Archive: Author: w
Hey, YOU! What are you doing (or NOT doing) to STAY HEALTHY?
These three Chicago Dept. of Public Health clinics offer free condoms and free, confidential (that means private) HIV testing to anyone age 12 and up. Be sure to call first to confirm that someone is available for the services that you need.
West Town Adolescent Specialty Clinic
2418 W. Division
Phone: (312) 742-4092
Tue.: 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
Fri.: 8 a.m.– 4 p.m.
South Austin Specialty Clinic
4958 W. Madison
Phone: (312) 746-4871
Mon., Wed., Fri.: 8:00 a.m.– 4:00 p.m.
Tue., Thu.: 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
31st Street Specialty
530 E. 31st St., 1st Floor
Phone: (312) 745-1493/1496
Mon., Wed., Fri.: 8:00 a.m.– 4:00 p.m.
Tue., Thu.: 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
Chicago Recovery Alliance offers clean needles and counseling to help people struggling with addiction to stop abusing drugs and lower their risk of HIV. To learn more about them, check out their website www.anypositivechange.org or call Cheryl at 773-860-1804 or Hector at 847-830-9255.
If you want to volunteer, request someone to speak about HIV, or if you have questions, you can reach Better Existence with HIV (BEHIV) at www.behiv.org or 773-293-4740.
You can learn more about how HIV and AIDS can affect you, your health, and your world at www.thebody.org, www.data.org, www.cdc.gov, and www.unaids.org.
Remember: To lower the risk of HIV, a person can postpone sex, use a latex condom if he or she chooses to have sex, not share needles, get tested, talk to his or her partners and friends about HIV and AIDS, not abuse drugs and alcohol, and/or have one faithful, HIV-negative partner.
Video Reflection #2
1. HOW have we come up with the list of ideas?
2. Do you feel that we have adequately explored the options and ideas?
3. How can we make sure everyone is heard?
4. How should we proceed? Give concrete solutions.
Sept 11, 2001 – Comparing Numbers
Compare numbers from the following two articles about 9-11-01. One article was written a day after 9-11-02, while the second was written much later. Which numbers are probably very accurate? Which are probably only rough estimates? How do you know? Why are the articles’ numbers different?
(Above is in conjunction with CMP Data Around Us Inv. 1.1)
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SEP 12, 2001
Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
Hijackers rammed jetliners into each of New York’s World Trade Center towers yesterday, toppling both in a hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke and leaping victims, while a third jetliner crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia. There was no official count, but President Bush said thousands had perished, and in the immediate aftermath the calamity was already being ranked the worst and most audacious terror attack in American history.
The attacks seemed carefully coordinated. The hijacked planes were all en route to California, and therefore gorged with fuel, and their departures were spaced within an hour and 40 minutes. The first, American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 out of Boston for Los Angeles, crashed into the north tower at 8:48 a.m. Eighteen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175, also headed from Boston to Los Angeles, plowed into the south tower.
Then an American Airlines Boeing 757 left Washington’s Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles, but instead hit the western part of the Pentagon, the military headquarters where 24,000 people work, at 9:40 a.m. Finally, United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 flying from Newark to San Francisco, crashed near Pittsburgh, raising the possibility that its hijackers had failed in whatever their mission was.
In all, 266 people perished in the four planes and several score more were known dead elsewhere. Numerous firefighters, police officers and other rescue workers who responded to the initial disaster in Lower Manhattan were killed or injured when the buildings collapsed. Hundreds were treated for cuts, broken bones, burns and smoke inhalation.
By 8 p.m., police officer volunteers using dogs had found four bodies in the smoldering, stories-high pile of rubble where the towers had once stood and had taken them to a makeshift morgue in the lobby of an office building at Vesey and West Streets.
But the real carnage was concealed for now by the twisted, smoking, ash-choked carcasses of the twin towers, in which tens of thousands of people used to work on a weekday. The collapse of the towers caused another World Trade Center building to fall 10 hours later, and several other buildings in the area were damaged or aflame.
“I have a sense it’s a horrendous number of lives lost,” said Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. “Right now we have to focus on saving as many lives as possible.”
