Wandering Lines

As unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality, consumers produce through their signifying practices something that might be considered similar to the "wandering lines" ("lignes derre") drawn by the autistic children studied by F. Deligny: "indirect" or "errant" trajectories obeying their own logic. In the technocratically constructed, written, and functionalized space in which the consumers move about, their trajectories form unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths across a space. Although they are composed with the vocabularies of established languages (those of television, newspapers, supermarkets, or museum sequences) and although they remain subordinated to the prescribed syntactical forms (temporal modes of schedules, paradigmatic orders of spaces, etc.), the trajectories trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop.

- Michel de Certau in The Practice of Everyday Life

Guerrilla War

It is often said that guerrilla warfare is primitive, This generalization is dangerously misleading and true only in the technological sense. If one considers the picture as a whole, a paradox is immediately apparent, and the primitive form is understood to be in fact more sophisticated than nuclear war or atomic war or war as it was waged by conventional armies, navies, and air forces. Guerrilla war is not dependent for success on the efficient operation of complex mechanical devices, highly organized logistical systems, or the accuracy of electronic computers. It can be conducted in any terrain, in any climate, in any weather; in swamps, in mountains, in farmed fields. Its basic element is man, and man is more complex than any of his machines. He is endowed with intelligence, emotions, and will. Guerrilla warfare is therefore suffused with, and reflects, man’s admirable qualities as well as his less pleasant ones, While it is not always humane, it is human, which is more than can be said for the strategy of extinction.

- Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC
From his introduction to his 1978 translation of Mao's Guerrilla Warfare.

A tear for the world

Cultivo una rosa blanca
En julio como en enero,
Para el amigo sincero
Que me da su mano franca.

Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazon con que vivo,
Cardo ni ortiga cultivo,
Cultivo una rosa blanca.

I cultivate a white rose
In July as in January
For the sincere friend
Who gives me his hand frankly.

And for the cruel person who tears out
the heart with which I live,
I cultivate neither nettles nor thorns:
I cultivate a white rose.

- José Martí

Love, and solidarity Tristan, and all who struggle with him.

Alienation & Academia

I finished a (short) paper today. It's nothing brilliant or anything; but, since it's about militarism and the university, I figured I ought to share. It doesn't gives a full account of what's going on (not even close) but it offers -- what I hope -- is one useful way of looking at it.

Since World War Two, American academia has had a close relationship with the military, in what has been termed the “Military-Industrial-Academic-Complex” (Leslie, 1993). In a report on the influence of military funding on science the Stanford Workshop on Political and Social Issues found that a number of professors defended their relationship with the military by “[...] declin[ing] to make any connection between their work and the DDC statements of military relevance” (Shapley, 1972). This paper will explicate Marx’s theory of alienation and then apply it to academia in order to illuminate how scientists are distanced from the ethical implications of their work.

[Read the rest of the paper.]

Phalic Key

The gargoyle lock of nightmares swallows with a robotic rumble the steel teeth of the keys, the phallic symbol of the prison.

- Jacques Lesage de la Haye, La guillotine du sexe