For a New Liberty

Murray N. Rothbard proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the two major political parties, the ideologies they embrace, and their central plans for using state power against people. Libertarianism is Rothbard's radical alternative that says state power is unworkable and immoral and ought to be curbed and finally abolished

https://mises.org/sites/default/files/For%20a%20New%20Liberty%20The%20Libertarian%20Manifesto_3.pdf

Staying There

Staying There, 2016

Concrete, felt

30 x 23 x 30 cm

Aside

In Berkshire somewhere 1970

I hid in a laurel bush outside a house,

Planted in gravel I think.

I stopped running and just pushed open

Its oilskin flaps and settled down

In some kind of waiting room, whose scarred boughs

Had clearly been leaning and kneeling there

For a long time. They were bright black.

I remember this Museum of Twilight

Was low-ceilinged and hear-through

As through a bedroom window

One hears the zone of someone’s afternoon

Being shouted and shouted in, but by now

I was too evergreen to answer, watching

The woodlice at work in hard hats

Taking their trolleys up and down.

Through longer and longer interims

A dead leaf fell, rigidly yellow and slow.

So by degrees I became invisible

In that spotted sick-room light

And nobody found me there.

The hour has not yet ended in which

Under a cloth of Laurel

I sat quite still.

Alice Oswald

Whither anarchy: freedom as non-domination

Which institutions are best suited to realising freedom? This is a question recently asked by the republican political theorist Philip Pettit. 

Anarchists, by contrast to republicans, argue that the modern nation-state and the institution of private property are antithetical to freedom. According to anarchists, these are historic injustices that are structurally dominating. If you value freedom as non-domination, you must reject both as inimical to realising this freedom.

But what is freedom as non-domination? In a nutshell, by a line of thinking most vocally articulated by Pettit, I’m free to the degree that I am not arbitrarily dominated by any other. I am not free if someone can arbitrarily interfere in the execution of my choices.

If I consent to a system of rules or procedures, anyone that then invokes these rules against me cannot be said to be curtailing my freedom from domination. My scope for action might be constrained, but since I have consented to the rules that now curtail my freedom, I am not subject to arbitrary domination.

https://theconversation.com/whither-anarchy-freedom-as-non-domination-60776 

Ein Holzstern, blau

Ein Holzstern, blau,

aus kleinen Rauten gebaut. Heute, von

der jüngsten unserer Hände.

Das Wort, während

du Salz aus der Nacht fällst, der Blick

wieder die Windgalle sucht:

- Ein Stern, tu ihn,

tu den Stern in die Nacht.

(- In meine, in

meine.) 

Paul Celan

Borders

Borders (Puppetry for Long Distance People) 2016

Concrete, wood, acrylic 

25 x 58 x 25 cm

Songs of Labour and Pleasure, from Postpaganism to Neoliberalism

An idiosyncratic mixtape based on an impromptu listening seminar held at Labour Camp, part of Paul Chaney’s Critical Camps series at Kestle Barton, traces the relationship between work and eroticism through popular song.

Starting with a bucolic idyll of self-suffiency where labour is not yet separated from life, continuing with traditional English folk song in which collective pleasure is embedded in and resonates with the cyclical patterns of agricultural labour, the mix then traverses the industrial revolution, where the new mechanical tools are at first reinscribed into this postpagan cosmology of jouissance, going on to chart the divergence of pleasure and labour as their intertwining shifts, in early popular mass entertainment media, into mere burlesque and innuendo; remembering colonial slave labour and the appropriation of its affect and expression in Western popular music; arriving at the refusal of exploitation, the separation of work and love into mutual exclusivity, the culminating existential frustration of the commuter; and the thanatropic joy of being absorbed into the machine. It ends in the present day with the queasy rapture of a libidinal economy in which work and pleasure are once more integrated, but this time according to new meshings in which human desire no longer resonates with meadow and the cosmos, but is re-engineered and modulated by a fluid media apparatus.

https://soundcloud.com/urbanomic/songs-of-labour-and-pleasure 

One and the Many

Fatoş Oyuncakları (Fatoş Toys), 1971-73 products.  Courtesy Fatoş İnhan.

One and the Many is a research-based exhibition that looks into the production and distribution of things. It tackles the period 1955–95 in Turkey, by following the material results of gradual industrialization as well as its contingent infrastructural disposals. The exhibition frames the topic primarily through stories of selected artifacts common to the ’80s, a period when industrial products met a voluminous consumer market for the first time.

The research and narrative of One and the Many are structured around the notion of genuine copies. Questioning our standard expectation of ingenuity versus the opportunity of building atop each other’s ideas, the exhibition suggests a fresh perspective on the history of production in Turkey. From the early-day assembly industry, to today’s abundant copyright infringing replicas, copies have been scrutinized from both economic and intellectual viewpoints. The exhibition brings together artifacts from a variety of industries—automotive, white goods, furniture, toy, stationery, pret-a-porter, textile, food and beverage, tableware, cutlery, and hygiene—inviting users to value things per se, in order to recognize the ingenuity prompted by circumstances and appreciate copying as a method of learning.

One and the Many was produced with rich contributions from collaborating industries, professionals, consultants, academics and students who provided various ideas, content and narrations. The exhibition is part of the five-year program The Uses of Art — The Legacy of 1848 an1989, organized by L’Internationale.

September 6–November 13, 2016

SALT Galata

Istanbul

saltonline.org

Carving the Perfect Citizen: The Adventures of Italian Pinocchio in the Soviet Union and the United States

Branson, Rachel, "Carving the Perfect Citizen: The Adventures of Italian Pinocchio in the Soviet Union and the United States" (2014). Honors Projects. Paper 18.

http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/intstu_honproj/18

The science of the inconceivable

A different kind of logic

by Philip Ball

Late last year, an experiment carried out by scientists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands appeared to demonstrate that one object can affect another from afar without any physical interaction between the two. The finding confirmed an idea so extraordinary that, nearly a century ago, Albert Einstein had rejected it with the dismissive phrase “spooky action at a distance.” In quantum theory this phenomenon is known as “entanglement,” and many physicists now regard it as the most profound and important characteristic of the physical world at the smallest scales, which quantum theory describes.

Quantum entanglement is a deeply counterintuitive idea, which seems to contradict human experience of the physical world at the most essential level. In the everyday (“classical”) physical realm, objects affect one another via some kind of contact. The tennis ball flies from the racquet when struck, and when it hits the window the glass will smash. Sure, “invisible forces” seem to act across space—magnetic and electrical attraction and repulsion, say. But in quantum theory these interactions arise from the passage of a particle—a photon of light—between the two interacting bodies. Meanwhile, Einstein showed that the Sun’s gravity corresponds to a distortion of space, to which distant objects such as Earth respond. It’s generally believed that in a quantum theory of gravity (which doesn’t yet exist), this picture will prove to be equivalent to the exchange of “gravity particles” or gravitons between the Sun and Earth.
But quantum entanglement bothered Einstein because it suggested that one particle could affect another even when there was no conceivable physical interaction between them. It didn’t matter if those particles were light years apart—measuring a property of one particle would, according to quantum theory, instantly affect the properties of the other. How could that be?

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/the-science-of-the-inconceivable

Smyging

“Smyging” was one of many methods used to cure epilepsy in Norway. This photo was teken in 1922.

http://tidsskriftet.no/article/3270023/