The Mayor warned that “the numbers are going to be very, very high.”
He added that the medical examiner’s office will be ready “to deal with thousands and thousands of bodies if they have to.”
Within an hour, the United States was on a war footing. The military was put on the highest state of alert, National Guard units were called out in Washington and New York and two aircraft carriers were dispatched to New York harbor. President Bush remained aloft in Air Force One, following a secretive route and making only brief stopovers at Air Force bases in Louisiana and Nebraska. His wife and daughters were evacuated to a secure, unidentified location. The White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol were evacuated, except for the Situation Room in the White House where Vice President Cheney remained in charge, giving the eerie impression of a national capital virtually stripped of its key institutions.
Nobody immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks. But the scale and sophistication of the operation, the extraordinary planning required for concerted hijackings by terrorists who had to be familiar with modern jetliners, and the history of major attacks on American targets in recent years led many officials and experts to point to Osama bin Laden, the Islamic militant believed to operate out of Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s hard-line Taliban rulers rejected such suggestions, but officials took that as a defensive measure.
Attorney General John Ashcroft told reporters in the evening that the suspects on the first flight were armed with knives.
Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, told reporters that the United States had some evidence that people associated with Mr. bin Laden had sent out messages “actually saying over the airwaves, private airwaves at that, that they had hit two targets.”
In the evening, explosions were reported in Kabul, the Afghan capital. But officials at the Pentagon denied that the United States had attacked that city.
President Bush, facing his first major crisis in office, vowed that the United States would hunt down and punish those responsible for the “evil, despicable acts of terror” which, he said, took thousands of American lives. He said the United States would make no distinction between those who carried out the hijackings and those who harbored and supported them
“These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat, but they have failed,” a somber president told the nation in an address from the Oval Office shortly after 8:30 p.m.
Earlier, landing at Barksdale, Air Force One was accompanied by fighter jets on both wings, and surrounded on the ground by Air Force personnel in full combat gear. Mr. Bush returned to Washington at 7 p.m.
The repercussions of the attack swiftly spread across the nation. Air traffic across the United States was halted at least until today and international flights were diverted to Canada. Borders with Canada and Mexico were closed. Most federal buildings across the country were shut down. Major skyscrapers and a variety of other sites, ranging from Disney theme parks to the Golden Gate Bridge and United Nations headquarters in New York, were evacuated.
But it was in New York that the calamity achieved levels of horror and destruction known only in war.
The largest city in the United States, the financial capital of the world, was virtually closed down. Transportation into Manhattan was halted, as was much of public transport within the city. Parts of Lower Manhattan were without power. Major stock exchanges closed. Primary elections for mayor and other city offices were cancelled. Thousands of workers, released from their offices in Lower Manhattan but with no way to get home except by foot, set off in vast streams, down the avenues and across the bridges under a beautiful, clear sky, accompanied by the unceasing serenade of sirens.
While doctors and nurses at hospitals across the city tended to hundreds of damaged people, a disquieting sense grew throughout the day at other triage centers and emergency rooms that there would, actually, be less work: the morgues were going to be busiest.
A sense of shock, grief and solidarity spread rapidly through the city. There was the expectation that friends and relatives would be revealed among the victims. Schools prepared to let students stay overnight if they could not get home, or if it emerged that there was no one to go home to.
There was also the fear that it was not over: stores reported a run on basic goods. And there was the urge to help. Thousands of New Yorkers lined up outside hospitals to donate blood.
As in great crises past, people exchanged stories of where they were when they heard the news.
“There is a controlled professionalism, but also a sense of shock,” said Mark G. Ackerman, an official at the St. Vincent Medical Center. “Obviously New York and all of us have experienced a trauma that is unparalleled.”
“I invite New Yorkers to join in prayer,” said Cardinal Edward M. Egan as he emerged from the emergency room of St. Vincent’s in blue hospital garb. “This is a tragedy that this great city can handle. I am amazed at the goodness of our police and our firefighters and our hospital people.”
All communications creaked under the load of the sudden emergency. Mobile phones became all but useless, intercity lines were clogged and major Internet servers reported overloads.
