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The Occupy with Art blog provides updates on projects in progress, opinion articles about art-related issues and OWS, useful tools built by artists for the movement, new features on the website, and requests for assistance. To submit a post, contact us at occupationalartschool(at)gmail(dot)com .

Entries in ows anniversary (2)

Friday
Sep142012

#S17 -- year 1 anniversary reflection [OAS Node 1 /Transmission]

Digital art by Paul McLean

Year 1 of Occupy by Paul McLean

 

Happy birthday, Occupy Wall Street. 

 

What a plenty odd phenomenon 

you are. A riddle, insoluble.

Where are you now, Occupy?

Should we ask over & over,

like a Dr. Seuss story? 

Are you over here

Are you over there

Did you disappear

into thin air?

Where are you now, Occupy?

Wall Street was never occupied, except by itself. From its origins in the slave trade to its present slave business, it is itself, and not even that much. When did a street wield such power over men? Never. Not High Street or Main Street. A street is only the substrate for the mass movement of man. By what motivation would the men and women of Wall Street enjoin us of the mass to action? The short answer is they would not. They would and do encourage us to acquiesce to our being consumed, at a profit (for them).

It is a sickness of man that he would lord it over his fellows, doom the other to misery and impoverishment, when all the necessities of life are in plenitude. We, the collective All of Everything live in a moment of disgrace, as intervention by the 1% so-called. If only the elegance of the few were worth all this mess, but no. It’s untrue. The great and powerful among us are mediocre. They are managers, for the most part, which never anything special and the contrivance of these management types is to assign everything the value of currency, of dollars or pounds or euros or whatever. How boring. How tragic. How commonplace. Why be occupied with the patently mediocre, even it is super-rich and powerful? Sure, that’s a guise, a ruse and a trick, but let’s run with it, for the sake of conjecture, as play. 

It’s actually not correct to say Wall Street was unoccupied by Occupy Wall Street. Our occupation of Wall Street, as such, was dimensional. The convergence of people, and with us our ideas, dreams, outrage, love and hope, switched the focus or at least blurred it for a time. For the “Time Is Money” sub-humans, we attached to that protocol a small measure of discomfort, which they perceived generally as disease. This actuality ought to indicate the fragility of the psychosis that envelops the financial sector, which is now the political sector and the social. Wall Street’s view of itself is tenuous, at best. Most in the know claim it, “Wall Street” per se, meaning the “stock market,” doesn’t even exist at Wall Street, anymore. This is in a number of aspects a verifiable statement. Wall Street isn’t a street anymore, anyway. It is a global managed cycle of consumption. Of Everything. 24/7/365. Timeless, which is to say, “All the time.” 

Consuming in the “global community” and the “free market” cannot, in the management view, be interrupted.* While both quoted terms in the previous sentence are outrageous lies, as we have witnessed perpetually, the mandate they represent for management society, the infinite artificial person syndicate must be fueled by everything. People are fuel. Nature is fuel. Perception and belief are fuels. God is fuel. Everything conceivable by man is fuel. Thus they have manufactured a market that encompasses everything on earth and every imaginary man can conceive of beyond the planet’s bounds. The market includes space, heaven and wonder in its fraudulent balance sheet. The secret of the derivatives market is its enslavement of all we know to its foibles, its notions, its whims, and the whims of those gangsters who manipulate it, many of whom are among the world’s wealthiest individuals today. 

The Everything Market is like the cancer that has fully consumed the body of its host. All systems begin to break down. Action to resist the illness becomes impossible, or at least seemingly so. Even self-destructive addiction becomes a secondary consideration, when the cancer reaches its final phase. The Everything Market, which Occupy Wall Street assembled to combat, peacefully for the most part, is the sort of disease that does not relent in its surge to dominate its victim. It does not stop short at the level of sustainable parasitism. It continues to metasticize until the body of the host is killed, continuing its sick growth to the end. 

So the Everything Market is mindless, as such, an enemy without conscience or an aim. It is death disguised. The mask of the market is the fat face or beautiful vision of unimaginable wealth, power and reproduction, if not sex or sexiness (although people must tend to project attractiveness or lust upon it). The market is insatiable. 

Humans can be incapable of satiation. Society, or societies that are concerned with survival, promote antipathy against mindless excess, except in the odd, highly regulated instances of ceremonial release. Such expressive forms are not uniform, by any means. Still, we as a race have ample proof of the dangers of unchecked anything, or “anything goes.” The social is plentiful in its supply of prohibitions against excess as modus operandi. 

