secrets of a jewish baker

rumi

2012-02-12T05:26:00.000-08:00

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition."

"Learn from Ali how to fight without your ego participating."

stephen king

2012-02-12T05:24:00.000-08:00

the use of genetic algorithm in architecture

2012-02-07T09:41:00.000-08:00

rachel berwick

2012-02-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

heather & ivan morison

2012-02-07T04:32:00.000-08:00

'i am so sorry. good bye.'
from 2008.

andrei

2012-02-06T12:54:00.001-08:00

nostalghia

2012-02-06T12:48:00.001-08:00

liu xiaobo

2012-02-06T09:03:00.001-08:00

"I have no enemies and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested, and interrogated me, none of the prosecutors who indicted me, and none of the judges who judged me are my enemies. Although there is no way I can accept your monitoring, arrests, indictments, and verdicts, I respect your professions and your integrity, including those of the two prosecutors, Zhang Rongge and Pan Xueqing, who are now bringing charges against me on behalf of the prosecution. During interrogation on December 3, I could sense your respect and your good faith.
Hatred can rot away at a person's intelligence and conscience. Enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation, incite cruel mortal struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and hinder a nation's progress towards freedom and democracy. That is why I hope to be able to transcend my personal experiences as I look upon our nation's development and social change, to counter the regime's hostility with utmost goodwill, and to dispel hatred with love.
It is precisely because of such convictions and personal experience that I firmly believe that China's political progress will not stop, and I, filled with optimism, look forward to the advent of a future free China. For there is no force that can put an end to the human quest for freedom, and China will in the end become a nation ruled by law, where human rights reign supreme. I also hope that this sort of progress can be reflected in this trial as I await the impartial ruling of the collegial bench - a ruling that will withstand the test of history.
If I may be permitted to say so, the most fortunate experience of these past twenty years has been the selfless love I have received from my wife, Liu Xia. She could not be present as an observer in court today, but I still want to say to you, my dear, that I firmly believe your love for me will remain the same as it has always been. Throughout all these years that I have lived without freedom, our love was full of bitterness imposed by outside circumstances, but as I savour its aftertaste, it remains boundless. I am serving my sentence in a tangible prison, while you wait in the intangible prison of the heart. Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body, allowing me to always keep peace, openness, and brightness in my heart, and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning."
"There is nothing criminal in anything I have done. if charges are brought against me because of this, I have no complaints."
December 2010

catherine christer hennix

2012-02-04T04:03:00.000-08:00

dream house

2012-02-04T03:51:00.000-08:00

the soliton

2012-02-04T03:45:00.000-08:00

"I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped – not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour, preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles I lost it in the windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation."
John Scott Russell

"A ›solitary wave‹ or ›soliton‹ is an example of an excitable medium which responds dynamically to vibrational variations in the environment as it travels forward in time. The soliton has, however, no memory, but it recovers its initial form after each vibrational interaction and proceeds in time as if it had never been disturbed or exited by vibrations from the past. When confined to a large cavity, such as the interior of a chamber hall, the soliton becomes a ›solitone‹, coherently interacting with itself in the form of standing waves continuously reflected from the walls of their spatial confinement. These compositions were originally scored for quartz crystals and analog electronic circuits. Corresponding digital compositions, scored for the first computer at EMS (SR’s digital electronic studio in Stockholm), were all given the title ›Fixed Points‹ (alluding to Brouwer’s fixed point theorem) and they initiated my concept of electronic ›Infinity Compositions‹, compositions without an end sustained by algorithmically controlled, continuous binary calculations."
from Revisiting Brouwer’s Lattice 30 Years Later (2005) by Catherine Christer Hennix.

eliane radigue

2012-02-04T02:02:00.001-08:00

a for animal

2012-02-03T06:06:00.000-08:00

tornado

2012-02-03T03:40:00.001-08:00

tornado depiction from the 13th century by albertus magnus.

mike kelley

2012-02-02T06:02:00.000-08:00

patrick van caeckenbergh

2012-01-31T11:11:00.000-08:00

"In his mysterious, baroque oeuvre Patrick Van Caeckenbergh (°1960, Aalst, Belgium) depicts the world and his own environment. His sculptures, collages, models and drawings connect small, everyday objects with all-encompassing frameworks, systems and great world discoveries. Van Caeckenbergh’s artwork stimulates the imagination and often reminds one of fables and fairytales.
The detailed collages from the 1980s incorporate wallpaper from his home, numerous references to the environment in which he grew up as well as to his own oeuvre. At the same time, they bear witness to an overwhelming desire to capture and store all the knowledge in the world. Relying on the insights he had gleaned from books, movies and art history, he tried to grasp the world with his own systems and models. He connected mundane elements from the everyday world with comprehensive global systems and grand discoveries. In the 90′s Van Caeckenbergh began to explore his own life and attempted to portray the multitude of complexities of the human condition. The process of germination, flowering and decay are contained in magnificent sculptures. Motifs such as the tree of life, beetles, the procession of caterpillars, and cuttings of bits of bare skin now make their appearance, and the everyday processes of rotting and decay are increasingly employed as metaphors.
The artist’s current work coincides with his move to the rural village of Sint-Kornelis-Horebeke. This work exudes a new sense of peace. It is a reflection of the soothing rhythm of the Flemish countryside. The world is now depicted less complexly, and the focus has shifted to recognisability. The artist has retreated into a chock-full studio that is described as a cigar box and that is now on display in the exhibition. In 2010, he embarked on a project known as The Old in Years, an ever-expanding series of drawings based on pictures of old trees, a detailed record of wise trees of life drawn with seemingly photographic realism." (from e-flux, here)

harry smith

2012-01-30T09:13:00.000-08:00

Smith explains: The first part depicts the heroine's toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel and Montreal. The second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward VII dedicated the Great Sewer of London.

john whitney

2012-01-30T09:09:00.000-08:00

ed emshwiller

2012-01-30T09:02:00.000-08:00

ilya prigogine

2012-01-30T08:43:00.000-08:00

"you need more anarchy in your times! more various, multiple activities!"

the winds

2012-01-30T02:25:00.001-08:00

In my Father's house are many rooms;

2012-01-30T02:19:00.001-08:00

if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.