The area around the World Trade Center resembled a desert after a terrible sandstorm. Parts of buildings, crushed vehicles and the shoes, purses, umbrellas and baby carriages of those who fled lay covered with thick, gray ash, through which weeping people wandered in search of safety, each with a story of pure horror.
Imez Graham, 40, and Dee Howard, 37, both of whom worked on the 61st floor of the north tower, were walking up Chambers Street, covered in soot to their gracefully woven dreadlocks caked in soot, barefoot. They had spent an hour walking down the stairs after the first explosion. They were taken to an ambulance, when the building collapsed. They jumped out and began to walk home. “They need me; I’ve got to get home,” Ms. Howard said. Where was that? “As far away from here as possible.”
In Chinatown, a woman offered them a pair of dainty Chinese sandals. Nearby, construction workers offered to hose the soot off passing people.
The twin pillars of the World Trade Center were among the best known landmarks in New York, 110- floor unadorned blocks that dominated any approach to Manhattan. It is probable that renown, and the thousands of people who normally work there each weekday, that led Islamic militants to target the towers for destruction already in 1993, then by parking vans loaded with explosives in the basement.
There is no way to know how many people were at work shortly before 9 a.m. when the first jetliners sliced into the north tower, also known as 1 World Trade Center. CNN and other television networks were quick to focus their cameras on the disaster, enabling untold numbers of viewers to witness the second jetliner as it banked into the south tower 18 minutes later, blowing a cloud of flame and debris out the other side.
Even more viewers were tuned in by 9:50 a.m. when the south tower suddenly vanished in swirling billows of ash, collapsing in on itself. Then at 10:29 a.m. the north tower followed. A choking grey cloud billowed out, blocking out the bright sunshine and chasing thousands of panicked workers through the canyons of Lower Manhattan. Plumes continued to rise high over the city late into the night.
“The screaming was just horrendous,” recalled Carol Webster, an official of the Nyack College Alliance Seminary who had just emerged from the PATH trains when the carnage began. “Every time there would be another explosion, people would start screaming and thronging again.”
The scenes of horror were indelible; people who left from the broken towers, people who fought for pay phones, people white with soot and red with blood. “We saw people jumping from the tower as the fire was going on,” said Steve Baker, 27. “The sky went black, all this stuff came onto us, we ran.”
The timing was murderous for the armada of rescue vehicles that gathered after the planes crashed, and were caught under the collapsing buildings. Many rescue workers were reported killed or injured, and the anticipation that Building 7 would soon follow led to a suspension of operatios. The firefighters union said that at least 200 of its members had died.
Mayor Giuliani, along with the police and fire commissioners and the director of emergency management, was forced to abandon a temporary command center at 75 Barclay Street, a block from the World Trade Center, and the mayor emerged with his gray suit covered with ash.
In the evening, officials reported that buildings 5 and 7 of the World Trade Center had also collapsed, and buildings all around the complex had their windows blown out. The Rector Street subway station collapsed, and the walkway at West Street was gone.
World leaders hastened to condemn the attacks, including Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Libya’s Muammar al-Qhaddafy.
European leaders began quiet discussions last night about how they might assist the United States in striking back, and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, joined in expressing support for a retaliatory strike.
But in the West Bank city of Nablus, rejoicing Palestinians, who have been locked in a bitter struggle with Israel for almost a year, went into the streets to chant, “God is great!” and to distribute candies to celebrate the attacks.
Many governments took their own precautions against attack. Israel evacuated many of its embassies abroad, and non-essential staffers at NATO headquarters in Brussels were ordered home.
In Afghanistan, the ruling Taliban argued that Mr. bin Laden could not have been responsible for the attacks. “What happened in the United States was not a job of ordinary people,” an official, Abdul Hai Mutmaen, told Reuters. “It could have been the work of governments. Osama bin Laden cannot do this work.”
Apart from the major question of who was responsible, a host of other questions were certain to be at the forefront in coming days and weeks. One was the timing — why Sept. 11?
The date seemed to have no obvious meaning. One of the men convicted in the bombing of the United States Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, in which 213 were killed, was originally scheduled for sentencing on Sept. 12. But the sentencing of the man, Mohamed Rasheed Daoud al-‘Owhali, had been put off to mid-October.
