The goal of anarchistnews.org is to provide a non-sectarian source for news about and of concern to anarchists.

Request for Proposals: BASTARD 2013

Wed, 01/09/2013 - 09:01 -- worker

From Berkeley Anarchist Students of Theory And Research & Development

RFP: BASTARD 2013 - Theme: Ethics & Aesthetics

We humbly request your participation in the 2013 instance of the Berkeley Anarchist Students of Theory And Research & Development conference. We meet every year to discuss new, old, and interesting ideas in anarchist theory. This year our emphasis is on Ethics & Aesthetics. Submit your proposals to BASTARDs. All theory workshop proposals (even not on theme) are welcome!

This year, BASTARD is interested in the relation of ethics and aesthetics to our ideal; are we trying to make the world more beautiful or more ethical? If we are hewing to an aesthetic vision, how does replacing the ‘good’ with the ‘beautiful’ prevent us from recreating the problems of moralism with different language, if we are retaining some concept of ethics, how is it distinct from christian or liberal morality?

What motivates us as anarchists? Not only what is sexy and appealing and easy to say, but what shapes the worlds we are trying to move toward? What criteria do we use to assess our actions or affirm our intentions, how do we make assessments of others?

How does the interplay of Ethics and Aesthetics shape our tactics, relationships, projects, and conceptions of ourselves as anarchists? How is this question related to the broad strains of anarchist thought?

We will be meeting on March 17th 2013 from 10am - 6pm. Most likely this meeting will occur in the East Bay. We look forward to seeing you all there.

Category: 

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Fuck ya, St. Paddy's day bastard con, up the RA!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

aesthetics, eh?

Submitted by emile on

the answer to one of these questions is simple;

“what shapes the worlds we are trying to move toward?”

--- ‘language’ shapes the world we ‘believe’ we live in as well as the world ‘we are trying to move towards’.

just ask the aboriginals. the world they live in, according to the colonizer government, is composed of independent tracts of land, some called ‘sovereign states’ and some called ‘lots’ or ‘tracts’ or ‘treaty reserves’. these are said to be local, independently-existing material entities, which are reserved for independently existing biological forms known as ‘humans’. these ‘humans’ are said to be local, independently-existing material systems or ‘machines made of meat’, notionally with their own locally-originating, internal process driven and directed behaviours. the independent material machines made of meat are granted the right by the supreme central authority of some unilaterally declared-as-independent state, the right to develop and operate as they see fit, in their pursuit of happiness, the independent material tracts of land, as described in writing.

in this world of independent individuals and independent tracts of land, or so the linguistically idealized language game goes, the colonizer government can endow other independent individuals with ownership of the independent tracts of land surrounding the aforementioned independent treaty tracts of land, and these owners can piss and shit on their land, dig evaporating pits for toxic wastes, mine it for minerals and pump shit down into its depths, so that the waters flowing through the independent treaty tracts are fouled and the air needed to nourish the vegetation is polluted and the fisheries fail and the game dies out and the vegetation is stunted and the livelihoods of the treaty land residents dissipate, thanks to the protected right of independent human machines made of meat to own their own independent tracts of land to use as they choose in their independent pursuit of happiness. the independence of local material objects and organisms, as captured in written documents and science texts by way of ‘linguistic idealization’ is what .... “shapes the world we ‘believe’ we live in as well as the world ‘we are trying to move towards’” don't take my _'word'_ for it, turn on your tv or read your newspaper, ... consult the written record of the proceedings of sovereign state government and supreme court; i.e. use your language game products; you can trust them, ... or can you?

maybe one of the questions in BASTARDS 2013 should be in regard to the wisdom of continuing to base our view of the world we ‘believe’ we live in, and/or the world ‘we are trying to move towards’, in linguistic idealization and supreme central authority enforced written laws and written legal documents, rather than physically real sensory experience.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Why don't you go to the conference? Is it because your gobbledygook holds no ground in real life?

