#Zournazi

[dailyanarchistposts]

Footnotes 1 - 100

[1] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 4.

[2] Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Seattle: Rebel Press, 2001), 26.

[3] Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xi–xiv.

[4] The concept of the “public secret” originated with situationism, and we borrow it from the Institute of Precarious Consciousness, in their suggestion that anxiety is a public secret of contemporary capitalism. See Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “Anxiety, Affective Struggle, and Precarity Consciousness-Raising,” Interface 6/2 (2014), 271–300.

[5] Alfredo M. Bonanno, Armed Joy (London: Elephant Editions, 1998), https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-armed-joy.

[6] See, for instance: John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, 2nd Revised Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 19–42; The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends 216–219.

[7] The concept of sad militancy comes to us from Michel Foucault and Colectivo Situaciones. See Foucault, “Preface”; Colectivo Situaciones, “Something More on Research Militancy: Footnotes on Procedures and (In)Decisions,” in Constituent Imagination, ed. Erika Biddle and Stevphen Shukaitis (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), 73–93.

[8] Brian Massumi, “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), ix–xv.

[9] Zainab Amadahy, “Protest Culture: How’s It Working for Us?,” Rabble.ca, July 20, 2010, http://rabble.ca/news/2010/07/protest-culture-how%E2%80%99s-it-working-us.

[10] This phrase is often attributed to Frederic Jameson who wrote “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” See Frederic Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (2003), 77.

[11] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 38.

[12] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1984), 53.

[13] “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 10. http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf.

[14] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 61.

[15] Dean Spade, “On Normal Life,” interview by Natalie Oswin, Society and Space (January 2014), http://societyandspace.org/2014/01/15/on-6/.

[16] “Joy—Definition of Joy in English,” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/joy.

[17] Rebecca Solnit, “We Could Be Heroes,” EMMA Talks, Vancouver, February 17, 2016. http://emmatalks.org/session/rebecca-solnit/.

[18] Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 192.

[19] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Indict the System: Indigenous & Black Connected Resistance,” LeanneSimpson.ca, http://leannesimpson.ca/indict-the-system-indigenous-black-connected-resistance/ (accessed November 28, 2014).

[20] Our interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of joy comes from many sources, but one of the most helpful is Mary Zournazi’s interview with the affect theorist Brian Massumi, in which he distinguishes joy from happiness. See Mary Zournazi, “Navigating Movements: A Conversation with Brian Massumi,” in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, by Mary Zournazi (New York: Routledge, 2002), 241–242.

[21] Gustavo Esteva, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, email, April 26, 2014.

[22] Silvia Federici, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, telephone, January 18, 2016.

[23] Lorde, Sister Outsider, 57.

[24] adrienne maree brown, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, email, November 11, 2015.

[25] This reading of Deleuze is indebted to conversations with Kim Smith and the reading she has developed of Susan Ruddick. See Susan Ruddick, “The Politics of Affect: Spinoza in the Work of Negri and Deleuze,” Theory, Culture & Society 27/4 (2010), 21–45.

[26] Bædan, “The Anti-Social Turn,” Bædan 1: Journal of Queer Nihilism (August 2012), 186.

[27] This notion of wisdom is drawn from Claire Carlisle’s helpful explanation of Spinozan wisdom as something akin to “emotional intelligence.” See Claire Carlisle, “Spinoza, Part 7: On the Ethics of the Self,” The Guardian, March 21, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/21/spinoza-ethics-of-the-self.

[28] Marina Sitrin, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, email, February 4, 2016.

[29] “Militant,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Militant&oldid=754366474 (accessed December 12, 2016).

[30] Melanie Matining, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, in person, May 6, 2014.

[31] Jackie Wang, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender and the Politics of Safety,” LIES Journal 1 (2012), 13.

[32] Idem, 10.

[33] Glen Coulthard, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, in person, March 16, 2016.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Kiera L. Ladner and Leanne Simpson, eds., This Is an Honour Song: Twenty Years since the Blockades (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010), 1.

[36] Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 178.

[37] Sebastián Touza, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, email, February 2, 2016.