It was possible that Mr. Al-‘Owhali and the others convicted with him were close witnesses to the bombings, since terror suspects typically await sentencing at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. Officials have not confirmed that the convicted Nairobi bombers are there.
Many questions would also be raised about how hijackers managed to seize four jets with all the modern safeguards in place. Initial information was sketchy, although a passenger on the United Airlines jetliner that crashed in Pennsylvania managed to make a cellular phone call from the toilet. “We are being hijacked, we are being hijacked,” the man shouted at 9:58 a.m. As he was speaking, the plane crashed about eight miles east of Jennerstown, killing all 45 aboard.
For all the questions, what was clear was that the World Trade Center would take its place among the great calamities of American history, a day of infamy like Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma City, Lockerbie.
The very absence of the towers would become a symbol after their domination of the New York skyline for 25 years. Though initial reviews were mixed when the towers were dedicated in 1976, they came into their own as landmarks with passing years. King Kong climbed one tower in a remake of the movie classic.
In April, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which ran the World Trade Center through its first 30 years, leased the complex for $3.2 billion to a group led by Larry A. Silverstein, a developer, and Westfield America Inc.
In recent years, the complex has filled up with tenants and revenues have increased. In addition to the towers the complex included four other buildings, two of which were also gone, for a total of 12 million square feet of rentable office space.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information
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http://www.newyorkmetro.com/news/articles/wtc/1year/numbers.htm
9/11 by the Numbers
Death, destruction, charity, salvation, war, money, real estate, spouses, babies, and other September 11 statistics.
The initial numbers are indelible: 8:46 a.m. and 9:02 a.m. Time the burning towers stood: 56 minutes and 102 minutes. Time they took to fall: 12 seconds. From there, they ripple out.
* Total number killed in attacks (official figure as of 9/5/02): 2,819
* Number of firefighters and paramedics killed: 343
* Number of NYPD officers: 23
* Number of Port Authority police officers: 37
* Number of WTC companies that lost people: 60
* Number of employees who died in Tower One: 1,402
* Number of employees who died in Tower Two: 614
* Number of employees lost at Cantor Fitzgerald: 658
* Number of U.S. troops killed in Operation Enduring Freedom: 22
* Number of nations whose citizens were killed in attacks: 115
* Ratio of men to women who died: 3:1
* Age of the greatest number who died: between 35 and 39
* Bodies found “intact”: 289
* Body parts found: 19,858
* Number of families who got no remains: 1,717
* Estimated units of blood donated to the New York Blood Center: 36,000
* Total units of donated blood actually used: 258
* Number of people who lost a spouse or partner in the attacks: 1,609
* Estimated number of children who lost a parent: 3,051
* Percentage of Americans who knew someone hurt or killed in the attacks: 20
* FDNY retirements, January–July 2001: 274
* FDNY retirements, January–July 2002: 661
* Number of firefighters on leave for respiratory problems by January 2002: 300
* Number of funerals attended by Rudy Giuliani in 2001: 200
* Number of FDNY vehicles destroyed: 98
* Tons of debris removed from site: 1,506,124
* Days fires continued to burn after the attack: 99
* Jobs lost in New York owing to the attacks: 146,100
* Days the New York Stock Exchange was closed: 6
* Point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average when the NYSE reopened: 684.81
* Days after 9/11 that the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan: 26
* Total number of hate crimes reported to the Council on American-Islamic Relations nationwide since 9/11: 1,714
* Economic loss to New York in month following the attacks: $105 billion
* Estimated cost of cleanup: $600 million
* Total FEMA money spent on the emergency: $970 million
* Estimated amount donated to 9/11 charities: $1.4 billion
* Estimated amount of insurance paid worldwide related to 9/11: $40.2 billion
* Estimated amount of money needed to overhaul lower-Manhattan subways: $7.5 billion
* Amount of money recently granted by U.S. government to overhaul lower-Manhattan subways: $4.55 billion
* Estimated amount of money raised for funds dedicated to NYPD and FDNY families: $500 million
* Percentage of total charity money raised going to FDNY and NYPD families: 25
* Average benefit already received by each FDNY and NYPD widow: $1 million
* Percentage increase in law-school applications from 2001 to 2002: 17.9
* Percentage increase in Peace Corps applications from 2001 to 2002: 40
* Percentage increase in CIA applications from 2001 to 2002: 50
* Number of songs Clear Channel Radio considered “inappropriate” to play after 9/11: 150
* Number of mentions of 9/11 at the Oscars: 26
* Apartments in lower Manhattan eligible for asbestos cleanup: 30,000
* Number of apartments whose residents have requested cleanup and testing: 4,110
* Number of Americans who changed their 2001 holiday-travel plans from plane to train or car: 1.4 million
* Estimated number of New Yorkers suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder as a result of 9/11: 422,000
we suck from the same mother
What is the shape of desire? How does it come to take on a form?
