<nettime> Cartography and War Machines, also more on radical project identity

[lotu5 <lotu5@resist.ca>]

I recently read this article which is really amazing and summarizes so
much great work going on in Europe. It discusses numerous projects
including Estrecho Indymedia and Precarias A La Deriva in Spain working
on precarity and migration using cartography as a tool for investigation
and organizing. It is especially helpful in showing how these very
important ideas from Deleuze can be practically applied. It was also
helpful because I'm working on a film about Occupied Social Centers in
Southern Europe and I interviewed some of the groups mentioned in this
article, but it gives me a broader understanding of their context and
their goals.      

http://deletetheborder.org/node/1459

Cartography and War Machines Challenges and Experiences around
Militant Research in Southern Europe

        Translated by Maribel Casas-Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias
        / Notas Rojas Collective Chapel HillJavier Toret / Nicolás
        Sguiglia

        â??There is a revolutionary becoming not to be confused with
        the future of revolutions nor must it be carried out by
        militantsâ??


        â??Nomadism is precisely this combination between war machine
        and smooth spaceâ?? -- Gilles Deleuze

        The intellectualâ??creativeâ??communicative skills of the
        new activists, the need to rename the world from below in
        order to reestablish a nonâ??mediated communication with
        society, together with the desire to produce understandings
        of the dizzying current social transformations we are
        living through, constitute the basis for a proliferation of
        experiences focused on the need to strongly link the intellect
        and collective action. What is being generated is truly a
        â??becoming militant researchersâ??[1]; the prosthetic use of
        research methodologies by social movements, and the production
        of cartographies or maps.

http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/tsg/en


also, related to our recent discussion of a radical project identity
is this article:

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:sQ481eEv55gJ:www.ephemeraweb.org/j
ournal/5-4/5-4colectivo.pdf+militant+research&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1
&client=flock


Something More on Research Militancy: Footnotes on Procedures and     
(In)Decisions                                                         

"Research militancy takes shape, at least among us, as a series of
operations when in the face of concrete problems (or of anguish that
stubbornness turns into productive interrogations): how to establish
bonds capable of altering our subjectivities and finding some sort
of community in the middle of todayâ??s radical dispersion? How to
provoke interventions that strengthen horizontality and resonances,
avoiding both hierarchical centralism and pure fragmentation? And,
to continue in this line: how to co-elaborate thinking in common
with the experiences/experiments that have been elaborating hyper-
intelligent practices? How to produce authentic compositions, clues
that later circulate through the diffuse network of counterpower,
without being perceived as an outsider to the experience of thought,
but, at the same time, without merging with experience(s) that is/are
not directly our own? How to avoid ideologization, the idealization
with which everything that generates interest is welcome in our times?
What kind of writing does justice to that which is produced in a
singular situation? What is to be done with the friendship that arises
from these encounters? How do we continue later? And, finally, what
to do with ourselves, if with each of these experiences/experiments
of composition we get further and further away from our initial
subjectivities, now without being able to return?

...

The movement of the encounter, then, is not so much one of getting
closer as it is of elaboration of a common plane. And this refers
to a more complex scenario, in which the mutual measurement of
â??distancesâ?? and â??proximitiesâ?? (the â??insidesâ?? and
â??outsidesâ??) should not be considered only in relation to the
initial positions (of departure) but also â?? and above all â?? with
respect to whether oneâ??s own plane (which includes steps forward
and backward, enthusiasms and distrusts, periods of production
and depressive lacunae) is drawn or not. Without a doubt, a plane
difficult to draw: counterpower exists only as a fold or knot between
heterogeneous experiences/experiments. One dynamic is territorial, the
others more deterritorialized. Thus, the territory is impoverished and
the more deterritorialized experiences/experiments are virtualized
without this common fabric (without this encounter between both).
Deterritorialized spatiality and territorial modes are polarities
inside the fold of counterpower and their being knotted to one
another is one of the fundamental matters of the new radicality.
The experiences/experiments more linked to the territory â?? more
â??concentratedâ?? â?? and those more â??diffuseâ?? â?? more nomadic
â?? can, in their dynamic difference, articulate, combine, or interact
as instances of an occupation of the public sphere by counterpower."



-- 
blog: http://deletetheborder.org/lotu5
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