Swiftly Unveiled

Journal for Occupied Studies Launch Party

Lech’s Art Loft
80 Vernon Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn
Potluck, Bands, Beer
8PM for Main Event

I set aside some time this morning to watch the Invisible Children film about Joseph Kony.  I’ve wanted to watch this video for the better part of a week.  But I’m also not entirely unfamiliar with the kinds of atrocities committed by Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, in part because I paid a lot of attention to the South Sudan Liberation Movement and the founding of South Sudan as an independent nation.  Since declaring independent, South Sudan has been crippled by political conflict, violence, and election scandal since declaring independence, thanks to patrolling war-mongers like Ahmed Haroun and Joseph Kony.

I’m appalled by the vicious cynical backlash against those who have used social media to distribute the video and reproduce discussion about the issues it raises.  In spite of Occupy Wall Street, appreciation for social activism is at a low point in America.  We have failed to integrate an activist culture into our work places; we have not exactly succeeded in our cafes, bars, music venues, parks, and other public spaces.  And now the House of Representatives has clearly indicated that it intends to make activism illegal. THAT’S something worth being irked about.

Now, as for the video itself. What’s the deal with the looming chasm of misdirection between the social mission — get rid of this thug roaming about central Africa — and the highly corporate strategy the Kony 2012 producers feel is the best way to make that happen?  

I can understand the appeal in buying a fleet of vans that say KONY in big letters — what I can’t understand is why they have to be brand new vans.

Do we really believe that the only way to get attention to Washington is to emulate the behavior and media patterns they have responded to in the past?

Occupy Wall Street had a different vision.

daniper:

My friend Kyle just published a gorgeous, digital look at where the Occupy movement stands.

swiftlyunveiled:

I’ve been working on a project.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.

But now you know.

(http://occupiedstudies.org/)

Thanks, Daniela!!

After an intensive weekend editing bucket-loads of copy, wrangling images, and tweaking our code base, the web version of the Journal for Occupied Studies is live and ready for action! 

Volume I, February 2012

1. Occupy America | Cinzia Arruzza | Assistant Professor of Philosophy, New School for Social Research

“Movements always arrive unexpectedly”, according to philosopher and veteran activist Cinzia Arruzza — but once they arrive, what is to be done? Cinzia reconstructs the moments of fulmination behind the high points of Occupy Wall Street, outlining a cautious vision for propelling the movement onward.

2. Lines of Dissent | Tim Gee | Friends of the Earth

Where did we come from and what can we learn? An analysis of London’s OccupyLSX in the context of the now-disbanded UK “Camp for Climate Action” network.

3. On the People’s Mic | Ryan Ruby | Writer and Teacher, New York City

Predicting that People’s Mic will come to be regarded as paradigmatic of post-literate politics, Ruby brings Plato to bear on boredom, sacrality, and eroticism in the movement, highlighting key contradictions of technoscientific capital in the social media of the American Fall and Arab Spring respectively.

4. Communicability & the Police | Hannes Charen | European Graduate School

A forceful outline of Occupy Wall Street’s heritage in the anti-globalization and Zapatista movements, 18th-century aesthetics, and Plato’s Republic. Drawing on the political theories of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, Charen evinces a fundamental struggle between the radically egalitarian core of OWS tactics and the stultifying gaze of pop-political representation

Writing from his experience as a long-time activist having lately found affinity with New York’s ‘Occupy’, Varon reminds us that ‘Occupy’ should not be approved of so much as appreciated as a transgressive disruption of normal liberal-democratic functioning.

Following the contentious and short-lived occupation of a study space, Lewis reflects on what makes an occupation truly ‘heterotopian’, on the basis that the space we claim should, above all, negate the unsafety of the capitalistic ordering.

In this sober yet utopian appraisal of the present reality of circulating struggle against the subsumption of education by capital, Thorburn, theorist of the EduFactory, describes the radical praxis of ‘militant research’ and formulates concrete proposals towards the autonomous university.

If university students are offered the pernicious choice of resembling either products or consumers, what are the fundamental choices facing today’s university professors? Are the practices of our professors in line with their preaching? Uncritical Faculties questions the apolitical attitudes and self-serving poises found among many professional academics today.

I’ve been working on a project.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.

But now you know.

(http://occupiedstudies.org/)