Friday — 07.25.14 — Coalition Building — Overcoming Separations within a Citywide Social Movement — Berliner Ratschlag, New York, and Translocal Networks of Solidarity
Comments Off on Friday — 07.25.14 — Coalition Building — Overcoming Separations within a Citywide Social Movement — Berliner Ratschlag, New York, and Translocal Networks of SolidarityFriday — 07.25.14 — Coalition Building — Overcoming Separations within a Citywide
Social Movement — Berliner Ratschlag, New York, and Translocal Networks of Solidarity
CONTENTS:
0. About Friday
1. Topics for the meeting
2. On Berliner Ratschlag
3. Further links and readings
4. Groups invited/participating
5. Conjunction/Connection
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0. About Friday
What: Plenary / Discussion
When: Friday July 25, 7:00pm
Where: 16 Beaver St., 4th Floor
Who: Free and Open to all
Tonight we invite the participation of a broader grouping of activists and artists to
discuss the ways in which we can develop meshworks of solidarity, alliance, and mutual
aid between separate initiatives and to work towards a larger movement.
Besides geographical distance, on a basic level it can be seen how functional it is for
neoliberal capitalism to have social relations to be fractured and separated, and
discourses and initiatives to become “specialized” (and to speak through this language
of specialization, whether in community meetings, academic networks, or art
institutions) within a broader potential array of autonomous practices.
In this regard neoliberalizations saturate or structure our social relations, keeping us
away from each other and obscuring the broader networks of solidarity that are possible.
A slogan could be: Conjoin the disconnected! That is, if we remain with the language we
developed in the Connective Mutations seminar with Bifo and many friends in 2009 – maybe
the task is not to connect, but discover once again our capacity to conjoin. (For more
on this, please read the fragment from Bifo further below)
Tonight’s conversation will include a report-back and presentation from David Scheller
on the work that the Berliner Ratschlag has been doing in the city of Berlin this spring
— inviting groups as diverse as the ongoing pipeline resistance in the Rockaways (No
Rockaway Pipeline, Rockaway Wildfire); the commoning of the Marine Transfer Station at
135th street; artistic initiatives to common the city through its water-front spaces and
waterways; community urban gardeners; bike activists; and members from housing activist
coalitions — to join in a larger conversation to focus on defining this broader
movement — and a broader definition of autonomy and autonomous practice. In this regard
the Ratschlag will serve as a potential example for a broader city-wide network and
platform of solidarity, knowledge exchange and direct actions united under the crucial
question “Whose city is it?”.
This is of course in relation to the way that the neoliberal city is currently
shaped/distributed — with separated domains into which our activities are channeled. In
a sense, when we petition funding networks to endorse and support our activities, we are
speaking the language of precarity — anticipating in the shaping of our discourses what
these networks “want”, and what we think is possible.
On a certain level the “siphoning off” of social creativity that has been seen yet is
mostly antithetical to a practice of building a movement, of developing affiliations
between isolated or individual projects or initiatives.
On the other side of this are the solidarity networks on which autonomous social
creativity is based — a common language of grassroots solidarity, prefigurative
practices, horizontalism and practices of resistance that work in and between
initiatives and networks, to create and sustain a larger empowering social movement and
its potential structures.
By providing this space for the formation and strengthening of our relations, we see
tonight’s conversation as a part of an ongoing process, which has many beginnings, many
middles, and will be continued in future conversations.
______________________________________
1. Topics for the meeting
*node of housing alliances (and land and water commoning initiatives), conversation
about broader networks/solidarity/affiliation between individual initiatives, urban
agriculture, and art groups
*potentialities for reclamation and transformation of urban properties beyond “housing”
= art, farming, etc
*democratization of the distribution of urban spaces and political decision-making in
(horizontal direct democracy and self-organization)
*related to the housing question, policy frameworks determine our approaches, but
prefigurative practices operate outside or autonomous to this
*the idea of distribution encompasses those networks
*if people are involved in a particular network, involved with a specialized discourse
(policy), then how do we create an idea of distribution (of discourses, of spaces, of
practices) that is more open/networked/empowering
*opening out of autonomous practices that overcome singular struggles — an idea of
“translocal” solidarity
*a network or platform that opens up possibilities for new social relations and a just city
______________________________________
2. On the Berliner Ratschlag
“Berliner Ratschlag”
Berliner Ratschlag is a grassroots network and platform for more solidarity and better
organization between initiatives, groups and coalitions from various backgrounds in
struggles about distribution — of (social) housing, anti-eviction, public spaces,
environment, migrant rights/status, energy, economy etc.
The intention is to overcome particularism and separatism of protest in the city of
Berlin, in order to be recognized as a broad coalition or movement for a city from the
grassroots.
April 2014 was the first meeting over a weekend as an open space – including a
conference with working groups and plenaries to start this conversation in order to get
to know each other better and reduce distrust.
Since this event monthly meetings and working groups have taken place to continue this
conversation, support in direct action, mobilizing and organizing of participating
groups between the various actions and projects.
Continuous work has occurred on a sustainable infrastructure of the network in working
groups (i.e. website, structure, representations, decision making processes, squatting,
alternative social housing economies, seniors and persons with disabilities, independent
media)
It is potentially open to everybody (according to a basic code that reflects and
excludes nationalism, sexism, racism etc.).