[38] Sebastián Touza, “Antipedagogies for Liberation Politics, Consensual Democracy and Post-Intellectual Interventions” (PhD dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 2008), 136–7. https://www.academia.edu/544417/Antipedagogies_for_liberation_politics_consensual_democracy_and_post-intellectual_interventions.

[39] For a fuller discussion of these dynamics, see Marina Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (London: Zed Books, 2012).

[40] Margaret Killjoy, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, email, March 8, 2014.

[41] Anonymous, “Robot Seals as Counter-Insurgency: Friendship and Power from Aristotle to Tiqqun,” Human Strike, https://humanstrike.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/robot-seals-as-counter-insurgency-friendship-and-power-from-aristotle-to-tiqqun/ (accessed August 27, 2013).

[42] brown, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[43] The turn of phrase “making kin” comes to us from the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway. See Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6/1 (2015), 161.

[44] Idem, 163.

[45] “Freedom—Definition of Freedom in English,” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/freedom.

[46] Douglas Harper, “Free (Adj.),” Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=free (accessed November 30, 2016).

[47] Ibid.

[48] Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries, eds., Word Histories and Mysteries: From Abracadabra to Zeus (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 103.

[49] Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, trans. Robert Hurley (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2015), 127.

[50] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008), Chapter XIII, Of the Natural Condition of Mankind.

[51] This short account of the Age of Reason is drawn primarily from Silvia Federici. See Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 133–62.

[52] Some books we have found helpful include Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992); Moira Gatens, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009); Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, trans. Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010).

[53] Our reading of Spinoza is drawn primarily from Deleuze and those he has influenced. For helpful introductions to this lineage, see Gilles Deleuze, “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect” (Lecture, Cours Vincennes, Paris, 1978), https://www.gold.ac.uk/media/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf; Michael Hardt, “The Power to Be Affected,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28/3 (September 1, 2015), 215–22; Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).

[54] “Ethics—Definition of Ethics in English,” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ethics.

[55] Deleuze, “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect.”

[56] This anecdote is based on conversations and exchanges with Kim Smith.

[57] Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 32.

[58] Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene.”

[59] Ivan Illich to Madhu Suri Prakash, “Friendship,” n.d.

[60] This is drawn from Anonymous, “Robot Seals as Counter-Insurgency.”

[61] Coulthard, Interview with Glen Coulthard.

[62] See for instance Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 2014); Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Colour Organizing,” in The Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology, INCITE! Women of Colour Against Violence, eds., (Oakland: South End Press, 2006), 66–73; Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2010); Federici, Caliban and the Witch.

[63] Silvia Federici, “Preoccupying: Silvia Federici,” interview by Occupied Times, October 25, 2014, http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=13482.

[64] Dean Spade, “For Lovers and Fighters,” in We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, ed. Melody Berger (Emeryville: Seal Press, 2006), 28–39, http://www.makezine.enoughenough.org/newpoly2.html.

[65] bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 2006), 249.

[66] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “I Am Not a Nation-State,” Indigenous Nationhood Movement, November 6, 2013, http://nationsrising.org/i-am-not-a-nation-state/.

[67] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, email, November 2, 2015.

[68] Raúl Zibechi, Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2012), 39.

[69] Idem, 41.

[70] Silvia Federici, “Permanent Reproductive Crisis: An Interview with Silvia Federici,” interview by Marina Vishmidt, July 3, 2013, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interview-silvia-federici.

[71] Mia Mingus, “On Collaboration: Starting With Each Other,” Leaving Evidence, August 3, 2012, https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/on-collaboration-starting-with-each-other/.

[72] Gustav Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 214.

[73] Idem, 90.

[74] Idem, 101.

[75] Idem, 91.

[76] scott crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective, 2nd ed. (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 199.

[77] Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2005), 127.

[78] Richard J. F. Day, “From Hegemony to Affinity,” Cultural Studies 18/5 (2004), 716–48.

[79] Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Ya Basta!: Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising, ed. Ziga Vodovnik, (Oakland: AK Press, 2004), 77.

[80] Gloria Anzaldúa, “(Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces,” in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3.

[81] Zainab Amadahy, “Community, ‘Relationship Framework’ and Implications for Activism,” Rabble.ca, July 13, 2010, http://rabble.ca/news/2010/07/community-%E2%80%98relationship-framework%E2%80%99-and-implications-activism.