John, 14:2

romanticism

2012-01-25T14:14:00.000-08:00

bachelard

2012-01-22T05:58:00.000-08:00

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

“Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.”

embarrassing how i always fall prey to falling in love with dead philosophers, making shrines for them on my shelf and being a quixotic adulator instead of a critical thinker. oh well... but how can you not love a melancholy, critical, tired of positivist progress-believing and blinded science dreamer, someone who turns to the attics, nooks and hideaways and not the representative big saloons, someone who talks as fast as him and takes a random baker-poet from a time and place lost just as serious as a so-called acclaimed thinker, someone who looks back to look forward, who sees places as living memories and the other way around. i don't know. i think one must love bachelard.

not living in the house of one's dreams

2012-01-22T05:13:00.000-08:00

"Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality"
(Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space)

a mineral collection

2012-01-21T13:28:00.000-08:00

proto breathing apparatus for tunneling endeavours

2012-01-21T13:17:00.000-08:00

"During World War I miners often dug tunnels, and placed mines in them. The main objective of these mines was to destroy part of an enemy trench, and then attack during the confusion. Soldiers eventually developed strategies for discovering enemy tunnels. One method was to put one end of a stick in the ground, and the other end on your teeth to feel vibrations. Another method was to sink a water-filled oil drum into the floor of the trench, and lower your ear into the water to listen to noise being made by people tunnelling.

It took a long time to dig a tunnel. Sometimes it took a year. Occasionally miners would dig into their enemy's tunnels, starting an underground fight.

Typically there would be 4 tunnellers working at the face (one of whom would be resting), plus 2 tunnellers mates handling trolley, air pumping and preparation of timber. Generally infantry working parties were employed to remove the spoil from the shaft heads and dispose of it. (One foot run of subway created 70 sandbags of spoil). At any time a Tunnelling Coy would have several digging parties working towards each other."

-John Lumsdon

silica polymorphs

2012-01-21T12:58:00.000-08:00

paul thek

2012-01-20T07:49:00.000-08:00

the magic carpet

2012-01-18T05:11:00.000-08:00

canoeing in oceania

2012-01-13T05:10:00.000-08:00

The akashic records

2012-01-09T12:13:00.001-08:00

(akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning "sky", "space" or "aether") is a term used in theosophy (and Anthroposophy) to describe a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence. These records are described as containing all knowledge of human experience and the history of the cosmos. They are metaphorically described as a library; other analogies commonly found in discourse on the subject include a "universal supercomputer" and the "Mind of God". People who describe the records assert that they are constantly updated automatically and that they can be accessed through astral projection or when someone is placed under deep hypnosis. The concept was popularized in the theosophical movements of the 19th century and is derived from Hindu philosophy of Samkhya. It is promulgated in the Samkhya philosophy that the Akashic records are automatically recorded in the elements of akasha one of the five types of elements visualized as existing in the elemental theory of Ancient India, called Mahabhuta. (wiki)

cloudbuster

2012-01-09T12:09:00.001-08:00

Кола Бельды-Ханина Ранина

2012-01-09T08:04:00.001-08:00

thinkings

2012-01-08T05:43:00.000-08:00

being in the picture for a long time theoretically enables you to look for more details, but often leaves you getting used to the first sight, only seemingly well-acquainted, and more and more ignorant for the confinements of perspective that become blind spots. some see a lot very quickly, a young quirk often called "genius", some take longer and get better in time, an old beard from the mountains often called "wise man". frustrating how knowing more about one thing, makes you blinder for the other things. brains like a rusty car getting used to one street. but what if the street melts into water and turns into a fall? the car should become a boat, but if it's too rusty it sinks. noticed that about my tongue. even though still in its 20s, it gets harder and harder to pronounce strange words because the muscles are so used to the regular choreography of daily language performance and more reluctant to change shape. how stay soft? how not fall prey to bias? how not get stuck in one picture and one voice? i guess doubt it, imagine it the other way around, explore and immerse into different pictures, learn many many languages, make the architecture of your thoughts evolutionary.

الحقيقة ملك الوجود

2012-01-08T05:14:00.001-08:00

un-drum

2012-01-08T05:12:00.001-08:00

telluris theoria sacra by thomas burnet

2012-01-04T04:58:00.000-08:00

reading the surface of the world as a "a gigantic and hideous ruin ... a broke and confused heap of bodies".
feeling offended by the ugliness of the mountains, burnet sees as wrinkles, scars and fractures.
the earth as an aged face, with cracks and traumas and concussions.
reading landscapes symbolically, like a detective, looking for signs and hints of a time and paradise lost.
making sense of structures beyond sense.
a theory of the WORLD.

odilon redon

2012-01-04T04:01:00.000-08:00

"I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased." Odilon Redon

papua neuguinea

2011-12-29T01:15:00.000-08:00

asaro mudmen

2011-12-29T01:02:00.000-08:00

prokudin gorsky

2011-12-20T17:27:00.000-08:00

all pictures from 1900-1910

ancient desert plant

2011-12-20T17:11:00.000-08:00

"Welwitschia mirabilis is known locally as kharos or khurub (Nama), tweeblaarkanniedood (Afrikaans), nyanka (Damara), or onyanga (Herero). The plant, which is considered a living fossil, is named after the Austrian botanist Friedrich Welwitsch who discovered it in 1859. The geographic distribution of Welwitschia mirabilis is limited to the Namib desert within Namibia and Angola and it lives 1000 years or more. Some individuals may be more than 2000 years old.
The plant absorbs water through structures on its leaves, harvesting moisture originating from Namib desert morning fogs that blow in during the night, comprising the main source of water for much of the desert life." (wiki)

tarkovsky

2011-12-15T07:44:00.000-08:00

"the artist exists because the world is ill-designed"
"cinema is an unhappy art as it depends on money"