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3. Links and Further Readings
Berliner Ratschlag
http://berliner-ratschlag.org
http://peter-nowak-journalist.de/2014/04/06/beginn-des-organisierungsprozesses/
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4. Groups invited/participating
Community Action for Save Appartments (CASA)
https://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Settlement-Apartments-Community-Action-for-Safe-Apartments-CASA/275463095900687?fref=nf
Crown Heights Tenant Union (CHTU)- Confirmation open
https://www.facebook.com/CrownHeightsTenantUnion
Queens Neighborhoods United
https://www.facebook.com/QueensNeighborhoodsUnited
No Rockaway Pipeline
https://www.facebook.com/norockawaypipeline
Rockaway Wildfire – Confirmation open
http://rockawaywildfire.org/
Brooklyn Solidarity Network
https://www.facebook.com/bklynsolidaritynetwork
Reclaim Bushwick (Colonie 1209)
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Reclaim-Bushwick/664471223623389?fref=ts
CAAAV – Organizing Asian Communities
http://caaav.org
Picture the Homeless
www.picturethehomeless.org/
Occupy Sunset Park
https://www.facebook.com/OccupySunsetPark
New York City Community Garden Coalition
http://nyccgc.org
Right of Way
Tweets by RightOfWayNYC
WE ACT for Environmental Justice
The Living Theatre
http://www.livingtheatre.org
New York Year Zero
https://www.facebook.com/newyorkyearzero
and the New York City Anti Eviction Network
______________________________________
5. Conjunction/Connection
From Precarious Rhapsody page 132-133
By Franco Bifo Berardi
The context of my understanding of the present historical and cul- tural dynamics is the
transition from a realm of conjunction to one of connection, with a special focus on the
emergence of the first connective generation, those who learn more words from a machine
than a mother.
In this transition, a mutation of the conscious organism is taking place: to render this
organism compatible with a connective environment, our cognitive system needs to be
reformatted. This appears to generate a dulling of the faculties of conjunction that had
hitherto characterized the human condition.
The realm of sensibility is involved in this ongoing process of cogni- tive
reformatting; we see aesthetic thought as being inserted at a juncture. Ethical and
political thought is also reshaping its observational stand- point and framework around
the passage from a conjunctive to a con- nective form of human concatenation.
Conjunction is becoming-other. In contrast, in connection each ele- ment remains
distinct and interacts only functionally.
Singularities change when they conjoin; they become something other than they were
before their conjunction. Love changes the lover and a combination of asignifying signs
gives rise to the emergence of a meaning that does not exist prior to it.
Rather than a fusion of segments, connection entails a simple effect of machinic
functionality. In order to connect, segments must be com- patible and open to
interfacing and interoperability. Connection requires these segments to be
linguistically compatible. In fact the digital web spreads and expands by progressively
reducing more and more elements to a format, a standard and a code that make different
segments compatible.
The segments that enter this rhizome belong to different realms of nature: they are
electronic, semiotic, machinic, biological, and psychic; optic fibre circuits,
mathematical abstractions, electromagnetic waves, human eyes, neurons and synapses. The
process whereby they become compatible traverses heterogeneous fields of being and folds
them onto a principle of connectivity.
The present mutation occurs in this transition from conjunction to connection, a
paradigm of exchange between conscious organisms. Cen- tral to this mutation is the
insertion of the electronic into the organic, the proliferation of artificial devices in
the organic universe, in the body, in communication and in society. Therefore, the
relationship between consciousness and sensibility is transformed and the exchange of
signs undergoes a process of increasing desensitization.
Conjunction is the meeting and fusion of rounded and irregular forms that infuse in a
manner that is imprecise, unrepeatable, imperfect and continuous. Connection is the
punctual and repeatable interaction of algorithmic functions, straight lines and points
that juxtapose perfectly and are inserted and removed in discrete modes of interaction.
These dis- crete modes make different parts compatible to predetermined standards.
The digitalization of communication processes leads on the one hand to a sort of
desensitization to the curve and to the continuous flows of slow becoming, and on the
other hand to a becoming sensitive to the code, to sudden changes of states and to the
sequence of discrete signs.
Interpretation follows semantic criteria in the realm of conjunction: the meaning of the
signs sent by the other as she enters in conjunction with you needs to be understood by
tracing the intention, the context, the nuances and the unsaid, if necessary.
The interpretative criteria of the realm of connection on the other hand are purely
syntactic. In connection, the interpreter must recognize a sequence and be able to
perform the operation required by general syn- tax or the operating system; there is no
room for margins of ambiguity in the exchange of messages, nor can the intention be
shown by means of nuances.
This mutation produces painful effects in the conscious organism and we read them
through the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anx- iety and apathy, panic,
depression and a sort of suicidal epidemics is spreading.
However, a purely psychopathological account fails to capture the question in its depth,
because we are in fact confronted with the effort of the conscious organism to adapt to
a changed environment and a read- justment of the cognitive system to the
techno-communicative environ- ment. This generates pathologies of the psychic sphere and
in social relations.
Aesthetic perception – here properly conceived of as the realm of sensibility and
aesthesia – is directly involved in this transformation: in its attempt to efficiently
interface with the connective environment, the conscious organism appears to
increasingly inhibit what we call sensibil- ity.
By sensibility, we mean the faculty that enables human beings to interpret signs that
are not verbal nor can be made so, the ability to understand what cannot be expressed in
forms that have a finite syntax.
This faculty reveals itself to be useless and even damaging in an inte- grated
connective system. Sensibility slows down processes of interpre- tation and renders them
aleatory and ambiguous, thus reducing the competitive efficiency of the semiotic agent.
The ethical realm where voluntary action is possible also plays an essential role in the
reformatting of the cognitive system. Religious soci- ologists and journalists lament a
sort of ethical lack of sensitivity and a general indifference in the behaviour of the
new generations. In many cases, they lament the decline of ideological values or
community links.
However, in order to understand the discomfort that invests the eth- ical and political
realms, the emphasis needs to be placed on aesthetics. Ethical paralysis and the
inability to ethically govern individual and col- lective life seem to stem from a
discomfort in aesthesia – the perception of the other and of the self.