[82] Coulthard, Interview by.

[83] Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2014), 31.

[84] Coulthard, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[85] Leanne Simpson, Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Press, 2011), 32.

[86] Luam Kidane and Jarrett Martineau, “Building Connections across Decolonization Struggles,” ROAR, October 29, 2013, https://roarmag.org/essays/african-indigenous-struggle-decolonization/.

[87] Harsha Walia, “Decolonizing Together: Moving beyond a Politics of Solidarity toward a Practice of Decolonization,” Briarpatch, January 1, 2012, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/decolonizing-together.

[88] Coulthard, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[89] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Thomas Wayne (New York: Algora Publishing, 2003), 42.

[90] Coulthard, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[91] Mingus, “On Collaboration.”

[92] Simpson, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[93] Ursula LeGuin, “Ursula K Le Guin’s Speech at National Book Awards: ‘Books Aren’t Just Commodities,’” The Guardian, November 20, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards-speech.

[94] scott crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective, 2nd ed. (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 173.

[95] adrienne maree brown, “That Would Be Enough,” adriennemareebrown.net, September 6, 2016, http://adriennemareebrown.net/2016/09/06/that-would-be-enough/.

[96] VOID Network, “VOID Network on the December 2008 Insurrection in Greece,” B.A.S.T.A.R.D. Conference, University of California, Berkeley, March 14, 2010, https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/03/18/18641710.php.

[97] Many works within this current remain untranslated into English; however, there are a few English sources. In particular, we learned a lot from Sebastian Touza’s PhD dissertation and our interview with him. See Colectivo Situaciones, 19&20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism, trans. Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza (New York: Minor Compositions, 2012); Deleuze, “Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect”; Marta Malo de Molina, “Common Notions, Part 1: Workers-Inquiry, Co-Research, Consciousness-Raising,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, April 2004, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en; Marta Malo de Molina:, “Common Notions, Part 2: Institutional Analysis, Participatory Action-Research, Militant Research,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, April 2004, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/malo/en; Touza, “Antipedagogies for Liberation Politics, Consensual Democracy and Post-Intellectual Interventions”; Touza, Interview with Sebastián Touza.

[98] Touza, “Antipedagogies for Liberation Politics, Consensual Democracy and Post-Intellectual Interventions,” 210.

[99] Nora Samaran, “On Gaslighting,” Dating Tips for the Feminist Man, June 28, 2016, https://norasamaran.com/2016/06/28/on-gaslighting/.

[100] Matt Hern, “The Promise of Deschooling,” Social Anarchism 25 (1998), http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display_printable/130.

[elladastinkardiamou]

Sydney-based filmmaker Mary Zournazi’s upcoming documentary ‘Rembetika Blues’ traverses Australia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, the US and UK to chronicle how the haunting Greek rebel music become the soundtrack for forced migration.

Rembetika was borne out of the 1922 catastrophe of Smyrna which led to the migration of 2 million Greek refugees from Asia Minor who fled to Greece, Russia, Australia and the United States.

Zournazi’s grandmother was one of those refugees and it wasn’t until she began researching the events surrounding Smyrna that it became apparent that she was unaware of this significant period that shaped modern Greece.

“It’s a whole history that is not part of history,” she explained to Neos Kosmos. “I knew I had a grandmother who fled but I didn’t really know the detail of it. I had never really investigated it and had never seen the footage until I saw the archive of the whole city burning and it’s horrific. There is one scene of a well-dressed Greek family on a rocking boat trying to flee on a ship. This is the same scene we see with refugees today, just 100 years back, walking through the countryside to get across land. That is the most shocking part, that history keeps repeating itself.”

While Zournazi’s documentary explores the Smyrna disaster the film is not just a story of a forgotten war. It is a parallel story of forced migration and how almost 100 years apart Rembetika has become not just the sound track of Greek refugees from Smyrna but also Syrian refugees to Greece.

[dialogue-queered]

Image: via @nemfrog

Courage:

Mary Zournazi, an Australian writer and academic has noted that today courage tends to mean a “quality of mind in facing danger without fear”. But she notes a second, under-emphasised concept of courage: fearlessness coming from “feeling and the heart” as distinct from the mind and negation of danger.