the memory of the world

2011-12-15T05:34:00.000-08:00

even statues die

2011-12-15T05:32:00.001-08:00

rear window 1

2011-12-14T07:52:00.001-08:00

she's in her underwear
she's fixing the curtain
she just took a shower
she's vacuuming the house
she's talking on the phone
finally that stool is occupied
she smokes with her left hand
while doing the dishes with her right
she has a tattoo above the left cheek of her arse
she has blond hair
dresses well
has a bicycle
stays up late

by Steve Dalachinsky

hype williams

2011-12-14T06:19:00.000-08:00

the ghost conference

2011-12-12T08:04:00.000-08:00

the levitation séance

2011-12-12T07:52:00.000-08:00

photos by Sven Turck, 1940

qui je suis

2011-12-12T07:18:00.000-08:00

"Jamais l’Italie ne fut plus odieuse. Surtout avec la trahison des intellectuels, avec ce révisionnisme du parti communiste, loup qui, cette fois, est vraiment agneau -- le camarade Longo sur la couverture du Spiegel avait un visage obséquieux d’homme de lettres qui fait désespérément semblant d’être à la page, rejetant ainsi toute violence palingénésique du communisme : oui, le communiste aussi est un bourgeois. C’est désormais la forme raciale de l’humanité. Peut-être que s’engager contre tout ça ne veut pas dire écrire, en homme engagé, dirais-je, mais vivre.
Quant à mes oeuvres futures, tu verras un jeune homme arriver un jour dans une belle maison où un père, une mère, un fils et une fille, vivent richement, dans un état qui ne connaît pas la critique comme si c’était un tout, la vie pure et simple ; il y a aussi une bonne (originaire de villages sous-prolétaires) ; il vient, ce jeune homme, beau comme un Américain, et, tout de suite, la bonne, la première, tombe amoureuse de lui, et retrousse ses jupons. Il lui donne la douce, lourde colère de son membre. Puis le fils tombe amoureux de lui ; ils dorment tous les deux, dans la chambre du garçon, avec les restes de l’enfance ; et au fils aussi, il donne son membre de soie, plus adulte et puissant ; et le même don, condescendant et généreux -- parce qu’il est celui qui donne -- il fera à la mère, adoratrice de ses vêtements, pantalon, maillot de corps, slip laissés dans un bungalow par une chaude journée d’été, sur la mer tyrrhénienne ; et c’est le même don qu’il fera au père, devenant le père du père -- puisque celui-ci, avec une douceur maternelle, ambiguë, n’est père que de nom -- au père réveillé à l’aube par une douleur qui le plis en deux, au ventre, et qui découvre, en se levant pour aller aux toilettes la beauté muette du petit matin avec son soleil déjà fulgurant… et il découvrira son amour avec le même étonnement que celui qu’il eut en découvrant ce soleil : un amour pareil à celui d’Ivan Ilitch pour son valet paysan et jeune homme ; mais conscient, et dramatique parce que lui, le vieil industriel avec le visage d’Orson Welles, est un petit-bourgeois, et qu’il dramatise tout. Le même don de son membre, durant les heures de la maladie de son père -- et avant de le faire au père -- il fera à la fille de quatorze ans, amoureuse de son père et qui le découvre, le jeune homme tout amour, à travers les yeux amoureux, justement, de son père. Puis le jeune homme s’en va : la route au fond de laquelle il disparaît reste déserte pour toujours. Et tout le monde, dans l’attente, dans le souvenir, comme apôtre d’un Christ non crucifié mais perdu, a son destin. C’est un théorème ; et chaque destin est un corollaire. Les destins sont ceux que tu connais, ceux de ce monde où toi, avec ton désagréable sourire anticommuniste, et moi, avec ma haine infantile antibourgeoise, sommes frères : nous le connaissons parfaitement ! Comment se forme une névrose d’angoisse et comment une petite victime féminine de quatorze ans finit dans le lit d’une clinique, les poings tellement serrés que pas même un scalpel ne pourrait les desserrer ; comment un garçon parle tout seul comme un fou peignant et inventant de nouvelles techniques, jusqu’à devenir un Giacometti, un Bacon, avec le spectacle de ses spectres figuratifs, symboliques de la tragédie du monde dans une ame malade, malodorante de la rancoeur mesquine du mal ; comment une femme d’age moyen, encore belle, et soignée, ne sait oublier le Christ de l’Eglise et en même temps, une fois perdue, ne sait pas résister au désir de se perdre encore, et ainsi vit entre des garçons faciles et des angoisses chrétiennes ; et comment, enfin, un père, qui vait confondu la vie avec la possession, une fois possédé, perd la vie, le jette : c’est-à-dire donne ce qu’il possède -- une usine dans la banlieue de la grande ville -- à ses ouvriers, pour se perdre dans le désert, comme les Hébreux. Ce sont tous des cas de conscience. Mais la bonne, au contraire, devient une sainte folle. Elle va dans la cour de sa vieille maison sous-prolétaire, se tait, prie et fait des miracles ; guérit des gens, ne mange que des orties, jusqu’à ce que ses cheveux en deviennent verts, et, enfin, pour mourir, se fait ensevelir, en pleurant, par une excavatrice, et ses larmes, jaillissant de la boue, deviennent une source miraculeuse. (…) Tu sais -- je te l’ai dit, vieil ami, père un peu intimidé par le fils, hôte allophone puissant aux humbles origines -- que rien ne vaut la vie. C’est pourquoi je ne voudrais que vivre, meme en étant poète, parce que la vie s’exprime aussi par elle-même. Je voudrais m’exprimer avec des exemples. Jeter mon corps dans la lutte. Mais si les actions de la vie sont expressives, l’expression, aussi, est action. Non pas cette expression de poète défaitiste, qui ne dit que des choses et utilise la langue comme toi, pauvre, direct instrument ; mais l’expression détachée des choses, les signes faits musiques, la poésie chantée et obscure, qui n’exprime rien sinon elle-même, selon l’idée barbare et exquise qu’elle est un son mystérieux dans les pauvres signes oraux d’une langue. Moi, j’ai abandonné à ceux de mon âge, et même aux plus jeunes, une telle illusion barbare et exquise : je te parle brutalement. et, puisque je ne peux revenir en arrière, et me prendre pour un garçon barbare qui croit que sa langue est la seule langue au monde, et perçoit dans ses syllabes des mystères de musique que seuls ses compatriotes, pareils à lui par caractère et folie littéraire, peuvent percevoir -- en tant que poète je serai poète de choses. Les actions de la vie ne seront que communiquées, et seront, elles, la poésie, puisque, je te le répète, il n’y a pas d’autre poésie que l’action réelle (tu trembles seulement quant tu la retrouves dans les vers ou dans les pages de prose, quand leur évocation est parfaite). Je ne ferai pas cela de bon coeur. J’aurai toujours le regret de cette autre poésie qui est action elle-même, dans son détachement des choses, dans sa musique qui n’exprime rien sinon son aride et sublime passion pour elle-même. Eh bien, je vais te confier, avant de te quitter, que je voudrais être compositeur de musique, vivre avec des instruments dans la tour de Viterbe que je n’arrive pas à acheter, dans le plus beau paysage du monde, où l’Arioste serait fou de joie de se voir recréé avec toute l’innocence des chênes, collines, eaux et ravins, et là, composer de la musique, la seule action expressive peut-être, haute, et indéfinissable comme les actions de la réalité."