To make examples of “successful” evasion of those prohibition the excuse to justify a catastrophe like the Everything Market is to behave as an addict does, who cannot stop his all-directionally destructive progression toward doom. To make such justifications of the wholesale devastation of humanity and our world the mantras of society is a crime against humanity and world, and nothing less. 

Which is why the 1% must proclaim God to be on their side. For this purpose, they have re-purposed God, the Creator, to suit their diseased, mad demands. No, this narrative is not a new one. The difference now is the scale of destruction possible through such blasphemies. Whether one God is true or not is no longer the point, in the monetized universe of the Everything Marketeer. It is whether a god can be invented to serve the short-term needs of the market and its propellents. 

War and heroism being commoditized, in the artificial imaginary of derivatives, the abstraction of all value, the mobilization of any means necessary to sustain the insane gambit, the only enemy is Loss, and that can be and is hedged. So, that’s that, except for the abominable consequences that such an inhumane program ensures. Casualties and cowardice are rationalized as systemic outcomes. This is the banality of evil. The prime EM players seek to defray and deflect any direct accountability for themselves, in the scheme. They seek to make everyone guilty, or at least not innocent. Is there any sin worse?

How is it possible to not address this chronic problem outside the domain of the moral? Law has been twisted beyond recognition, subverted at every turn by the management society and its Everything Marketeer. The democracies the Everything Market evolved to destroy, because the slaver cannot abide freedom, is now bought and sold by the market, which controls both government and citizen through debt and threat. The threat of the market is enforced by increasingly militarized and “privatized” police. 

“Privatized” means “owned and operated by corporate syndicates and their prime beneficiaries, some of whom, like Bloomberg, have purchased the high offices of the land. 

It is the moral that can yet apply, because in most every person, except for the most deformed among us, is some conception of it. For the moral is another iteration of love, and almost no person knows no love. So how does the Everything Market attack love? By creating conditions in which the value of human life is systematically abolished. Monetizing human life, and the quality of it, is only one way de-humanization or the demoralizing of humanity is accomplished. Enforced poverty, artificially-induced starvation, endless war, drugs are others, for “others.” It is also an important function of management society to destroy to dissent, which is now nothing more than realistic assessment of the effects of management society and Everything Market on life. 

The suffering often wonder how their tormenters can do their evil business day in and day out, consistently striving to generate their product, which is obliteration of Everything (although obviously this is not how the players prefer to identify themselves). Well, they develop sophisticated entertainments. Peering through the lens of the created abject is an entertainment for those most responsible for the massive man-made suffering present in the world. Their warped vision has displaced the created object, or art. Instead we have Everything Art and a market to consume it, and legions of consumers, critics, marketeers, dealers, manufacturers, workers, and so on to tend that market. No longer is does the artist strive to make a thing timeless, for all. Art is contemporary and immaterial, except in its progressive costs. 

A key feature of such Everything Art, as in the Everything Market, is its indecipherable quality. Only the Great Practitioners can comprehend Everthing(s), either markets or art, or any everything else. The Common Man, Woman or Child is not qualified even to enter such markets, without expert advisors. Of course, we have discovered the Everything Game (see LIBOR) is rigged, and learned that the expert advisors are frauds (see Sothebys). It is therefore no surprise that many view Everything with such cynicism. 

We mustn’t however listen to the cynics. They often, wittingly or not, serve the interests of the Everything Market and Management Society. How? By debilitating the confrontational. It is not enough to critique and spread cynicism, when confronting evil. Evil must be met with force, and completely eradicated. This is ancient wisdom. It holds today. 

It is not markets that are evil. Who hasn’t been to a local market and found the experience life-affirming? It is today a rhetorical question, because many people have no concept of any but the Everything Market and its base and debasing derivatives. The same is true of art. Art is not evil, nor is it sorcery or a con. It is so difficult to remember this, when the perceptual and transactional fields are so thoroughly corrupted. 

But try. 

On the anniversary of the occupation of Liberty Square, try to remember that exchange can be a gift. Try to remember that art is real, it exists, and humans still can make it, for us, for all time, the only object, as a form of sacred play [+].

