Society of the Friends of the Virus Volume 4 / Sunday — 08.09.20 — Fifteenth Testing Assembling
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CONTENTS:
1. Sunday’s Assembling
2. Society of the Friends of the Virus Volume 4
3. Videos from Previous Assemblings
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1. Sunday’s Assembling
The history of our space has been intrinsically woven together through bodies, places, events, feelings, practices, processes, thoughts, struggles, questions, friendships, affinities and ways of convening around, through, with them, with one another. And these ways of encountering, coming together have all been implicitly shaped by conditions, contexts, places, geographies, …. contested and calling for contestation.
Beirut has been in the middle of this collective experience or passage of attempting to make sense of/with/through our worlds, struggles – both through the many friends as well as questions those friends have shared (including in our recent assemblings, see note below).
This week, as we assemble to discuss the question of caste in relation to race, class, gender, and black life, we will will not forget the _____________ events in Beirut, as we do not see them in isolation, but in composition, as one culmination of a complex of interwoven, entangled, conjunctions, bringing us all to a conjuncture in which the histories of colonialism, the continuation, evolution, and globalization of the same operations of abstraction, extraction, destruction, exploitation, … colonial, patriarchal and capitalist forms of (un)relating to earth begin to gather a seismic counter-force that is no longer containable, controllable.
Can we be part of that counter-force? To look around our communities and find ways of stopping these processes from continuing is what the George Floyd Uprisings speak to even if we do not find the language (what is the language of earth?). The scale is epic and what it asks of each of us is nothing short of a radical refusal to comply with these systems and structures of neglect that have brought us to this conjuncture.
In the spirit of that search we share the fourth volume of the Society of the Friends of the Virus as well as invite those interested to join this week, to write to mai [at] 16beavergroup.org to receive further instructions.
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2. Society of the Friends of the Virus Volume 4
LIFE IS NOT A COMMODITY
LANGUAGE IS NOT A COMMODITY
EARTH IS NOT A COMMODITY
HEALTH IS NOT A COMMODITY
KNOWLEDGE IS NOT A COMMODITY
AIR IS NOT A COMMODITY
WATER IS NOT A COMMODITY
LAND IS NOT A COMMODITY
…
A COLONY
…
THE COMMODIFICATION/COLONIZATION OF LIFE LANGUAGE EARTH
MUST BE BROUGHT TO A HALT, PROLIFERATE THE STRIKE*
Here is Volume 4:
http://centreparrhesia.org/vol_4_society_of_the_friends.pdf
*The notion of strike invoked here, as well as other points emerging in this volume have been elaborated or engaged with in previous volumes. All of them can be found here:
http://centreparrhesia.org/
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3. Videos from Previous Assemblings
We are hopeful to have more soon, but the most recent video we have shared in the link below is our meeting on ‘milpa’ (as it is practiced and nurtured by comrades in the Yucatan) as a way of thinking concretely around convivial tools which can hold together social infrastructures of community.
To view visit:
https://16beavergroup.org/assembling/
Testing Assembling – Movement 18 – Valiana Aguilar and Ángel Kú on Milpa and the Social Infrastructures of Community with Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy
Also, to have a sense of the questions that were present in the context of struggles in Beirut before and during the pandemic, which the recent explosions are expression and exacerbation of, you can watch Movement 9, in which our friends Haig Aivazian and Göksun Yazici shared notes on the situtaions in Lebanon and Turkey respectively.