Pier Paolo Pasolini Poeta delle ceneri / 1966/ Théorème / 1968

chardin

2011-12-11T03:03:00.000-08:00

Great Ecstasy Of The Sculptor Steiner

2011-12-11T02:56:00.000-08:00

fatima al qadiri

2011-12-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

物の哀れ

2011-12-08T16:53:00.000-08:00

mono no aware. The feeling of things.
"We only get to know the heart of things through the feelings they arouse in us. This is what the Japanese aesthetical and literary principle mono no aware posits, defining the emotions which come into being in us when we are in contact with facts and things as the sole way of getting to know their substance and becoming aware of their impermanence.
The term was coined in the 18th century by the Edo period Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga, and was originally a concept used in his literary criticism of The Tale of Genji, and later applied to other seminal Japanese works including the Man'yōshū.
The word is derived from the Japanese word mono, which means "things", and aware, which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise (similar to "ah" or "oh"), translating roughly as "pathos", "poignancy", "deep feeling", or "sensitivity". Awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty, and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing. In his criticism of The Tale of Genji Motoori noted that mono no aware is the crucial emotion that moves readers. Its scope was not limited to Japanese literature, and became associated with Japanese cultural tradition." (from wiki)

lenka clayton

2011-12-08T07:38:00.000-08:00

art & culture from the middle east to click on

2011-12-08T06:31:00.000-08:00

bidoun
bubuweb

raoul vaneigem

2011-12-06T02:29:00.000-08:00

"Just as we distinguish in private life between what a man thinks and says about himself and what he really is and does, everyone has learned to distinguish the rhetoric and the messianic pretensions of political parties from their organization and real interests: what they think they are, from what they are. A man's illusions about himself and others are not basically different from the illusions which groups, classes, and parties have about themselves. Indeed, they come from the same source: the dominant ideas, which are the ideas of the dominant class, even if they take an antagonistic form."
from: Impossible Participation or Power as the Sum of Constraints

"To the question posed by Cravan, Gide looked at his watch and replied, whatever the real time was, "It is five o'clock." We more often ignore the point at which living poetry disturbs the time ruled by making a living. I don't claim that all of my hours are spent free from work, but I try to break out of the channels of work and boredom, and I know that only the happiness of one and all can perfect my own happiness. I obstinately continue to privilege the time of pleasure, of love, of amenities, of creation, of beginnings [trans: commensalite]. I'm not putting forward, like some hedonist, a remedy to anguish. These moments, which I champion with scorn for received ideas -- they are never finished. They help me to live better, to better explore the labyrinth where one desire hides in another."
from: Refusals and Passions

alÿs

2011-12-05T17:27:00.000-08:00

"Samuel Beckett is the most obvious accomplice of Alÿs’s aesthetic sensibility, as the wall text at MoMA explains: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” A resident of Mexico City for the past 25 years, Alÿs has borne witness to the continual attempts (and, one might argue, successive failures) at modernization by the country’s government and its citizens, resulting in a tragic farce that, in the wake of ever-increasing violence and disorder, continues to play itself out on one of life’s largest stages. One observes this theme of repetitive failure in almost all of the artist’s work, but most apparently in his short films and performances, waged globally across international borders, labor classes, and art history.

A three-part video installation of When Faith Can Move Mountains (2002), commissioned for the second Lima Biennial and perhaps one of Alÿs’s most famous actions, is also featured, along with dozens of drawings, notes, clippings, and e-mail exchanges related to the monumental performance. For the project, 500 volunteers clad in white converged with shovels upon an enormous sand dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, and, over the course of an afternoon, enacted a visual demonstration of “faith vs. insanity.” Documentary evidence in the form of aerial photography, video, and personal testimony account for the exploit’s potency: Alÿs and the participants, moving the natural structure a mere few inches, had tapped into art’s revolutionary potential for change. In Kafka-esque fashion, historical determinacy was suddenly obliterated."
from: A Story of Deception

to think

2011-12-05T16:44:00.000-08:00

"The Utopian impulse in thinking is all the stronger, the less it objectifies itself as
Utopia—a further form of regression—whereby it sabotages its own realization.
Open thinking points beyond itself … Beyond all specialized and particular
content, thinking is actually and above all the force of resistance, alienated from
resistance only with great effort … The happiness visible to the eye of a thinker
is the happiness of mankind. The universal tendency toward suppression goes
against thought as such. Such thought is happiness, even where unhappiness
prevails; thought achieves happiness in the expression of unhappiness. Whoever
refuses to permit this thought to be taken from him has not resigned."

