WAR BY
OTH ER
NAM ES
a-summit-in-acts

ACT X

Tenth Encounter
with
Veronika Zablotsky, Françoise Vergès
Sista Oloruntoyin, Brother Mwayemudza
Black Community Coalition for Justice and Self-Defense
Alisa Lozhkina, Göksun Yazici
Peter Linebaugh, Sabu Kohso
Anatoli Ulyanov, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu
Zoé Samudzi, Nicholas Mirzoeff

and many friends

Sunday March 5th 2023
11AM - 3PM (EST)

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PREAMBLE

To learn about the previous ACTS:

I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, XI

To receive instructions for joining virtually please write to:
mai [at] 16beavergroup.org


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INTRODUCTION

Last year, we started with friends a series of encounters, attempting to think through the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, both in its specificities as well as it regional and planetary dimensions.*

One year on, we see it even more clearly, this war, at the same time as it devastates Ukraine and destroys the lives of its peoples, is planetary and involves nearly all the large ensembles, molar lines, blocs, economic and political concentrations of coercion. And as much as it reveals, this war, like all wars, masks and occludes, gives rise to reactivity, countering our insurgencies. And in that sense, there is no denying its relevance to struggles on a planetary scale, including the fate of the planet itself.

Whether it is at the level of ecology, economy, energy, weapons, technology, white supremacy, coloniality, hetero-patriarchy, border regimes, state power, capitalist realism much of what is being mobilized in the name of Ukraine from those larger ensembles seems nothing other than the continuation of the very state of things that need urgently to be abolished.

So it is in this spirit that we would like to call for an assembling, marking this passing of a year since the invasion of Ukraine, not only in order to be present to the immense violence, displacement, destruction, death and suffering, but also to find ways of thinking, responding, which do not isolate it, searching for words or senses of it through other struggles, the many wars or war like states which underpin our worlds.

For looking back at the previous acts, we assembled on our website a little overview:
http://16beavergroup.org/summit/


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THE FORM

We think to organize in 4 one hour circles. Invited contributors will speak for about 10 minutes, sharing questions they are thinking through from wherever they are at, and then keep some space for a conversation to emerge. We will try to take a short break between each of the circles.


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THE INVITATION

We don’t expect our contributors to explain what is happening, rather to try together to construct ideas, thought forms, out of words and questions which could help us overcome the dominant political imaginaries and narratives of this invasion, this war, our times, and what we are struggling for/against.


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WAR BY OTHER NAMES

*This process has not been systematic, it emerged week to week, assembly by assembly as lines of thinking held together mostly by association, affinity, friendship, and trust for a process of collective inquiry and its capacity to inform how we struggle against the wars in our midst. It started as a conversation with Olga Kopenkina and Dmitry Vilensky weeks before the invasion, to organize something to bring together artists and thinkers to discuss what seemed to us a grave situation. We organized the first encounter just days after the invasion had started. As the assemblings continued, Alisa Lozhkina and Ovidiu Tichindeleanu added further energy and nourishment to our collective, speculative but politically grounded inquiry and conversation. We remain grateful to these and the many friends who have given their time and energy to this common effort.


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FORE/BACKGROUND

Like the virtual assemblings we have organized with so many friends over the last three years, as well as the many more physically over two plus decades, we use these occasions to go beyond ourselves, offering instead questions, sharing speculatively, as ways not to convince but to open new paths for our ways of collectively perceiving as well as struggling through the local realities contexts where we are all in.

As a friend and comrade, Stefano Harney, recently reminded us, we do this wrestling away the monopoly of states and corporations (for or non profit) to determine when, with whom, how, for what we assemble.

And given that the preponderance of spaces and situations which are created for anything resembling assembly are usually of a professional sort, even within our activist contexts (i.e., instrumental): assembling to speculate and to discover new spaces of possibility, both for thought and action become critical to overcome the terms of order and go beyond disciplinary (in all senses of the term) logics.

If whatever we do or undo has anything to do with art (which remains an open question), at the very least, it is to insist on this ability to put the state of things into question, to question our means, and to put into crisis any particular end sought, even in words. To open up a space to do that collectively, is not easy, it requires trust and in moments such as now, a generosity and care which seem harder to find.

We lose so much time in making ends meet, there is never time to meet without ends, or to question those ends. These are dialogical moments when thinking returns to an experience of being in and out of a body, at a threshold, in contact, extimate, in common.

In 2005, our friend and comrade Brian Holmes initiated with us a collective inquiry which he called Continental Drift. In that seeking, he insisted that the enormity of the challenge to understand our worlds, from the vantage point of what happened after 1989, 1991, required a breadth of knowledge and a complexity of approaches that no single person could carry, that it had to be done collectively and could be a way to embody and open up the necessity of thinking, searching together in our sometimes close, sometimes distant fields of study, struggle.

Just last night in a conversation between friends and contributors to our assemblings, Silvia Federici and Verónica Gago, a question was raised regarding the fate of struggles when they seem to dissipate from the streets. And Silvia spoke about the necessity of spaces and infrastructures to hold together, imagine, build up our forces of continuing, presisting, resisting, responding, restituting, reimagining, reproducing our communities and our worlds.

So as we continue to search for a language to articulate and weave together our struggles, we do so thinking through this long arc of efforts with friends and comrades, to insist on collectively constructing multiplying those practices, spaces and paths of autonomy, transversality, communality.