This reminds us that courage is a derivative of the Latin ‘cor’, ie heart....”the heart as the seat of feeling - which created the conditions for thought”.

See: Zournazi, M (2007) Keywords to War. Reviving Language in An Age of Terror, Melbourne: Scribe, pps52-53.

[yu-sigao]

What does it mean to rethink leisure and work in this fashion? Here I am no longer thinking of “chronological time” – of clocks and calendars or the world of instant messaging and instantaneous information networks – but the older historical sense of the word, that comes from the Greek hora, which means “soul” time. This involves contemplation and leisure just as much as it involves work and play. It involves the gift of time, the period that a task rightly takes. Connected to this soul time is the Greek kairos, which is the time of opportunity and encounter that opens out the possibility of wonder and exchange.

I’d like to share a story about this kairos, and the time I spent with my late father in the final stages of his dementia. Every Sunday I would visit him at his nursing home. This ritual became a significant part of our relationship as my father could no longer recognise who I was. But in taking the time to be with him, I was able to give him the time that it takes to understand the illness. I could learn to be playful and attentive even when he occupied different time zones: for example, when he was no longer my “father” but a young man in the army or an old man in a nursing home. To share his kairos gave us the opportunity for joy and wonder in the midst of the suffering and pain.

Mary Zournazi for The Saturday Paper in 2014

[flying-elliska]

Indeed, it could be argued that we are mostly confronted by anger and disillusionment in current political and socially oriented activism. In this sense, for activists the process of emotional management can become tainted. Indeed, in the interviews undertaken with different activists over the years one of the most prominent expressions is the ‘depressive’ states that can set in, in which anger, frustration, and fear take over.

Importantly, this aspect of depressive states – as one activist, Emma, put it: ‘deliberate sadness and misery and outrage’ – can often have an impact on how activism itself is under-stood and enacted. If outrage and misery take over it can lead to a certain wanton moralism, or ‘distortion of the ends, a purposeful sadness to demonstrate the outrage and suffering of others’.

This is not to ignore the suffering of people that ignites a passion for and an interest in collective change in different contexts, however, it suggests that it can distort the ground-work for change, as forms of sadness and depression can take over the management of emotions and lead to more retroactive states of despair and disillusionment. In that context the value of mindfulness does not lie simply in the management of difficult emotions but also in ‘watering the seeds of happiness’ (Thich Nhat Hanh, 2001). We need to focus not simply on what is wrong or difficult in our lives but on what is right, and so strengthen our ability to be content, which makes for a better world not simply tomorrow but today.

Barker, C., Martin, B., & Zournazi, M. (2008). Emotional self-management for activists. Reflective Practice, 9(4), 423–435.

[perkwunos]

In ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Massumi (1995) states that ‘it is crucial to theorise the difference between affect and emotion’ because they ‘follow different logics and pertain to different orders’ (p. 88). He bases this division on the idea that emotions are cognitive structures of language that distort affect after the initial event of corporeal perception (Massumi, 1995). Eric Shouse (2005) explains that for Massumi, ‘affect is not a personal feeling or emotion. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal’ (unpaginated). Massumi characterises emotion as affect that has been ‘pinned down’ and defined in words, rendered static by structure, and thus ineffective for explaining a dynamic world (Massumi in Zournazi, 2002: 27). In this line of reasoning, emotional recognition is understood as a sense-making mechanism that rationalises indeterminate affects into a periodic table of emotions, a codified, meaning-laden typography of joy, embarrassment, sadness and so on. Massumi’s primary partition is therefore between dynamic force and rigid structure.