Theodor Adorno, “Resignation,” trans. Wes Blomster, in The Culture Industry:
Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 171.

the uncanny

2011-12-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

..."It was a moment of the uncanny which is the return of the
repressed, the return of that which is familiar but you have
forgotten and than it comes back to haunt you, like the
return of ghosts, the return of the dead. In the case of
9/11 people began to ask me: What happened here? What is
the explanation? Where did this come from? And of course,
in the minute it was attributed to a group called Al Qaida, an
Islamic terrorist group and highly fundamentalist, religious
fanatics, people began to ask: Where did they come from?
And the answer is: They were begotten by the US in
Afghanistan during the occupation of Afghanistan by the
Soviet Union. They were a relic of the so called Cold War.
So the appropriate and deepest literary framework for this is
the uncanny."
W.J.T. Mitchell

abdoulaye konate

2011-12-02T07:25:00.000-08:00

the trevi fountain

2011-12-02T01:22:00.000-08:00

statues and clouds

2011-12-01T07:44:00.000-08:00

from godard's le mépris

raed yassin & paed conca

2011-12-01T03:07:00.001-08:00

akadumah amodoo

2011-11-29T13:19:00.001-08:00

sitting alone at the movies

2011-11-29T03:43:00.000-08:00

some things last a long time

2011-11-29T03:37:00.000-08:00

tree my ass

2011-11-29T03:35:00.001-08:00

elementary yiddish

2011-11-25T07:40:00.000-08:00

Arein! - Come in!
Balobotishe - Respectable, well mannered
Batampte - Tasty, delicious 
Boychik - Young boy (term of endearment)
Challa - Ceremonial egg bread
Chavver - Friend
Deigeh nisht! - Don’t worry 
Der mensch trakht un Gott lahkht - Man plans and God laughs
Es gefelt mir - I like it 
Ess gesunt! - Eat in good health! 
Ess, bench, sei a mensch! - Eat, pray, don’t act like a jerk
Fardinen a mitzvah - Earn a blessing by doing 
Farpitzed - Dressed up to the nines 
For gesunterhait! - Travel in good health 
Frailech - Happy
Geshmak - Tasty, delicious
Gesunte tzores - Troubles one should not take too seriously 
G’nossen tsum emess! - The sneeze confirmed the truth! 
Git Yontif - Happy Holiday
Haimish ponem - A friendly face 
Hak mir nicht in  tchainik arain! - Don’t get on my nerves!
Kosher - Jewish dietary laws based on “cleanliness”, also referring to the legitimacy of a situation
K’velen - Glow with pride and happiness, beam, be delighted
Lang leben zolt ir! - Long may you live! 
Leben ahf dein kop - Words of praise like, Well said! Well done!  (Literal translation: A long life upon your head)
Maven - Expert, connoisseur, authority 
Mazel - Luck 
Mazel Tov - Good luck 
Me ken lecken di finger - It’s delicious 
Mekheye - An extreme pleasure, orgasmic, out of this world
Naches - Joy, gratification, especially from children 
Neshomeleh - Sweetheart, sweet soul 
Nisht geferlech - Not so bad, not to shabby
Olreitnik - Nouveau riche
Richtiker chaifetz - The real McCoy!
Saichel - Common sense, good sense
Shlemiel - A clumsy person (The one who spills the soup)
Schlemazel - Someone with bad luck (The schlemazel is the one that gets spilled on) 
Shain vi dizibben velte - Beautiful as the seven worlds
Tu mir a toive - Do me a favor 
Tu mir nit kain toives - Don’t do me any favors 
Tsu fil anives is a halber shtoltz - Too much
Vi gaits? - How goes it? How are things? 
Vos vet zein, vet zein! - What will be, will be!
Wen ich ess, ch’ob ich alles in dread. - When I am eating, everybody can go to hell! (Literal translation: When I am eating, I have everything in the ground.)
Yashir koyech - May your strength continue 
Zaftig - Pleasantly plump and pretty 
Zaier gut - Very good 
Zei mir frailich! - Be happy!

feathers and glasses

2011-11-25T04:34:00.001-08:00

king james I

2011-11-25T04:17:00.000-08:00

a king with no interest in girls and nothing but "the one romantic episode of his life" with a lady named anne. he did have a very nice bird as a boy though.
(from: David Harris Willson: King James VI & I)

a soul a world

2011-11-24T03:33:00.000-08:00

"As Hillel the Elder had stated, whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."
Jerusalem Talmud Sanhedrin 4:1 (22a)

"On that account: We [Allah or God] had ordained for the Children of Israel that if any one slew a person it would be as if he slew the whole world: and if any one saved a life from the people, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole world."
Islamic verses, Yuseph Ali translation 5:32

maps and myths

2011-11-23T01:18:00.001-08:00

"A mythic map of Australia would show thousands of characters, varying in their importance, but all in some way connected with the land. Some emerged at their specific sites and stayed spiritually in that vicinity. Others came from somewhere else and went somewhere else."

"Many were shape changing, transformed from or into human beings or natural species, or into natural features such as rocks but all left something of their spiritual essence at the places noted in their stories."
(from David Horton's Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia )

"..they generally describe the journeys of ancestral beings, often giant animals or people, over what began as a featureless domain. Mountains, rivers, waterholes, animal and plant species, and other natural and cultural resources came into being as a result of events which took place during these Dreamtime journeys. Their existence in present-day landscapes is seen by many indigenous peoples as confirmation of their creation beliefs.."

"..The routes taken by the Creator Beings in their Dreamtime journeys across land and sea.. link many sacred sites together in a web of Dreamtime tracks criss-crossing the country. Dreaming tracks can run for hundreds, even thousands of kilometres, from desert to the coast [and] may be shared by peoples in countries through which the tracks pass.."
(from "Understanding Country")

"Aboriginal people learned from their stories that a society must not be human-centred but rather land centred, otherwise they forget their source and purpose.... humans are prone to exploitative behaviour if not constantly reminded they are interconnected with the rest of creation, that they as individuals are only temporal in time, and past and future generations must be included in their perception of their purpose in life."

