Some bonds constrain us, and confine us to isolation one from another. Others release us from our confinement and our isolation, letting us loose and inviting us to enter into community with one another. The former bonds cage and enslave us, whereas the latter ones open our cage-doors and set us free. The former constipate us, tightening us up and closing us down. The latter act laxatively, as it were. They open us out like blossoms, loosening us up and relaxing us.
Read moreWhat Are Riots For?
Nuit Debout, Paris, 2016
Riots are exuberant demonstrations in celebration of community, and celebrations have nothing to do with counting costs or reckoning profits and losses. Whoever must count costs and keep a balance sheet has no idea how to celebrate. By performing his calculations, he excludes himself from the common party.
Read moreWhat Is a Riot?
Occupy Wall Street, Washington Square Park, October 8, 2011
Let us loudly and proudly proclaim it a "riot," whenever and wherever the spirit moves us to come together in celebration of our very being together.
Read moreExiting Egypt--or, Leaving Servitude to Modern Modernity
Egypt today is the Internet. Or at least the Internet can be used to signify today what Egypt once signified in the Biblical account of the Exodus. The Internet can serve as a synecdoche in one of its forms: a part standing for the whole to which it belongs.
Read moreDeliverance Now
The end-time does not come at the end of time. The end-time is now, just as it always has been and always will be. Our role is to enjoy it, as it carries us on its ever-rolling wave.
Read moreVacuums and Clearings: The Taking and the Making of Space
Clearings, including especially in and as artworks, allow whatever at all may happen to be, to have room to be. Unlike vacuums, which suck everything into themselves and leave it no room, clearings open things out, and give them room just to be--to be whatever and however they are in and for themselves and one another.
Read moreRendering the Desert Just Deserts
To get to the other side of despair, where life begins, one must first vomit out all the mere pretense at living with which the global scam so dominant today fills all of our everyday days. To do that, we must first seek out some desolate place where we can dump all that vomitus. We must go into the desert of solitude.
Read moreDeserting the Desert
If we were to look for a fitting image of today's already global but still spreading desert of death, we would not find it in the mushroom clouds above nuclear explosions such as those that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the United States bombed them to bring about VJ-Day. We would instead find a fitting image of today's ever growing desert in such images as the icons for Microsoft or Apple, Google or Facebook, Walmart or Amazon.
Read moreQuestioning Authority
The only sorts of questions to which answers bring a close are no more than requests for information, of one form or another. When that information is given in answer to such a request, the question is closed. In contrast, the question that genuine authority poses to each of us is one we can never close. It must always be held open, awaiting further response. The question that genuine authority poses to us is one that can only be answered with the entirely of our lives.
Read moreDisrobing the Emperor
Vested authorities never like having their authority called into question, opened to being looked into and searched out. To have their claims to authority questioned threatens to make those claims and those who make them ridiculous, something not to be taken seriously. Something deserving of being mocked and ridiculed. Those who claim authority cannot stand the thought of such a thing happening to them.
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