The real power problem is to take control of our own desires, to actually give them forms that are good for ourselves – strategically, long-term. That is, how can we change the “what” of desire?
Does desire have to be linked to the possible, to an image, and therefore to the other, to lack?
Within the borders of a drugs effect, or a sexual experience, or a mystical/spiritual landscape, we experience desire as levels of intensities – not lack (Deleuze’s body-without-organs).
The “I” is lost.
The “I” afterall, was the constriction, the lack, the fact that I cannot be you, I cannot inhabit all positions, I am located here within an other-space as opposed to there. But when that I is abandoned, we have fluidity, creation. Creation changes the borders that create the I. The creative event starts out with some simple idea and transforms itself and participants simultaneously, exposing and leading out of the constrictions that at first enabled it. The contract is violated.
I want to violate the contract. I want freedom from the forms of the past that are constantly shackling the present (often by proclaiming to be the future). I want immersion. All the images and bodies and objects are so many parameters, but let them be modifiable. Instead, the contract constantly requires stability, preset desire channels. Little rivulets of titilation leech away desire. Constant bombardment of positions, of bodies, of others that I-could-be-but-I-am-not empower me to possibilities while ensuring my alienation and lack. It is a pornography.
How do we know when our desires are being fucked with? Does that question imply that there is a natural self, or a pure desire, out there somewhere beyond? What desires might I be willing to give up? What desires am I too scared to dissociate from the self? Would I be a man if I did not want…? Would I be me if I did not want (dissociate) an other?
Conversely, what desires am I too scared to associate with the self? Would I be me if I wanted…?
(And so we construct fantasies, parodies, invented and transferred desires. We have a million mechanisms to locate desire so that it will not fundamentally alter our own image. We must see our desire as legitimate, as good (or at least ok). We sense (and are told) of a danger…)
What do I want? What do S, Sh, D want? What if that dissociation is the constriction? Can I say instead what do we want? Well, writing about it – at least in this form, seems destined to always be a laundry list of (fictional) lacks and possibilities not attained. That is because there is no feedback, no ambiguity, no way in which the contract is violated to recreate the enabling/constricting parameters (the self/other). We are not experimenting together if I write in such a straightforward format. Maybe it is a good idea to self-reference and use stream-of-consciousness as Sh did. How can we open this up, lose the “I”, let it take on a life of its own and follow it?
I was reading about a Native American tribe, the Zunis, that has a curing society of clowns. The clowns actively work in that zone of discofort by taking on shamanic powers, by seeing themselves as indestructible. They inhabit/expose that uncomfortable zone of belief/disbelief, of that which structures desire. Their actions force one to look and laugh at one’s own borders. (Boundaries of Belief by Barbara Tedlock in I Become Part of It)
Again I created the absence. I am such a sexist. Positing the absent void other that I can never grasp, never fill. The blue sky womb here but greater, its immensity always beyond, and therefore to some degree always missed. And so it is past, the past I never lived and yet which enables my present. I am complicit. I killed mother because I live the way I live. Trampling. So many fetuses I could become.
And now I claim all of them. Desire spans across them like an invisible energy wave, reverberating like the taut cords that were cut. We are acting on the same impulse – one that runs between us. We have tapped the same root. We abandon the contract, the forms, the bodies. We suck from the same mother.
desire
“I want to exercise that muscle, develop that part of the self.”