"People come and go but the Land, and stories about the Land, stay. This is a wisdom that takes lifetimes of listening, observing and experiencing .... There is a deep understanding of human nature and the environment.. sites hold 'feelings' which cannot be described in physical terms.. subtle feelings that resonate through the bodies of these people.. It is only when talking and being with these people that these 'feelings' can truly be appreciated. This is.. the intangible reality of these people.."
(from Morris: "An Approach to Ensure Continuity and Transmission of the Rainforest Peoples' Oral Tradition")

till roeskens

2011-11-21T10:48:00.001-08:00

Walking Through Walls

2011-11-21T10:39:00.001-08:00

by Eyal Weizman

The maneuver conducted by units of the Israeli military during the attack on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, as “inverse geometry,” which he explained as the re-organization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions. During the attack, soldiers moved within the city across hundred-meter-long “over-ground-tunnels” carved out through a dense and contiguous urban fabric. Although several thousand soldiers and hundreds of Palestinian guerrilla fighters were maneuvering simultaneously in the city, they were saturated within its fabric to the degree that most would not have been visible from an aerial perspective at any given moment. Furthermore, soldiers did not often use the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, as well as the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement is part of a tactics that the military refers to in metaphors it borrows from the world of aggregate animal formation as “swarming” and “infestation.” Moving through domestic interiors this maneuver turns inside to outside and private domains to thoroughfares. Fighting took place within half-demolished living rooms, bedrooms and corridors of poorly built refugee homes, where the television may still be operating and a pot may still on the stove. Rather than submitting to the authority of conventional spatial boundaries, movement became constitutive of space, and space was constituted as an event. It was not the order of space that governed patterns of movement but movement that produced and practiced space around it. The three-dimensional movement through walls, ceilings, and floors across the urban bulk reinterpreted, short-circuited, and recomposed both architectural and urban syntax. The tactics of “walking-through-walls” involved a conception of the city as not just the site, but as the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid matter that is forever contingent and in flux.

According to geographer Stephen Graham, since the end of the cold war a vast, international “intellectual field” that he called a “shadow world of military urban research institutes and training centers” has been established in order to rethink military operations in urban terrain.[1] This responds to the urbanization of insurgency. The expanding network of these “shadow worlds” includes schools, urban-research institutes and training centers, as well as mechanisms for the exchange of knowledge between different militaries such as conferences, workshops and joint training exercises. In their attempt to comprehend urban life, soldiers – the urban practitioners of today – take crash courses to master topics such as urban infrastructure, complex system analysis, structural stability, building techniques, and appeal as well to a variety of theories and methodologies developed within contemporary civilian academia. There is thus a new relationship emerging between a triangle of three interrelated components: armed conflicts, the built environment, and the theoretical language conceived to conceptualize them.

Following global trends throughout the last decade the IDF established several institutes and think-tanks in different levels of its command and asked them to re-conceptualize strategic, tactical and organizational responses to the brutal policing work that came to be known as “dirty” or “low intensity” wars. Notable amongst these are the Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI) set up in 1996 and the “Alternative Team”[2] set up in 2003. These institutes were composed not only of military officers but of civilian academics and technological experts. Two of the main figures affiliated to these institutes – Shimon Naveh, a retired Brigadier General, director of OTRI, and Aviv Kochavi, a serving officer – are extensively interviewed in the following pages.

Inverse-urban-geometry
The tactics of “walking through walls” that the military employed in the urban attacks on the refugee camps were developed, not in response to theoretical influences, but as a way of penetrating the previously “un-penetrable” refugee camps. Aviv Kochavi, then commander of the Paratrooper Brigade, explained the principle that guided the attack of the refugee camp of Batala and the adjacent Kasbah (old city) of Nablus:

“This space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. Now, you can stretch the boundaries of your interpretation, but not in an unlimited fashion, after all, it must be bound by physics, as it contains buildings and alleys. The question is: how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret the alley as a place, like every architect and every town planner does, to walk through, or do you interpret the alley as a place forbidden to walk through? This depends only on interpretation. We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through, and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. Not only do I not want to fall into his traps, I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win. I need to emerge from an unexpected place. And this is what we tried to do.”
“This is why that we opted for the methodology of walking through walls. […] Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. We were thus moving from the interior of homes to their exterior in a surprising manner and in places we were not expected, arriving from behind and hitting the enemy that awaited us behind a corner. […] I said to my troops, “Friends! This is not a matter of your choice! There is no other way of moving! If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!”[3]

If moving through walls is pitched by the military as its “humane” answer to the wanton destruction of traditional urban warfare, and as an “elegant” alternative to Jenin-style urban destruction, this is because the damage it causes is often concealed within the interiors of homes. The unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home has been experienced by civilians in Palestine, just like in Iraq, as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation. Since Palestinian guerrilla fighters were themselves maneuvering through walls and pre-planned openings, most fighting took place in private homes. Some buildings became like layered cakes, with Israeli soldiers both above and below a floor where Palestinians were trapped.
Urban warfare increasingly depends on technologies developed for the purpose of “un-walling of the wall,” to borrow a term from Gordon Matta-Clark. As a complement to military tactics that involve physically breaking and walking through walls, new methods have been devised to allow soldiers not only to see but also shoot and kill through solid walls. The Israeli company Camero developed a hand-held imaging device that combines thermal imaging with ultra-wideband radar, which much like a contemporary maternity-ward ultra-sound system has the ability to produce three-dimensional renderings of biological life concealed behind barriers.[4] Weapons using the NATO standard 5.56mm round are complemented with some using the 7.62mm one, which is capable of penetrating brick, wood, and adobe without much deflection of the bullet-head. Instruments of “literal transparency” are the main components in the search to produce a ghostlike (or computer-game like) military fantasy-world of boundless fluidity, in which the space of the city becomes as navigable as an ocean. By striving to see what is hidden behind walls and to move and propel ammunition through them, the military seems to have elevated contemporary technologies – using the justification of (almost contemporary) theories – to the level of metaphysics, seeking to move beyond the here and now of physical reality, collapsing time and space.