Also, its good to recall that the Everything Market will pass. The infinite artificial person will die. Really. The Everything Market will crash again, even worse than before, because nothing significant has been done to prevent that happening. The infinite artificial person will “die,” or something like that, which is to say, it never really was alive to begin with. We will all just agree to the demise of infinite artificial personhood. Or else, there will be no more “we,” only “it.”

Maybe you can push the passing of these evil manifestations of our minds a bit, and help kill the artificial person that’s killing, maiming or diseasing your dreams. Whatever. You will or you won’t. Maybe you have other more important things to do, more pressing matters. 

At any rate, something will change, because nothing lasts forever, right? Hopefully, things will be okay for you and the ones and the things you really care about. If they aren’t okay, who is there to blame? 

Well, one can always blame the Economy, if you must blame something (not yourself). Too bad, though: the Economy won’t care about either you or your blame.

#

*That chimera, the Economy must feed, like a shark swimming in the oceans of want and ownership; this is another essay.

 

Wednesday
Sep122012

#S17 -- year 1 anniversary reflection [OAS Node n /Transmission]

temporary absence from the field of action gives you a good spot to observe spirals. yes, history is a collection of spirals, pendulums that rover. sometimes it is funny my friends, funny how so much intensity can take us time to digest. to overcome a police officer kicking you in the ribs and smiling sadistically is a slow process. one. two. three

 

~ go 

 

the choice \\ to #bloom,, to #ooze a fresh movement :: is urgent to be reconciled with......#year1 is done. now, a tad bit of coffee (or tea) and some peace of mind, some books, a humming-bird whistling political literature,, a kiss from your love and we are on our way for #year2. but what is precisely crossing that valley, we still don't know.

 

in the last months of our movement,, it became clear that it will take nothing more than a philosophic rebellion in #occupy to dissolve the consolidation of power and remove the stench of our stagnated waters :: our ideological springs are contaminated with pus, and became no longer a good source to drink from ........... if we are to thrive as a viable project it is paramount to reject stagnations and seek fresh currents of thought.

 

to #occupy with our bodies a given space and park there,, pretending that everything is going to be ok because we are there for "as long as we can!" -- is #ostrichism. and the same can be mentioned about refusing debt or domination without refusing to dominate others:: one is not complete without the other.

 

~ abolition is volition, says the Oracle of Delphi.

 

sometimes i wonder if we were to "win" or take power. how different our project would actually be? i see organizers,, sympathetic journalist and theoretical gurus still working under a Toyotist paradigm, {{dling! dling!}} ~ JUST IN TIME ~ {{dling! dling!}} :: "hello! we are here to sell you redemption, with the utmost attention to efficiency & results!"{{dling! dling!}} --

 

or what acid historians call

 

                  POST-MODERNIST CRAP 

 

and we BUY IT! efficiency & results! we BUY it! 

 

#occupy has only one enemy :: ITSELF :: and not because we are blind, unable to see our adversaries marching on us,, hunting us down - it takes more than physical violence to legitimize a dying order. this is clear for everybody with their necks deep enough. we know that THEIR project was discredited after the fall of the Wall in 2008. not even their own priests believe in their bullshit anymore,, and this will always be for our advantage. the greatest threat comes from the obscurity of our own shadows...

 

the question is if #occupy is "reformable" or will it take a radical departure from the dominating schools of thought in #OWS to break the chains arresting our imagination.

 

 -- maybe the mirror is a set of questions -- :: despite the Diaspora,, are we dancing revolution freely and with #poiesis, or are we insisting on the same shit? are we adventurous and curious and experimental or are we picking the safe, broad road?

 

before trying to destroy the Beast (neoliberal state) by clogging its circulatory system (financial capitalism),,

 

 _ did we ::

(1) prepared something in its place,, a QUOTIDIAN alternative,, or are we making the same mistake of the French Revolution?

 

 ~~~ the French Terror occupied the vaccum left by decapitations ~~~

_did we ::

(2) realize that we don't need to clash with the state, but rather make it obsolete?

 

 

so this is it. #year2 ~

 

! we more than ever enter a time of self-discovery. maybe #occupy can't be reformed, but this might not be a bad thing :: it takes a while to understand that we can always write history in the way of a wanderer, 

 

     ~ instead of #settling,

 

#rooting,

 

                     ;; instead of #occupying

 

or  #OCCUPY -- :: maybe just to       #ROVER?

 

             Happy Birthday family.

 

Atchu