The implication, and riddle, of Massumi’s affect theory is that the social sciences must change their methods to register the virtual workings of affect. He argues that structural and semiotic approaches hamper our efforts to engage with affect: ‘there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconciliable differences’ (p. 88). …

Ashley Barnwell, Durkheim as Affect Theorist

[constellations-soc]

Crucially, what Nixon offers is something quite different from Massumi’s (in Zournazi, 2002) suggestion that ‘What [emotions] lose, precisely, is the expression event – in favour of structure’ (p. 27). For Nixon, the idea that we cannot readily perceive certain social processes is not about rote cognition, but how cognition and traditions of representation, including the primacy of ‘the event’, are complicit in the directives of particular social, economic and ideological wills. Nixon does not wish to accept that certain social agencies simply fall beneath the threshold of our perception and therefore escape representation as a natural fact. For him this ‘escaping’ is a topic for ethical and political inquiry and an important representational challenge for social scientists, a point that chimes with Durkheim’s work on choice in Suicide, or even Simmel’s (1971 [1903]) work on the blasé attitude in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. In Durkheim’s theory of affect, the crisis operates not just at the level of the individual’s corporeal cognition but also at the social level that constitutes this very cognitive process. The fact that we cannot register affect may be because it is not in the interest of the system, and thus own participation, to do so. Therefore, as Durkheim and Nixon argue, the challenge for social scientists is to find a suitable scope, be it of scale or temporality, with which to register and interrogate, rather than simply accept, the affective processes and effects which we cannot see. By including Durkheim’s question of how our perception is directed by social currents, a question that has been revived by Nixon, affect theory opens up to sociological inquiries about the role of affect in reproducing and revealing social inequalities and political blind-spots.

Barnwell A (2017) Durkheim as affect theorist. Journal of Classical Sociology: 1468795X17702917. 11-12

[instrumentsofempathy]

Mary Zournazi- interviews with Brain massumi included in this book

[johnnygsanto]

Rembetika Blues from Smyrna to Syria: How the music style became the soundtrack for displaced migrants. - Neos Kosmos

Rembetika Blues from Smyrna to Syria: How the music style became the soundtrack for displaced migrants.  Neos Kosmos

Sydney-based filmmaker Mary Zournazi talks about her film, 'Rembetika Blues', which chronicles how the haunting Greek rebel music become the soundtrack ...

Originally Published here: Rembetika Blues from Smyrna to Syria: How the music style became the soundtrack for displaced migrants. - Neos Kosmos

[dailyanarchistposts]

Appendix 3: Further Reading

Though we have used direct quotes and endnotes as a way to acknowledge our intellectual debts and sources throughout the book, we often found ourselves wanting to include more of the currents and perspectives that have shaped this work. With that in mind, we have assembled some articles, zines, books, films, interviews, and stories for those who want to go further with some of the ideas explored in each chapter, providing links to online versions where possible. This list is diverse, and elements of these texts are in tension with each other and our own work, and we think they are all worth approaching in the spirit of critical and affirmative reading. We also recommend checking out work by everyone we interviewed and cited, and we are planning to create a fuller list on our website: joyfulmilitancy.com

Chapter 1: Empire, Militancy, Joy

Zainab Amadahy, Wielding the Force: The Science of Social Justice, Smashwords Edition, 2013 (non-fiction book).

Anonymous, “The Tyranny of Imagery, or, How To Escape the Zoopraxiscope,” Hostis 2, 2016 (essay).

adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, eds., Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, AK Press 2015 (collected short fiction).

Colectivo Situaciones, “On the Researcher Militant,” 2003 (essay), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, 2004 (non-fiction book).

John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, Pluto Press, 2005 (non-fiction book).

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, Crossing Press, 1984 (collected essays).

Brian Massumi, “Navigating Movements” interviewed by Mary Zournazi, https://archive.org/stream/InterviewWithBrianMassumi/intmassumi_djvu.txt.

P. M. bolo’bolo, Autonomedia, 1985 (non-fiction book), http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/bb_3.pdf.

Stevphen Shukaitis, Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life, Minor Compositions, 2009 (non-fiction book), http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ImaginalMachines-web.pdf.

Chapter 2: Friendship, Freedom, Ethics

Taiaiake Alfred, Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom, University of Toronto Press, 2005 (non-fiction book).

Anonymous, “Robot Seals as Counter-Insurgency: Friendship and Power from Aristotle to Tiqqun (blog post), https://humanstrike.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/robot-seals-as-counter-insurgency-friendship-and-power-from-aristotle-to-tiqqun/.

Richard Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, Between the Lines, 2005 (non-fiction book).

