notebookeleven

Confronted by an ever more absurd state power, we shall speak no more
LE MONDE | 16.03.09

bwo Multitudes-infos list/ Frederic Neyrat

bwo the nettime list / trans Patrice Riemens

For four month now, the legal & media spectacle titled “The Tarnac affair” won’t come to an end. Was Julien Coupat to come out of prison for Christmas? For New Year’s Eve then? Or would Friday the 13th be his lucky day? No. In the end ‘we’ will keep him a bit longer in jail, locked into his new role as ‘leader of an invisible cell’.

Since a few people in power appear to have an interest in letting this charade go on, even beyond the limits of the grotesque, for the sake of collective clarification, we will have to take once more the garb that has been knit for us (“the 9 from Tarnac”).

Well then.

Firstly. As journos were burrowing into our garbage cans, the cops were fingering our assholes. Not the funniest of experience. For months you have been opening our mail, eavesdropping our phones, harassing our friends and video-tapping our homes. And you delectate in these actions. We, the ‘nine’, we endure them, like so many others. We have been atomised by judicial procedures, nine times one single individual, whereas you are one administration, one police force, and the one and whole logic of one system. As we stand now, we have been double-dealt, and the stake is already erected. So please don’t expect us to play cricket. Read more…

As a pedagogic device for working on NVC the suggestion I made to my students is that a series of ‘themes’ are identified which then provide a backbone for ‘indexing’ some of the content with a view to building up a ground for exegetical work.  The idea would be to take each theme – or at least a selection of them – and find relevant passages within the text in order to then have a focused selection from the text to think about.  Obviously these themes interlock but the need to ‘ignore’ some things to focus on others is a methodological tool, enabling us to gain some focus before perhaps expanding again. (This is not, by any means, a comprehensive list of the themes that might be extracted from NVC, nor even a list of the themes which might be thought to be the ‘most central’ or ‘most obvious’. It arises from a particular class and discussion and as such is located in that context is intended to be added to and improved through discussion). Read more…