theworldwelivein:

Tilt-Shift | Overlooking the City of Prague, Czech Republic
© Maί

newwavefeminism:

motherjones:

(via all education matters)

But if we make education more accessible how will the privileged elite maintain their comparative advantage over everyone else?!

(via mysticseas)

(via infinitestranger)

fucktheory:

War of Movement/War of Position

(click)

In my opinion, this is absolutely the wrong moment for the Occupy Wall Street movement to begin setting concrete demands or crystallizing into an ideological rather than purely physical movement. 

The greatest strength of the movement is the fact that “participation” consists of two things:  political dissatisfaction whether general or specific, and physical presence.  If you’re pissed off and you’re out in the street, you’re participating.  Yes, this fact opens the door for all kinds of idiocy-by-association, but it’s also, I think, the reason that after a few slow weeks the movement is suddenly gaining widespread and viral support:  the amorphous nature of the movement is allowing it to pick up steam by drawing on a vast array of potential dissatisfactions and privations.  God knows there are enough things to be pissed off about, and, at this point, everybody’s anger is equally valid. 

As soon as concrete demands are put in place, this generalized social phenomenon will immediately begin to splinter along pre-existing lines.  Why?  Because any specific demands, whether positive or negative, have to be articulated on the basis of existing social and economic conditions, and those social and economic conditions are already demarcated by social, identity, and interest groups.  So that any specific set of demands will correspond to a greater or less extent with the dissatisfactions of those groups. 

You automatically risk producing a relative hierarchy of investment.  This will have two effects:  first, people or groups already participating in the movement will immediately feel more or less invested in the demands of the movement; and second, people or groups who are potential participants will begin to gauge the utility of their participation based on how closely the movement’s specific demands correspond with their personal dissatisfaction.  In other words, by instituting a set of specific demands, the movement risks shifting from affect-based participation to ideology-based participation.  Needless to say, emotion is a considerably stronger mobilizing force than ideological argumentation. Consider, for example, the sentence above from the NYT.  Think what a difference there is between the vast metonymic symbolism of “Occupy Wall Street” as compared with the geographic, economic, and political specificities that immediately attach to “the Occupation of New York.” 

As Gramsci notes in the quote above, only the obviously dominant side in a conflict gets to dictate terms.  The state already has the apparatuses in place to control the location of the protest, its physical movements, and to impose significant physical and legal consequences on participants.  To weaken the movement’s position further by voluntarily producing cracks in its unity of purpose would be a grave mistake.  The strongest thing that Occupy Wall Street has going for it right now is the fact that Wall Street doesn’t know who it’s dealing with; that makes it very difficult for it to respond.  By making concrete demands, by producing specific manifestos, the movement essentially provides its opposition with a road-map of its constituency, allowing it to begin dividing and conquering. 

The greatest strength Occupy Wall Street has is its incoherence.  The state needs to know we’re out there.  It needs to know we are legion.  But it doesn’t need to know who and why we are.  The fundamental operating principle of capitalism is quantification:  the process of putting a price tag on everything begins, necessarily, by establishing what every given thing is, so its value and social position can be abstracted and quantified.  Nothing confuses the capitalist machine more than an entity it can’t even identify, much less quantify or buy and sell.  This is the brute force of the “99%” slogan:  rather than identifying who the protesters are and what they want, it identifies who the enemy is, and what we’re not.  To reverse this strategy while the movement is still gathering momentum would be a serious mistake.  Only a rhizome can save us now. 

(via tartanspartan)

lovelynotes:

Sending you my love.