Submitted by anonymous on

emile won't go anywhere except to his keyboard to pound out unending streams of quotes within quotes. he's a shitbag that only exists virtually. yes. he's a 'virtual shitbag' and wouldn't appear anywhere 'in the flesh' because he knows appearing in person would invalidate his whole spatially relational shitbaggy dynamic flow.

Submitted by emile on

as we know, people live in different mental realities; e.g. socialists and capitalists, libertarians and fascists, republicans and democrats, zapatistas and colonizers. those conferences that want to explore outside-of-the-box ideas are a good idea. nevertheless, what subcommandante marcos has to say, is likely to be taken to be ‘gobbledygook’ in a capitalist conference.

lenin found the ‘relational’ [non-dualist] ideas of mach and poincaré so much gobbledygook that he wrote a book to try to put a wooden stake through the heart of their ideas; ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism’

in his opening section, ‘In Lieu of Introduction’, wherein Lenin introduces the ‘attack of Machian ‘imperio-criticism’ on Marxist ‘materialism’, Lenin writes;

“That Ernst Mach is the most popular representative of empirio-criticism today is universally acknowledged in philosophical literature. ...The “new” discoveries of the Machians are the product of an astounding ignorance of the history of the basic philosophical trends. ... Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the afore-mentioned writers. ... We cannot dwell here on this remarkably correct and profound judgment of Engels’ (a judgment which is shamelessly ignored by the Machians)”

Mach’s non-materialist, non-dualist ideas, and those of Nietzsche, Bohm, Schroedinger, the Zapatistas, and indigenous aboriginals, have the same ‘relational topology’. Materialists can’t stand the notion of relational space in which ‘matter’ and material structures are ‘secondary’ [resonance features in the transforming energy-charged relational spatial-plenum]. Capitalist authoritarian society is dualist-materialist as is Marxist philosophy.

Marxism opposes capitalism but they are both together in their ‘materialist-dualist’ philosophy; i.e. to be anti-capitalist does not mean to be anti-materialist or non-dualist.

If you haven’t thought about it, since dualist-materialist philosophy is the ‘default’ philosophy of Western civilization [European language speaking society], your are a de facto dualist-materialist by default. that is likely why you find the Machian non-materialist, non-dualist way of understanding the world and your relation to it, ‘gobbledygook’. emile’s ideas are understood as ‘conformant’ with the non-dualist, relational philosophy of indigenous aboriginals, in ‘indigenous’ circles. emile’s language differs from the aboriginal’s language because it orients to [Machean] physics and general systems theory. But it is coming from the same ‘non-dualist, relational topology’; i.e. wherein the influence of the transforming relations amongst things predominates over the influences of the ‘things’. To talk about ‘things’ on has to ‘Bootstrap’ [Geoffrey Chew] or to play a ‘surprise version’ of the game of twenty questions [J.A. Wheeler]

the ideas here are accessible to any of us through our ordinary, natural experience. all you have to do is reflect on how we reduce our experience as we articulate it in words; e.g. as William James says in the leading quote of the aforementioned article;

“Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, -- or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood. William James, ‘Psychology’

that is, the proverbial ‘thing-in-itself’ is understood by [non-dualist] WillianJames [as with non-dualists Mach, Schroedinger, Poincaré] NOT as a real, material [dualist] ‘thing-in-itself’ but as a kind of nexus of relational influences, a resonance feature in the transforming relational energy-flow-space.

As Gerald Holton observes in ‘Ernst Mach in America’

“That alliance was, as it were, the final result of a contact first made in 1882 when both James and Mach were still only at the threshold of becoming widely known. James had come to Prague during a European study tour, and wrote Mach asking for an interview, noting that he, James, was “very familiar” with his writings. Mach in fact had also read some of James’s studies, and the two had a famous and glorious meeting in Prague on November 2, 1882. There followed years of correspondence, some of it unpublished and at the Houghton Library at Harvard. There also I found William James’s own copy, heavily annotated in his hand, of Ernst Mach’s ‘Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargestellt’, in the original edition of 1883. It is the book that starts with the famous challenge; “This work is not a text to drill the theorems of mechanics. Rather, its intention is one of enlightenment---or, to put it still more plainly, an anti-metaphysical one.”

