Conrad Felixmüller | Men above the World | 1919
(Epitaph for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht)
Richard D Wolff’s latest update | Relax into his style of delivery as if were a well-worn armchair. If you’re pressed for time, let it load and fast-forward to ~11:45 for a good econometric description of higher education that comes coyly coupled with an interesting prescription. That’s followed by a cutting riff on last month’s textile catastrophe in Bangladesh. What time is it, people?
(Source: vimeo.com)
Alli Warren’s placard loiters in its holster in advance of 11/2/11; Maya Weeks caught it in direct action
a report, & some other exchanges
Please direct your attention now to this report (pdf) by David Grundy on last weekend’s daylong symposium on Militant Politics and Poetry at Birkbeck College in London: several poets, many of them familiar to longtime readers of the Roule, convened to take a pragmatic survey of the shape of things one year on from the Poetry and Revolution conference. We’re told a tumblr might be in the works for last weekend’s proceedings; in the meantime, be sure, also, to pay a visit to David’s Eartrip (which is better & more fun than Q-tips).
Enticing convergences are in the cards on these shores too: one hopes the East Bay Poetry Summit this coming weekend might yield documentation that is similarly limber, condensed, and unafraid of sharing an opinion — even if this encuentro does not explicitly concern the political. (Speaking of the Bay, see these excellent after-incident reports from the Berkeley ecopoetics conference that took place earlier this spring.)
& if you like the sound of several voices sharing ideas together in a room, you could do worse than tune your earholes to this conversation of Bay Area poets on avant-gardes and hopeless places, recorded earlier in the year (which may explain what feels from here like an undue concern with the Perloff hegemony, which amounts to only a minor distraction from what otherwise remains of interest). Also well worth your attention as you while away your ample spare time is this multi-channel ping-pong game on communization and aesthetics, out of the east coast, and more broadly tuned to the discipline of art history, and possibly all the more instructive for that. Read it and weep while you can, o readers of the world — you have nothing to lose but your ad-free platforms.
Areopagitica (1644) | cf. “the good manners of vampires”
Conference of the Birds | 5/17/2013
conclusion to a resident thought from Tim Etchells
2 days ago - 
1
1How to Look at Art, Arts & Architecture, Ad Reinhardt, January 1947
— or as Fred Moten puts it:
The notion that crisis lies in the ever more brutal interdiction of our capacity to represent or be represented by the normal is as seductive, in its way, as the notion that such interdiction is the necessary response to our incapacity for such representation. Their joint power is held in the fact that whether abnormality is a function of external imposition or of internal malady it can only be understood as pathological. Such power is put in its accidental place, however, by the ones who see, who imaginatively misunderstand, the crisis as our constant disruption of the normal, whose honor is given in and protected by its representations, with the ante-representational generativity that it spurns and craves. This is the crisis that is always with us; this is the crisis that must be policed not just by the lethal physical brutality of the state and capital but also by the equally deadly production of a discourse that serially asserts that the crisis that has befallen us must overwhelm the crisis that we are; that crisis follows rather than prompts our incorporative exclusion.
(Source: lessadjectivesmoreverbs)
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
This is truly a thing to behold under one cover or in one file — that latter the best sort of commodity: one you can already own just by looking at it. The thing is, what shall you do with such a possession? Careful what you click: Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s thinking on the shape we’re in — one of whose integrals might be reckoned as: lower limit debt, upper limit study — is truly lambent in that radical sense Peter Riley reminded us of the other day: lapped (as in by a tongue) with flames.
“The university is a factory,” the banner says, which raises an interesting question: what does it make? Debt’s the best one-size-fits-all answer I’m afraid (something all to well understood by the Department of Education, which projects a profit of $50 billion for 2013). But what else might the university make? That’s the question those who think they might be working on a different floor of the factory ought be studying on, for I tell you now that it shall be on the fiery flying pop quiz next time I see you. Yes, it will be an open-book quiz, and the book I’d recommend is this one, esp. their chapter “Debt and Study”
While we’re on this channel: Moten’s preoccupied engagement with the riot form remains at large aqui. I confess that at this distance I can’t help but recognize that piece as a response — of the sort Moten and Harney describe in their innerview with Shukaitis when they distinguish “claim” from “demand” from “call” — not only to those August riots but also to the prescient call of Sean Bonney’s “Letter on Riots and Doubt.” (That letter, which posits “a poetry that only the enemy can understand,” got recycled as the keynote to A Second Fiery Flying Roule, while an unauthorized chunk of Moten and Harney’s lucubrations supplied the interior to A Twentieth Fiery Flying Roule.)
Which brings me to my final question: what time is it, people?
5 days ago - 3
3 
Wobbly variation on a theme
6 days ago - 7
7
Philadelphia :: 13 May 1983
6 days ago - 1
1speaking of understanding, Marshal Sahlins thus in the LRB 9 May 2013
[ Bohr’s dictum might well apply to capitalism too, n’est pas? ]
6 days ago - 1
1