Academy of Street Fighting
Shimon Naveh, a retired brigadier general, was until May 2006 the co-director of the Operational Theory Research Institute. In an interview I conducted with him, Naveh explained the aims of the institute: “Jenin was a complete failure of the IDF, the damage that this destruction has caused the IDF is larger than what it caused the Palestinians [sic], it was commanded by extremely inexperienced officers who just panicked and stopped thinking.” He suggested that the IDF should further develop the kind of approach employed in Nablus and Balata. He saw his work as “making IDF actions more efficient, smarter… and thus more humane.” On the theoretical references the institute employs he said: “We read Christopher Alexander […] can you imagine? We read John Forester. […] We read Gregory Bateson, we read Clifford Geertz. Not just myself, but our soldiers, our generals are reflecting on these kinds of materials. We have established a school and developed a curriculum that trains ‘operational architects’.”
In a lecture I attended, Naveh presented a diagram resembling a “square of opposition” that plots a set of logical relationships among certain propositions relating to military and guerrilla operations. Indications such as “Difference and Repetition – The Dialectics of Structuring and Structure”; “‘Formless’ Rival Entities”; “Fractal Maneuver: Strike-Driven Raids”; “Velocity vs. Rhythms”; “Wahhabi War Machine”; “Post-Modern Anarchists”; “Nomadic Terrorists”, and so on, employed the language of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
In the interview, I asked Naveh: “Why Deleuze and Guattari?” He replied that: “Several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaus became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise explained. It problematized our own paradigms. […] Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space […] [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the ‘war machine’ and the ‘state apparatus.’ […] In the IDF we now often use the term ‘to smooth out space’ when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. We try to produce the operational space in such a manner that borders do not affect us. Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as ‘striated,’ in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roadblocks and so on. […] We want to confront the ‘striated’ space of traditional, old-fashioned military practice [the way most military units presently operate] with smoothness that allows for movement through space that crosses any borders and barriers. Rather than contain and organize our forces according to existing borders, we want to move through them.”
Naveh has recently completed the translation into Hebrew of some of the chapters in Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture and Disjunction. In addition to these theoretical positions, Naveh references such canonical elements of urban theory as the Situationist practices of dérive and détournement. These ideas were conceived as part of a general approach meant to challenge the built hierarchy of the capitalist city. They aimed to break down distinctions between private and public, inside and outside, use and function, to replace private space with a “borderless” public surface. Naveh made references to the work of Georges Bataille as well, who also spoke of a desire to attack architecture: his call to arms was meant to dismantle the rigid rationalism of a postwar order, to escape “the architectural straitjacket,” and to liberate repressed human desires.
These ideas and tactics reflected a general lack of confidence in the capacity of state structures to protect or further democracy. The non-statist micro-politics of the time represented in many ways an attempt to constitute a mental and affective guerrilla at the intimate levels of the body, sexuality, and inter-subjectivity, an individual in whom the personal became subversively political. As such, these theoretical positions offered a strategy for withdrawing from the formal state apparatus into the private domain. While these tactics were conceived to transgress the established “bourgeois order” of the city, with the architectural element of the wall – domestic, urban or geopolitical – projected as an embodiment of social and political repression, in the hands of the Israeli military, tactics inspired by these thinkers were projected as the basis for an attack on an “enemy” city. Education in the humanities – often believed to be the most powerful weapon against imperialism – has here been appropriated as the powerful tool of colonial power itself.
All this is not outlined here in order to place blame on this theory, its makers or the purity of their intentions or promote an anti-theoretical approach, but in an attempt to turn our attention to the possibility that, as Herbert Marcus suggested, with the growing integration between the various aspects of society, “contradiction and criticism” could be equally subsumed and made operative as an instrumental tool by the hegemony of power – in this case post-structuralist and even post-colonial theory by the colonial state.[5]

Swarming
According to Naveh, a central category in the IDF conception of the new urban operations is “swarming.” It refers to a coordinated joint action undertaken by a network form of organization whose separate units operate semi-autonomously but in general synergy with all others. The RAND corporation theorists credited with the popularization of the military implications of the term, David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, claim that swarming was historically employed in the warfare of nomadic tribes, and is currently undertaken by different organizations across the spectrum of social political conflict – terrorists and guerrillas organization, mafia criminals as well as non-violent social activists.[6]
In our interview, Kochavi explained the way the IDF understands and employs the concept: “A state military whose enemy is scattered like a network of loosely-organized gangs […] must liberate itself from the old concept of straight lines, units in linear formation, regiments and battalions, […] and become itself much more diffuse and scattered, flexible and swarm-like… In fact, it must adjust itself to the stealthy capability of the enemy […] Swarming, to my understanding, is simultaneous arrival at a target of a large number of nodes – if possible from 360 degrees […] which then dissever and re-disperse.” According to Gal Hirsh, swarming creates “noisy humming,” that makes it very difficult for the enemy to know where the military is and what is its direction of movement.[7]
The assumption of low-intensity conflict, as articulated by Arquilla and Ronfeldt, is that “it takes a network to combat a network.”[8] An urban combat is thus not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass, but the collision of two networks.[9] As they adapt, mimic and learn from each other, the military and the guerrilla enter a cycle of “co-evolution.” Military capabilities evolve in relation to resistance, which itself evolves in relation to transformations in military practice. However, claims for total breakdown of vertical hierarchies in contemporary militaries are largely exaggerated. Beyond the rhetoric of “self-organization” and “flattening of hierarchy,” military networks are still largely nested within traditional institutional hierarchies. Non-linear swarming is performed at the very tactical end of an inherently hierarchical system.[10] Spatial non-linearity is achieved because Israel still controls all linear supply lines – the roads within the West Bank and those that connect it to its large bases within Israel proper, as well as the multiplicity of linear barriers constructed throughout it. Furthermore, “swarming” and “walking through walls” are successful when the enemy is relatively weak and disorganized, without an ability to coordinate resistance, and especially when the balance of technology, training and force is clearly on the side of the military.
The years spent successfully attacking the weak Palestinian organizations was no doubt one the reason for the incompetence that the same Israeli soldiers demonstrated when they faced in 2006 the stronger, better armed and well trained Hizbollah fighters in Lebanon. Indeed the two officers most implicated in the summer of 2006 events in Gaza and Lebanon are none other than two Israeli military graduates of OTRI, veterans of the Balata and Nablus attack in 2002, Aviv Kochavi (commander of the Gaza Division) and Gal Hirsh (commander of the northern Galilee Division 91). Kochavi, who commanded the summer 2006 attack on Gaza, stuck to his obfuscating language: “we intend to create a chaos in the Palestinian side, to jump from one place to the other, to leave the area and then return to it […] we will use all the advantages of ‘raid’ rather than ‘occupation.’”[11] In Lebanon Hirsh called for “raids instead of occupation,” and ordered the battalions newly attached to his command and unused to the language he acquired at OTRI to “swarm” and “infest” an area. However his subordinate officers did not seem to understand what this was supposed to mean. Hirsh but was later criticized for arrogance, intellectualism and out-of touch-ness. Naveh, pondering the results, himself admitted in the popular media that “The war in Lebanon was a failure and I had a great part in it. What I have brought to the IDF has failed.”[12]
The chaos was indeed on the Israeli side. Continuous fire and shelling by the increasingly frustrated IDF gradually cumulated villages and neighborhoods into sharp topographies of broken concrete and glass sprouting with twisted metal bars. Within this lunar landscape, the hills of rubble were honeycombed with cavities of buried rooms, which paradoxically offered more hiding places to the guerrillas. Hizbollah fighters, themselves effectively swarming through and between this rubble and detritus of wars, sometimes using an invisible system of tunnels, studied the maneuver of Israeli soldiers, and attacked them with anti-tank weapons precisely when they entered, organized and moved within Lebanese homes as they were used to from the cities and refugee camps of the West Bank.