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, Europa, 2012 (novel).

Knowing the Land is Resistance, “Towards an Anarchist Ecology” (blog post/zine), https://knowingtheland.com/2014/01/28/new-zine-collecting-towards-and-anarchist-ecology/.

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Zed Books, 2014 (non-fiction book).

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Decolonial Love: Building Resurgent Communities of Connection,” 2014 (video recorded talk), http://emmatalks.org/session/leanne-simpson/.

Harsha Walia, “Decolonizing Together,” Briarpatch, 2012 (essay), https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/decolonizing-together

Irvin Yalom, The Spinoza Problem: A Novel, Basic Books, 2013 (novel).

Chapter 3: Trust and Responsibility as Common Notions

carla bergman and Corin Brown, Common Notions: Handbook Not Required, 2015 (documentary).

Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures, Zed Books, 1998 (non-fiction book).

Matt Hern, Everywhere all the Time: A New Deschooling Reader, AK Press, 2008 (non-fiction anthology).

John Holloway, “Greece: Hope Drowns in the Reality of a Dying World, or Does it?” (video lecture), http://www.johnholloway.com.mx/2015/10/05/greecehope-drowns-in-the-reality-of-a-dying-world-or-does-it/.

Walidah Imarisha, Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption, AK Press, 2016 (creative non-fiction).

The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, Semiotext(e), 2015 (non-fiction book),

Margaret Killjoy, “Take What You Need and Compost the Rest: an introduction to post-civilized theory,” Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, 2010 (zine), http://www.tangledwilderness.org/take-what-you-need-and-compost-the-rest/.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkwood, 2015 (non-fiction book).

Victoria Law, “Against Carceral Feminism,” Jacobin, 2014 (essay), https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/.

Leanne Simpson, ed., Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations, Arbeiter Ring, 2008 (non-fiction anthology).

Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, 2010 (non-fiction book).

Chapter 4: Stifling Air, Burnout, Political Performance

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967 (non-fiction book)

Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972 (non-fiction book).

Jo Freeman, “Trashing: the Dark Side of Sisterhood,” 1976 (essay),

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm.

INCITE! Women of Colour Against Violence, eds., The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, South End Press, 2009 (non-fiction anthology).

Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “We Are All Very Anxious,” 2014 (zine), https://cloudfront.crimethinc.com/pdfs/We-Are-All-Very-Anxious.pdf.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887 (non-fiction book),

http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/GeneologyofMorals.pdf.

Andrew X, “Give Up Activism,” 2009 (essay / zine),

Chapter 5: Undoing Rigid Radicalism

Asam Ahmad, “A Note on Call-Out Culture,” Briarpatch, 2015 (essay), https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture.

Kelsey Cham C., “Radical Language in the Mainstream,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 29, 2016 (essay), https://anarchiststudies.org/2017/03/09/radical-language-in-the-mainstream-by-kelsey-cham-c/.

CrimethInc., “Against Ideology?,” 2010 (essay),

http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/ideology.php.

scott crow, “In a moving river nothing can ever be set in stone: A letter for insurgent dreamers,” (essay) in Emergency Hearts, AK Press, 2015,

Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Viking Press, 1977,

http://cnqzu.com/library/Philosophy/Deleuze,%20Gilles%20and%20Felix%20Guattari-AntiOedipus.pdf.

Jamie Heckert “Anarchy and Opposition,” (essay) In Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, AK Press, 2012.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” (essay) in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press, 2003,

Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, University of Minnesota Press, 2016 (non-fiction book).

amory starr, “Grumpywarriorcool: What Makes Our Movements White?” (essay) in Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, AK Press, 2006, http://trabal.org/texts/grumpywarriorcool.pdf.

Nicholas Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” New Formations 68, 2009 (academic article), http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Thoburn-Weatherman-the-Militant-Diagram-and-the-Problem-of-Political-Passion.pdf.

[2020ads]

Mary Zournazi defines affect as “different pulls, constraints and freedoms that move us forward and propel us into life” (2002, p. 210). Affect then encompasses all relations which shape, and are shaped by, “the experience and dimensions of living” (Zournazi 2002). Advertisements, as texts specifically designed to persuade (and even manipulate) our sense of living, leverage affect.