Eventually the collection of collective desire will lead us to the next step, collective action. It is through the control of what can be transmitted as desire, through the taboo, that collective action is controlled and the individual is atomized. Only certain desires are socially expressible, others remain – subconscious or mute or withering in our selves.
AN ACTION PLAN: CONFESSIONS
We will make a log of our desires and compare notes. What are those desires we share but are too scared to share? What are we hiding from ourselves and each other? How are we constantly surveilling ourselves?
First we will keep logs based on a singular time of day (10pm). Later we will try keeping a log based on a same/similar place. And why not take a guess at what other group members are desiring?
the placement of that desire
2006/5/23 7:45am, Sacramento at 90/94, W:
A large delivery truck coming at me took a left right in front of me, missing my front bumper by inches. My anger was quick. But as I thought back on it, I believe that anger, at least some sorts, also has a basis in desire. I wanted the truck not to be right in front of me. I wanted not to be in danger. And I externalized the blame to an other. If it had been myself, I suppose it would manifest as guilt. Both stem from a desire. It is the placement of that desire in self or other that can make it radically active.
about beyond surveillance
we are exploring modes
> >>> “beyond” surveillance. That’s a name that seems somehow the slightest
> >> bit hopeful…which may not be a bad thing.
> >>
> > yes – i like the idea of it not being only reactionary, but something that
> > might experiment/create… Beyond surveillance experiment? project? workshop?
> > cabal?
> >
(we are based in chicago)
measuring complicity
I want to be able to make the right decisions for my students. I want to be able to encourage them to learn. Instead I am complicit in a system of measure that tells kids their worth(lessness) and discourages so many of them. Anything to sort and justify and legitimize. I want to be able to use the system – in that it is free and provided, but I also want to be able to get rid of its underlying idea of standardization. Why crank out more automatons? I want students to actually learn to learn. Instead, we teach them to be spoonfed and school is like one step “better” than tv (but much less entertaining).
I want to spend time with my family. I want a relief from the work (soon…). I want that daily debilitating migraine in my head to stop. I want to stop time and see it all. I want to stop life’s march to death. I want real communion. I want to be less lonely. So many people and I feel so distant.
that sort of anonymous fog
2006/05/22 7:30-8:00am, in my car driving South along Sacramento Ave. to work, W:
I want to turn on the radio, but I resist as that fills my brain (prop-agenda). Instead I am trying to focus on the present, and on my desires. I want to focus on the present. I want the coffee to make me more aware. I want to be less sleepy, but the buildings pass by in a sort of blur. I want to find this trip riveting (there was a while when I could really see the city). I want to recapture the past. I want what never was I am sure. I want right now. Her hip-swinging walk. Way overdone, but it works.
Am I really desiring her? Some anonymous girl on the sidewalk with tight pants and a hip-swinging walk? It isn’t really fully formed, the thought. It lingers there – not as the idea of sex, of having sex, but rather as sexuality, that sort of anonymous fog.
There is a vacant corner lot. Nice odd shape. Could be a nice place to design a house. Except it is right next to the highway. Someday I wish I’ll get to actually put something nice up. Maybe on that lot there. Another fully odd corner lot. What about her? Not really that interesting. Why am I always looking? I mean, honestly, I’ve never even touched anyone else outside of my wife since we started going out 15 years ago. Never seriously considered it. And still there is that fog, not really sex, but sexuality. Is it desire? Some form of it, doubtless. I wish I actually had less of all of this work. I know once I get there I am going to be swamped once again with all that BS. I just want to stick with what’s important. I want no demands I guess.
There is that damn juvenile court, with its white shining walls and pure glass pyramid on the top. What a load of shit. What might I desire to do to that building. Tear the damn thing down. I’d love to watch it implode. Or maybe just paint it red, anything but that pure white, as if it were innocent.
