Meeting Links: US Election Funding, Project Ideas, Machines Blog, Videos

Hey folks, here are some links relevant to our first meeting of 2008:

Let’s try and make this post an ongoing list for any other stuff people feel is relevant.

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Who’s Next?

Campaign Finance 2008 USA Election:

Here’s a website, I realize its cnn, but it’s an easy start for finding general numbers.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/money/dems.html

NYtimes is good also….
http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/finances/index.html

Project Ideas:

Asian American Video Oral History Tutorial

http://thewhalehunt.org/

Michel Gondry’s Please Be Kind Rewind and “How to Swede”:

Machines and Movements: Deleuze and Guattari
Michael Hardt’s Reading notes on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus
My Blog: Desiring-Machines

Instead, it’s all about machines—desiring machines: “Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections”. (AO 1)

“Everything is a machine” (AO 2):
In the first section of the first chapter process and desire are defined in relation to both production and machines.
“A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupres)…related to a continual flow (hyle) that it cuts into…like a ham slicing machine, removing portions [prelevement] from the associative flow: the anus and the flow of shit it cuts off, for instance” (AO 36).
Hyle: “designates the pure continuity that any one sort of matter ideally possess” (AO 36).
The break or interruption of flows is not a rejection of that continuity; instead, it is constitutive of it—“it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal continuity” (AO 36). Thus with each machine there are other machines that are connected to it and the form of that connection is conditioned by how (and which) breaks-flows function in that relation. Also, there is always a “third machine” that perpetually produces an infinite flux. This scope of these processes are essentially the law of the production of production at work; machines connected to other machines, producing and encountering breaks-flows.

The notion of desire that emerges in the first chapter is still somewhat unclear. This has much to do with the fact that I continually find myself clinging to desire as something that emerges from a subject-object relationship: the individual who tries in his life to satisfy his desires by seeking, projecting, working towards, discovering the objects of desire. This also brings out my second confusion, what it means to displace subjects and objects—the implications of situating the subject adjacent to(/outside?) of and after desiring-machines…as products of production.

Civil Disobedience: Howard Zinn Video, Hannah Arendt’s words

www.howardzinn.org/

celeb endorsement of the day:

Bruce Springsteen raves about Howard Zinn

In the new issue of Rolling Stone, under the heading “Inspiration,” Bruce Springsteen says: “Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States had an enormous impact on me. It set me down in a place that I recognized and felt I had a claim to. It made me feel that I was a player in this moment in history, as we all are, and that this moment in history was mine, somehow, to do with whatever I could. It gave me a sense of myself in the context of this huge American experience and empowered me to feel that in my small way. I had something to say, I could do something. It made me feel a part of history, and gave me life as a participant.”

“Civil disobedience arises when a significant number of citizens have become convinced either that the normal channels of change no longer function, and grievances will not be heard or acted upon, or that, on the contrary, the government is about to change and has embarked upon and persists in modes of action whose legality and constitutionality are open to grave doubt”

“The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is never possible without instruments.”

“Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of the individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together…Power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy. The common treatment of these words as synonyms is no less misleading and confusing than the current equation of obedience and support. Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow. Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but never will be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future.

Strength unequivocally designates something in the singular, an individual entity; it is the property inherent in an object or person and belongs to its character, which may prove itself in relation to other things or persons, but is essentially independent of them…

Force, which we often use in daily speech as a synonym for violence, especially if violence serves as a means of coercion, should be reserved, in terminological language, for the ‘forces of nature’ or the ‘force of circumstances’, that is, to indicate the energy released by physical or social movements…

Violence, finally, as I have said, is distinguished by its instrumental character. Phenomenologically, it is close to strength, since the implements of violence, like all other tools, are designed and used for that purpose of multiplying natural strength until, in the last stage of their development, they can substitute for it.

It is not superfluous to add that these distinctions, though by no means arbitrary, hardly ever correspond to watertight compartments in the real world, from which nevertheless they are drawn.

-hannah arendt, Crises of the Republic, 1969

http://www.terry.ubc.ca

Check out this link to a solid UBC log that seems to share many of the same values, ideals, beliefs etc. as the fungus…. I met Devon Carr earlier this year and have had a few coincidental encounters with him recently, and so we began talking at the climbing gym and he informed me that he is a poli-sci and international relations student at ubc…. he is also the manager of this website….. strange coincidence? Perhaps….. regardless, I think it would be a good idea if we linked our blog sites, shared information, and continued to spread love with as many people as possible.D