Affect captures a sense of “in-between-ness” inherent in the complexity of constantly shifting relations (Seigworth & Gregg 2010). Seigworth and Gregg (2010) note that affect “transpires within and across the subtlest of shuttling intensities” and Massumi agrees that affect is about “all the depth and breadth of our experiencing of experiencing” (2002, p. 213). It is then the “events of the unnoticed” which can be used to make sense of the constantly evolving network of relations which define the world we live in (Seigworth & Gregg 2010). Concurrently affect is a useful frame for deconstructing the various forces which control discourses within a particular advertisement; regardless of whether they are consciously registered by the viewer, or even deliberately included.

For example, American comedy film ‘The Internship’ (2013) portrays Google’s internship program as a fun, happy pathway to success. Functioning as a two hour advertisement for Google, the film is set in the real-life ‘Googleplex’, an apparently flawless, innovative magical kingdom equipped with rainbow bikes, endless free food, slippery slides, a quidditch pitch and sleep pods. Through a lens of affect we can see that this utopia plays on countless aspects of the Western unconscious.

In leveraging narratological elements the audience is likely to unconsciously associate with childlike fantasy, such as the sense of a journey, castle like building, magical cars which drive themselves, colourful, youthful props, and endless sunny weather, the film associates Google with appealing aspects of fairytales, such as innocence, freedom, happy endings and heroic main characters. These affective magical associations are only helped by the inclusion of a quidditch match; appropriation from Harry Potter which screams quintessential 21st century magic.

Leveraging the archetypal fairytale appeals to “fantasist-escapist” needs of audience members, affecting them by creating a fantastical world in which the struggles of real life can be escaped (Weiss 1971, pp. 309-336). By encouraging the audience to escape into this fantasy world, Green & Brock’s “Narrative Transportation Theory” is utilised to associate Google with inherent youthfulness, creativity, generosity and ultimately goodness (2002, pp. 315-341). It is then clear that affect within advertising is governed by any number of hidden stimuli which appeal to audiences on a prepersonal level (Shouse 2005).

Hence affect, as a term which encompasses complex, convoluted networks of relations, is very useful in an advertising context. I think this is particularly clear as it, as a frame of thinking, assists in the delineation of various psychological forces, “events of the unnoticed,” which underpin advertising strategies (Seigworth & Gregg 2010).

[dialogue-queered]

[There is an] inextricable link between language and a deteriorating moral conscience; taken together these elements infiltrate our perception of and how we function in the world. Now more than ever it is necessary to extricate ourselves from this quagmire, and from the confused and disputed meanings that permeate and have produced an often latent, but significantly charged mental state of war in our everyday lives, so much so that our interior worlds and social spaces are infused with the language of war.

Mary Zournazi writing in her 2007 Keywords to War. Reviving Language in an Age of Terror, Scribe, Carlton North, Melbourne, p2.

[yu-sigao]

A couple of years ago a friend of mine, who is a vet, discussed with great passion how he would not open his veterinary practice on a Sunday. He felt the pressure to do so because of rising rental costs in his suburb, the public demand that he should be available at all times, and the sense of competition from surrounding businesses. But he vehemently believed in social time: that Sundays are meant for rest and being with family and friends.

I was struck by my friend’s position. His attitude made me seriously consider this question of social time, how it is related to our understanding of work and how it intersects with our notions of leisure and play. Now more than ever, we appear to be “workers” in an almost invisible economy that makes social time the time of instantaneous capital flow. This has no borders or boundaries. We might say empires of the past colonised space, but today it is the colonisation and commodification of time that is shaping our lives and experience.

So what if we consider leisure not as a privilege but as a virtue? What if rest and relaxation are as essential to a global economy as any other factor; that leisure is required for a prosperous and sane world? For me, this involves looking at the relationship between leisure and work, and leisure and contemplation. Leisure is often thought of as in opposition to work, but what if we think of leisure in work – or rather how to approach work in a calm way? This idea of work is not goal oriented but it still has purpose; in this scenario the purpose is not the end itself, but the way in which we undertake work. It could be seen as a kind of play.

Mary Zournazi for The Saturday Paper in 2014