You know, when I first look at that building, I just have this general feeling of distaste. It’s not like desire has taken on a form. It’s only when I start thinking consciously about it that it takes on a form. Instead, when I first look at it, it just has that fog around it. Then, as I start thinking, some thoughts pop in that might reasonably fit that fog. I think that is where propaganda could take hold. That is where one can strategically intervene in desire. It is by allowing easily pre-made routes, paths of least resistance, pre-formed desire vehicles that one can channel the energy of that initial emotional fog.
Beyond Surveillance Meeting Notes for 5/20/06 at Mess Hall
Attending: D, S, Sh, W
Why am I interested in surveillance? I dislike the potential limits it puts on future action. Also, this future consequence changes what I do in the present. How much control is affected only on the basis of my own belief that it is really there? To what degree does surveillance only exist as far as I believe in it?
DISMANTLING JUSTICE?
Looking out the window, getting up at the bumps in the night – is that surveillance? What’s so bad about surveillance? The video camera is interesting in that it is a visible symbol of the surveillance apparatus. It is difficult to get some people to go beyond the idea of right/wrong to the idea of who/what decides what is right/wrong.
With watching comes judgment.
People who didn’t grow up in the small town think the monoculture is quaint (and it sells – look at the new urbanist subdivision), while the imposed monoculture of the mediated technological government/corporate apparatus is seen as imposing. Yet, monoculture can be just as, if not more, oppressive. How many times can we call into the system? Is that more than reverse surveillance? The government/corporation consistently attempts to take on the role of the paternal/maternal (and their exceptionalism). How is the mommy/daddy/gov/corp broken? Is it a matter of telling dad’s drunken party stories? How am I culpable as a surveiller of others (teacher/mother/father/husband/wife)? and of self?
At the heart of surveillance is the idea: If you do something, there will be a consequence.
Can justice exist without surveillance?
DISMANTLING THE SINGULAR SELF, THE SINGULAR BODY
We are taught to self-surveill from a very early age. Our very conception of self, of body, can not be separated from the issue of surveillance. To deconstruct surveillance is also to deconstruct the self. We are talking about fundamental liberation. We must examine the limits of the self. We must re-conceptualize the self. We must look into the border of self/other. Is lack or culture(surveillance) the limit of the body? (nature/nurture argument) We cannot draw a nice pure line between what is “real” self-preservation and what is culturally-based self-preservation.
What is a body? How can I become my self without seeing my self? (self-surveillance) What good is a self? There are traditions that indicate routes of no-self, such as zen buddhists, christian mystics…
We need to make the internalized surveillance mechanism visible.
What if we were to dismantle the idea of the singular space-time self, the linked self? Is that schizophrenia?
DISMANTLING THE SINGULAR SPACE-TIME, THE SINGULAR OTHER
Email is worthless for big corporate advertisers because it has been flooded with spam. What if we were to take this approach to surveillance? Make the medium useless? Run the other way with it. Destroy the singular space-time it is attempting to create.
Can we look back to before surveillance? Back to the decentralized space (the “dark” ages) which did not conceptualize a singular self/other?
We must look for the contradictions, paradoxes.
COLLECTIVE SELVES, COLLECTIVE DESIRES
There is no personal liberation without social liberation, and vice versa. There is only liberation. (Or perhaps there is only problematics.)
When we took over LSD, the crowd was acting as a singular self, on a singular collective simultaneous desire. No self or collective self. (Police remained as other.)
What are the strategic routes for desire?
I want to exercise that muscle, develop that part of the self. Eventually the collection of collective desire will lead us to the next step, collective action. It is through the control of what can be transmitted as desire, through the taboo, that collective action is controlled and the individual is atomized. Only certain desires are socially expressible, others remain – subconscious or mute or withering in our selves.
AN ACTION PLAN: CONFESSIONS
We will make a log of our desires and compare notes. What are those desires we share but are too scared to share? What are we hiding from ourselves and each other? How are we constantly surveilling ourselves?
First we will keep logs based on a singular time of day (10pm). Later we will try keeping a log based on a same/similar place. And why not take a guess at what other group members are desiring?
FUTURE STRATEGIES
How can we strategically look at the issue of surveillance? How is desire strategically planned? It is done all the time – advertisers provide a few hand object choices for which you can associate/match your desire to. Police design the routes that they would like protesters to take, and break them up into small units.