keeping in ‘mind’):
The following observations from the Manifesto, got me really excited:
XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds (0x01).
XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world (0x02).
XF must be a rationalism (0x04).
Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands.Xenofeminism endeavours to face up to these obligations as collective agents capable of transitioning between multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organization (0x06).
We want to cultivate the exercise of positive freedom–freedom-to rather than simply freedom-from–and urge feminists to equip themselves with the skills to redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools in the service of common ends (0x07).
The malady of melancholia only compounds political inertia, and–under the guise of being realistic–relinquishes all hope of calibrating the world otherwise. It is against such maladies that XF innoculates (0x09).
XF is an affirmative creature on the offensive, fiercely insisting on the possibility of large-scale social change for all of our alien kin (0x0A).
These puritanical politics of shame–which fetishize oppression as if it were a blessing, and cloud the waters in moralistic frenzies–leave us cold. We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption (0x0C).
What requires reengineering are the memetic parasites arousing and coordinating behaviours in ways occluded by their hosts’ self-image; failing this, memes like ‘anonymity’, ‘ethics’, ‘social justice’ and ‘privilege-checking’ host social dynamisms at odds with the often-commendable intentions with which they’re taken up. The task of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire’s puppet-strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural systems. The will will always be corrupted by the memes in which it traffics, but nothing prevents us from instrumentalizing this fact, and calibrating it in view of the ends it desires (0x0D).
Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist (0x0E).
The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies (0x0F).
Xenofeminism seeks to be a mutable architecture that, like open source software, remains available for perpetual modification and enhancement following the navigational impulse of militant ethical reasoning. Open, however, does not mean undirected. The most durable systems in the world owe their stability to the way they train order to emerge as an ‘invisible hand’ from apparent spontaneity; or exploit the inertia of investment and sedimentation. We should not hesitate to learn from our adversaries or the successes and failures of history. With this in mind, XF seeks ways to seed an order that is equitable and just, injecting it into the geometry of freedoms these platforms afford (0x10).
The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is, indeed, an infinite task (0x12).
Digital technologies are not separable from the material realities that underwrite them; they are connected so that each can be used to alter the other towards different ends. Rather than arguing for the primacy of the virtual over the material, or the material over the virtual, xenofeminism grasps points of power and powerlessness in both, to unfold this knowledge as effective interventions in our jointly composed reality (0x13).
With the potential to foreclose, restrict, or open up future social conditions, xenofeminists must become attuned to the language of architecture as a vocabulary for collective choreo-graphy–the coordinated writing of space (0x14).
From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with home as fact, as an un-remakeable given. Stultifying ‘domestic realism’ has no home on our horizon. Let us set sights on augmented homes of shared laboratories, of communal media and technical facilities. The home is ripe for spatial transformation as an integral component in any process of feminist futurity. But this cannot stop at the garden gates. We see too well that reinventions of family structure and domestic life are currently only possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic sphere–the way of the commune–or bearing its burdens manyfold–the way of the single parent. If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate women from the public sphere, and men from the lives of their children, while penalizing those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place. The task before us is twofold, and our vision necessarily stereoscopic: we must engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labour and family life, while building models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage labour (0x15).
Without the foolhardy endangerment of lives, can we stitch together the embryonic promises held before us by pharmaceutical 3D printing (‘Reactionware’), grassroots telemedical abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to assemble a platform for free and open source medicine? (0x16).
The mesopolitical arena of xenofeminism’s universalist ambitions comprehends itself as a mobile and intricate network of transits between these polarities. As pragmatists, we invite contamination as a mutational driver between such frontiers (0x17).
How do we build a better semiotic parasite–one that arouses the desires we want to desire, that orchestrates not an autophagic orgy of indignity or rage, but an emancipatory and egalitarian community buttressed by new forms of unselfish solidarity and collective self-mastery? (0x18)
Xenofeminism is a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new language for sexual politics–a language that seizes its own methods as materials to be reworked, and incrementally bootstraps itself into existence. We understand that the problems we face are systemic and interlocking, and that any chance of global success depends on infecting myriad skills and contexts with the logic of XF. Ours is a transformation of seeping, directed subsumption rather than rapid overthrow; it is a transformation of deliberate construction, seeking to submerge the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy in a sea of procedures that soften its shell and dismantle its defenses, so as to build a new world from the scraps (0x19)
Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is the insertion of a topological-keyframe for the formation of a new logic. In affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry than the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed. We need new affordances of perception and action unblinkered by naturalised identities. In the name of feminism, ‘Nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever!
If nature is unjust, change nature! (0x1A)
THE JUDGE FACIALITY MACHINE (PART 2)
Still from Stereoscope, 1999, animated film, 35 mm film, video and DVD transfer, 8’ 22’’. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery New York (via http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/Timeandphotography/vancaelenberghe.html)
I shall look into faces, and I shall see them seek some other face (Virginia Woolf, The Waves).