The book is by no means an easy one --- it is simultaneously a study in the history of science, a detailed analysis of topics in mechanics, a tract on how to make one’s ideas clear, and a sequel to certain 18th-century Enlightenment treatises. But it is obvious that James mastered it fully. His annotations, queries and summaries are often quite dense (most of all in Mach’s discussion of Newton’s views on time and space), and at the end James entered his own supplementary index of important ideas. Other authors have treated Mach’s and James’s correspondence, their agreements and occasional disagreements, their references to and respect for each other’s work. But James’s copy of the Mechanik graphically demonstrates the immense impression it made on him in the period he wrote his own major works.”

so, all of this may be ‘gobbledygook’ to you, but non-dualist understanding is not going away, after over 500 years since North American colonization, the non-dualist philosophy is still being paraded out there in the streets by indigenous aboriginals in the ‘Idle no more’ movement.

you only have to read the popular news reports and view the comments on the web to discover that you are not alone, most people see non-dualist understanding as ‘gobbledygook’. but of course, Western society strikes early, as Skinner said’

“Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom.”

i.e. ‘you are not alone’.

Submitted by anonymous on

emile won't go anywhere except to his keyboard to pound out unending streams of quotes within quotes.

We know our EMILE so well!!!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

This person!

Submitted by anonymous on

this dualism vs. monism argument is nothing new, emile. the only thing that is new, relatively speaking, is you hiding behind the post-modern 'gobbledygook' language game of this old argument.

Submitted by emile on

yes, as many have discovered in this forum, any language that requires more than a few calories for mental processing becomes an impenetrable shield that hides otherwise easily accessed understandings from the spoon-feeders that seem to gather here. btw. congratulations on getting 'gobbledygook' out there, ... you have earned yourself a rest!

Submitted by Assnonymous (not verified) on

tisk-tisk. the owners of this site sure seem to be protecting emile from some direct and harsh criticism. why the censorship? and why the seemingly hands-off approach to letting emile take over this entire site? maybe more of HIS commentary needs to be hidden. clearly he thinks he is above the collective intelligence demonstrated by the majority of anonymous commentators here. yet he keeps coming back... why is that?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

yeah, he's totally unlike everyone else on the site

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

collective intelligence of the @news commentators? are you fucking high?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Hey kids, watch this! This is how you do it...

HEY EMILE, TAKE YOUR SHITTY ALGORITHMS AND SHOVE 'EM AHAHAHAHAHAHA

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

I used to slice the throats of industrially farmed chickens for 13-15 hours a day so I wouldn't have to go to prison or squat in some squalid shack—a VERY common situation for a lot of folk.

So basically what I'm saying is get the fuck outta here with this bullshit.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

And I'm sure in your limited world view, that was the only option. Kill or be killed, amirite? Get the fuck out, you're compromised.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

was compromised*

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Only time I've ever really identified with a comment on here...

Submitted by bro-again (not verified) on

I just had an idea. So y'all know about 4:20 right? stoners light up, or at least used to light up, at 4:20 because of some myth but more likely because stoners all around the world acted together? Well what if we took that idea and added an anarchist twist to it? For example we start a trend that at 6:30 PM (making up the time[arbitrary] maybe to signify the sunet and nightfall) if you are in a car you honk your horn 3 times, 1 for downfall of hierarchy, 1 for downfall of state, 1 for downfall of capitalism, etc. (this is just a rough idea) and then people start to hear about it and then the recognize it and we raise awareness about anarchism? What do ya'll think?

Submitted by Ron Dekken (not verified) on

Or better idea....

Go to a public place at 6:30 PM and be seen reading Anarcho-Syndicalist Review (everyone on this website reading the same magazine in public places at the same time all around the world)

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Ron Dekken ?....this sounds really similar to Jon Bekken of Anarcho-Syndicalist Review. You're pretty good, trying to get everyone to read your boring anarcho-leftist magazine. You win this one, but the battle is not over.

Add new comment

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
W
3
z
b
3
z
S
Enter the code without spaces.
Subscribe to Comments for "Request for Proposals: BASTARD 2013"