The Golden Barley School

Dear comrades,

First of all: you have our solidarity. We know that feeling surveilled and monitored can be a very real trauma, and we know that those feelings don’t just disappear though the ‘correct’ political analysis or through macho bravado.

We have no interest in singling out anyone or any group for condemnation. However, these recent events, and the conversations around them, have emphasised to us the importance of creating a strong collective culture in which we refuse to speak with ASIO or the cops: not matter how innocent the circumstances might seem. Even when we’re under pressure – and we’re always under pressure – we need to be able to deal with debates and conflicts without creating unnecessary divisions between ourselves.

It’s precisely because things don’t seem to have gone too badly on this occasion when people chose to speak with ASIO that it’s important to raise a critique of ever talking to them and to point out the dangers of becoming complacent around this. It seems necessary to re-iterate why ‘don’t talk’ should be a general political principle.

We gain nothing; they gain something

There’s no information we could gain from talking to the cops that is useful to us. In the first place, it is clear that we should not an cannot trust anything they say. Beyond this, what actual good does it do us to ‘know’ that they’re monitoring this group or the other? Without being paranoid, we should always assume that they could be monitoring us, and this shouldn’t change our behaviour. Whether or not we have particular signs of attention from the state, we should organise and communicate openly in the same ways, and we should be cautious in the same ways. From this perspective, getting confirmation or information from the state does not inform our practice in any useful way.

On the other hand, the cops could always gain something from any conversation with us. They are trained to question and to gather information. The information that’s useful to them isn’t just the details of (non existent) secret plots: anything inadvertently disclosed about our relationships could be useful to them.

Collective refusal gives us more power and control

Ultimately we need to resist creating a situation in which it could be seem as normal, harmless or acceptable for individuals to talk to the police. Continue Reading →

‘When we can only confide in each other enough to speak of struggle (communal, abstract, heroic), but not of sadness (aloneness, in this minute…) then we have not done enough, we are not doing enough for each other’s liberation’ – Anwyn Crawford, ‘The politics of sadness’

 ‘What I would like to see emerge is a new approach to politics that doesn’t see “personal” or “interpersonal” problems (mental illness, harassment, violence) as issues best kept to the private sphere, but which regrettably overflow those boundaries and unfortunately interrupt the real business of revolutionaries…This perspective offers me nothing.’ – J, reproduced from personal correspondence

Introduction

The following is an attempt to move beyond the impasse of post-workerist theories of affective labour and the common, and to develop instead a process of affective composition that takes place within an undercommon.[1] Specifically, the underlying problem throughout is that of how we make infrastructures,[2] rather than institutions or networks, of political movement in such a way that we are not required to excise the messiness of our lives from the terrain of politics: our mental health, grief, sadness, illnesses and so on. If there is to be a politics and/of the common, these are as much of it as anything else. And to be sure, there is much in the world to ruin our bodies’ capacities to make relationships that don’t reproduce capital and the gendered, racial, sexual and familial attachments that mark this reproduction. And yet despite this we do make different relationships, and we do so in a way that isn’t just reactive. However, our collective negotiation of these tensions needs more thorough theorisation and work in practice.

In what follows two elements within an affective circuit are developed[3] as one contribution to carrying out such theorisation, and to reflect on some practices: one of disaffection, another as affective composition.

Disaffection can be thought of as a process of refusal arising from our experience of being variable capital and re/productive labour, as well as the forms that our traumas and tensions take, within our bodies and between them. As Alondra Nelson has stated, ‘health is politics by other means’,[4] so within this term is included those questions of our emotional, mental, bodily health. Affective composition, as the second element in a circuit, is the making of ‘other’ relations to those of reproduction, which are created in processes of struggle. This is not to imply a clear separation, rather that our participation in struggle, draws into play our disaffections, as well as allowing us to make new ways of relation. The question then becomes, what infrastructures would allow this to occur, and how might they be made?

The infrastructures through which political movement forms, which draw into play our disaffections as well as compose new relations, what I refer to as a circuit of disaffection and affective composition, is something different to reproduction. If we understand reproduction to be the fundament or axiom of capitalist futurity, then when we succeed in these struggles, we are not involved in reproduction but the formation of different ways of living: against reproduction of the same and for variation, generation and recombination. From this perspective ‘reproduction [is] a specifically capitalist form of foundationalism’.[5]

Continue Reading →

Poster version of a statement by asylum seekers protesting on Nauru on October 29:

Another poster in solidarity:

http://naururefugees.wordpress.com

This is some thoughts on the exhibition of poster prints, Careers in Retail by a couple of friends of mine.

“Lets build quiet armies friends, lets march on their glass towers… Lets build fallen cathedrals and make impractical plans…” BBF3 – Godspeed! You Black Emperor

ESCAPE

The beginnings for Careers in Retail (as written on the back of the flyer for it) has the two artist/ protagonists (collectively calling themselves Dexter Fletcher) with headphones on at school, ‘thinking of sex during maths’, reading the wrong things about art, revolution and anarchy. Dreaming of escape, of so many potential futures as made possible through pop music and a knowledge of the past and the world around. But in the space of a blink of time those subversions of the boredom of school now manifest themselves as escape from the tedium of a job behind a cash register.

On the poster for BBF3 a child gazes wistfully into the distance. From amidst a swirl of ideas they look away and imagine a future and an escape (or many escapes). Boredom is counter-revolutionary and we are expected to be bored everyday – to accept the containment of our desires within the strict orthodoxy of post-industrial capitalism. Here we sell our labour to have access to a series of ‘choices’ about how to spend our ‘leisure’ time that are contained within acts of exchange and consumption that cannot really meet our desires. Mostly we accept to continue to sell our labour out of the merest desire to survive. Continue Reading →

Originally published in Mutiny zine.

What follows is a dialogue between two people commenting on the Sydney ‘riot’ – eds

Sourdough: My first response on seeing the Sydney ‘riot’ reported on the news was “wow!” – I hadn’t known anything was happening in town that day and suddenly there’s this rowdy demo fighting with cops. And it’s a crowd with a large proportion of young brown men , so it’s also pretty clear from the outset that they are necessarily resisting aggressive, racialised policing. And of course the liberal left line-up with an entire array of conservatives to denounce ‘violent protesters’. But it didn’t take long for a sinking feeling to hit, a feeling I’ve been trying to contemplate in the weeks since.

Princess Mob: I’m not being flippant when I say that ‘fuck the police’ is a pretty key political starting point.

What does it even mean to ‘take sides’ in this situation? We’re clearly not going to join with those who call for the police to make sure things don’t get out of control again, nor those who call on ‘moderate Muslims’ to distance themselves from ‘extremists’ (precisely because we don’t see the ‘extremists’ as representing anyone but themselves). Nor will we join with the explicit racists blathering on about deporting people, or the liberal racists saying ‘this is the kind of thing that makes people think that racists are right.’ Continue Reading →