Ecoregionalism
This week, the nation of Russia attacked the nation of Ukraine in what is widely and rightly being regarded as a brazen act of nationalist imperialism. The liberal news media in the West has tended to criticize Russia’s actions in the name of the sovereignty of the nation of Ukraine, taking the inviolability of sovereign national territories for granted.
In this dispatch, I propose that we criticize acts of nationalist imperialism otherwise than affirming the inviolability of sovereign national territories. In brief, I propose that we criticize acts of nationalist imperialism by affirming nations’ shared concern for ecoregions and by affirming more or less permeable ecoregional boundaries.
Planning to Flee from Profiling
Once upon a time it was the paid administrator’s task to profile subjects under administration. In today’s deathly world of suffering, subjects under administration are tasked with profiling themselves without pay.
We are all becoming unpaid administrators, engaged in compiling and reviewing profiles about ourselves and others, and desperately trying to find ways to advantage ourselves in administrative rat races by exploiting the (mal)functioning of automated and networked systems that record, sort, filter, and match profiles.
Planning to Flee from Calendaring and Clocking
If my desire to flee from calendaring and clocking seems fanciful, it is only because we have become accustomed living in a deathly world of suffering that privileges machinic measures of time and abstract tabulations of days, months, and years.
Planning to Flee from Financing
“If it don’t make money, it don’t make sense.” — That is gist of the domineering statements, implements, and environments that form the capitalist powers that prevail over our deathly world of suffering.
Planning to Flee from Schooling
Why do we live in a deathly world of suffering in which schooling is considered to be more important than learning?
Fugitive Planning
Fugitive planning is what enables us to makes sense of direct action and due process in defense of direct action.
Convivial Statements
I write that domineering statements are the condition of possibility for the effectiveness of violent communication, and I write that convivial statements are the conditions of possibility for the effectiveness of nonviolent communication — but what do I mean by this?
Black Mythologies
I have been thinking a great deal about an essay by Jacques Derrida titled “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”. In this essay, Derrida speaks of a coin so old that the images stamped on its heads and tails have worn away. This coin still has some currency, but its provenance is uncertain and, as a result, its value is considered increasingly suspect by those who give it and take it in turns. Derrida holds that philosophical concepts that do not bear any mark of their cultural provenance or any mark of the facticity of their issuers are similar to such coins: such concepts may have currency but their value is suspect.
For bell hooks
The recent passing of bell hooks has inspired me to reconsider the clinical expression that she often used to name the deathly world of suffering that prevails over us, “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.
Multiplying Confluences
Rather than working to prevent the formation of powers, counterpowers work to prevent the stabilization of power formations.
Freeing Time
All powers first establish themselves over us by determining the rhythm and tempo of our lives. This is to say, in other words, that power can only rule, discipline, normalize, and optimize our lives if it succeeds in ruling, disciplining, normalizing, and optimizing the rhythm and tempo of our lives.
It follows from this that countering the powers that determine the rhythm and tempo of our lives is decisive to countering any and all powers.
Pivotal Processes
The previous dispatch examined the fifteen processes (or “structure preserving transformations”) that the architect Christopher Alexander found to be pivotal to the deconstruction of deathly worlds and the (re-)construction of living worlds.
In considering the specific kinds of living worlds that I would (re-)construct, I have found that, while all fifteen of these processes have their place in my worlds, some are more pivotal to my worlds than others. The most pivotal processes to my worlds are the processes of (i) NOT-SEPARATENESS, (ii) DEEP INTERLOCK AND AMBIGUITY, (iii) ROUGHNESS, and (iv) SIMPLICITY AND INNER CALM.