Introduction
Judicial adjudication affords the individual and collective bodies an alternative / additional space in the event of a possible rights infringement, to challenge enacted laws, policy and the action of the sovereign. Although constitutionalism in modern liberal democracies has opened up a previous enclosed space for courts in the form of judicial adjudication to possibly creatively deal with rights alongside traditional forms of democratic participation, courts remain trapped within institutional boundaries when they rely on interpretative approaches, legal convention, legal culture, and legal history. Courts often defer a situation of rights-infringement to the legislature or executive branches of government as a macro-political matter. As such the concept of human rights grounded in the notion of a supposed fixed identity and judicial interpretation grounded in presupposed values confines movement or change. An underlying reason for this confinement is the artificial blockages created by our current knowledge apparatus and the overemphasis on medico-legal considerations on the issue of the right to passage.
In this post, I focus on two recent cases in two different domestic jurisdictions, Canada and South Africa that concerned the sensitive and controversial issue of the right to passage (euthanasia, assisted dying or assisted suicide). I argue that courts functions as a faciality machine producing both the concrete face and the landscape insofar the judge as faciality machines, manages decisions about health including decision-making between the messy borders of life and death on behalf of micro-political agencements (arrangements or assemblages). I focus on the most general function of facialisation that of biunivocalization function arguing that courts functions as normality computers and deviance detectors. Continue reading
The judge faciality machine (part 1)
Burned Out by Urs Fischer
When individuals face a decision to end their life in their own way an in their own time, they attempt to overcome established ways of acting and being acted upon by forming micro-political arrangements or becomings challenging the established position of the prohibition to end their life. This micro-political movement however, encounters the macro-political when they approach a court and question the established order. Hanafin (2009: 56) explains that these agencements (arrangements/assmblages) or becomings ‘call for another politics, a politics of becoming beyond the time of the political’. These micro-political becomings calling for another politics forces thinking law to become other than it presently is. It opens questions of bioethics calling for a focus on actual desires and interests in relation to the ending of life and the nebulous borders between life and death. However, courts assign a molar identity to these arrangements and I hope to explain this by working with Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract faciality machine.
Furthermore, the law perceives such a request, as a treat to the legal order which requires that the law through prohibition in legislation manage and prevent the action of the subordinate individual to end their life (Hanafin 2009: 47). Braidotti, Colebrook and Hanafin (2009: 5) argues that
What is at stake here is a politics beyond the bureaucratic rights-giving or rights-depriving state, which remains after the word has been said. This is the self declaring itself not in response to the call of the state or as the subject matter of rights, but as an active participant in political affairs. It is a self which exceeds fixing.
In this and the followings post, I intend to work with Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract faciality machine as an attempt to think intensively and to investigate the possibility of exploring the leakages or lines of flight out of the confined spaces in which courts operate as explained in previous posts (here and here). By firstly focussing on the most general function of facialisation that of biunivocalization or binarisation, I illustrate that courts functions as a faciality machine producing both the concrete face and the landscape when addressing the possible infringements of human rights (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 180-181).
Although these posts only focus on the operation of biunivocalization, I hope to explore the judge faciality machine in subsequent posts in the context of limit judge faciality machines. The biunivocalization function merely illustrate how courts function as normality computers and deviance detectors and as such I argue that possibilities of leakages or lines of flight will only be presented when working with the court as a limit machine.
This post aims to provide background on how the faciality machine operates. The following post, focuses on two recent cases in two different domestic jurisdictions, Canada and South Africa (that is so to speak worlds apart) that concerned the sensitive and controversial issue of the right to passage (euthanasia, assisted dying or assisted suicide).
Thinking rights beyond current knowledge apparatus, beyond institutionalisation and beyond the subject – doing jurisprudence
Judicial adjudication within our current knowledge apparatus, affords individual and collective bodies an alternative and additional space in the event of a possible rights infringement, to challenge enacted laws, policy and the action of the sovereign. Although constitutionalism in modern liberal democracies has opened up a previous enclosed space for courts in the form of judicial adjudication to possibly creatively deal with rights alongside traditional forms of democratic participation, courts remain trapped within institutional boundaries when they rely on interpretative approaches, legal convention, legal culture, and legal history where courts often defer a situation of rights-infringement to the legislature or executive branches of government as a macro-political matter. As such the concept of human rights grounded in the notion of a supposed fixed identity and judicial interpretation grounded in presupposed values confines movement or change.
In this post I hope to illustrate that when rights are perceived beyond institutional expression, a supposed fixed identity (subject) and presupposed values, it may possibly be of assistance in identifying different ways of ‘becomings’ that goes beyond the majority standard.