Lethal Theory
Non-linear and network terminology has its origins in military discourse since after the end of WWII and was instrumental in the conception in 1982 of the US military doctrine of AirLand Battle which emphasized inter-service cooperation and the targeting of the enemy at its systematic bottlenecks – bridges, headquarters and supply lines – in attempts to throw it off balance. It was conceived to check Soviet invasion in Central Europe and was first applied in the Gulf War of 1991. The advance of this strand leads to the Network Centric Doctrine in the context of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) after the end of the Cold War. Network Centric Warfare conceptualizes the field of military operation as distributed network-systems, woven together by information technology across the entire operational spectrum. This type of transformation, promoted by neo-conservatives such as Donald Rumsfeld, faced strong opposition within the US armed forces. This opposition recently accelerated in the context of American military failures in Iraq. The IDF is similarly, since the early 1990s, undergoing institutional conflicts in the context of these transformations. In the context of these internal conflicts, a special language based on post-structuralist theory was used to articulate the critique of the existing system, to argue for transformations, and to call for further reorganizations. As Naveh explained: “We employ critical theory primarily in order to critique the military institution itself – its fixed and heavy conceptual foundations […].”
One of the internal conflicts within the IDF, which was conceptual as much as it was hierarchical, was articulated in the context of the debate that followed the closing down of OTRI in the spring of 2006 and the controversial suspension of Naveh and his co-director Dov Tamari. This took place in the context of the change of staff that followed the replacement of Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon with his rival Dan Halutz.[13] After dismantling OTRI Halutz set up an alternative institute for “operational thinking” which was based on the model of a similar department Haluz previously set up within the Air Force. Naveh understood his dismissal as “a coup against OTRI and theory.”
The military debate reflects upon political questions. Naveh, together with most of his former colleagues at OTRI, supported the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip as well as the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon prior to its actual undertaking in 2000. He is similarly is in favor of withdrawal from the West Bank. In fact, his political position is in line with what is referred to in Israel as the “Zionist left.” His vote alternated between Labor and Meretz parties. Similarly, Kochavi enthusiastically accepted the command over the military operation for the evacuation and destruction of Gaza settlements, and regardless of the atrocities he was accused of in Gaza is similarly understood as a “leftist” officer. According to Naveh, Israel’s operational paradigm should seek to replace presence in occupied areas with the capacity to move through them, and produce in them what he called “effects,” which are “military operations such as aerial attacks or commando raids… that affect the enemy psychologically and organizationally.” The new tactics are meant to maintain security domination in the Palestinian areas evacuated, and their development was seen in fact as a precondition for withdrawal. Withdrawal is understood within the IDF as depending on Israel’s capacity to cancel it in emergency situations it could itself define. This undoubtedly undoes much of the perceived symmetrical nature of borders, embodied by the iconography of West Bank Wall, and by all the recent diplomatic rhetoric that would like to regard whatever polity remains (fragmented and perforated as it may be) on the other side of this Wall as a Palestinian state. Following this logic Naveh claimed that “whatever line they [the politicians] could agree upon – there they should put the fence [Wall]. This is okay with me . . .but as long as I can cross this fence. What we need is not to be there, but […] to act there. […] Withdrawal is not the end of the story.” In this respect, the large “state wall” is conceptualized in similar terms to the house wall – as a transparent and permeable medium that could allow the Israeli military to “smoothly” move through and across it.
A comparison between the attacks in 2002 on Jenin and Nablus would reveal the paradox that renders the overall effect of the leftist officers even more destructive. A hole in the wall may not be as devastating as the complete destruction of the home, but considering local and international opposition, if the occupation forces were not able to enter refugee camps without having to destroy them as they did in Jenin, they would most likely not attack refugee camps, and definitely not as often as they do now that they have found the tool to do so. Instead of entering a political process of negotiation with Hamas, military confidence is finding a solution for the government to avoid politics.

Walls/Laws
In siege warfare, the breaching of the outer wall signaled the destruction of the sovereignty of the city-state. Accordingly, the “art” of siege warfare historically engaged with the geometries of city walls and with the development of equally complex technologies for approaching and breaching them. Contemporary urban combat, on the other hand, is increasingly concerned with methods of transgressing the limitations embodied by the domestic wall. In this respect, it might be useful to think of the city’s (domestic) walls as one would think about the (civic) city wall – as operative edges of the law and the condition of democratic urban life.
According to Hannah Arendt, the political realm of the Greek city was guaranteed by these two kinds of walls (or wall-like laws): the wall surrounding the city, which defined the zone of the political; and the walls separating private space from the public domain, ensuring the autonomy of the domestic realm. “The one harbored and enclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family.”[14] The very order of the city relies thus on the fantasy of a wall as stable, solid, and fixed. Indeed, architectural discourse tends to otherwise see walls as architecture’s irreducible givens. The military practice of “walking through walls” – on the scale of the house, the city or the “state” – links the physical properties of construction with this syntax of architectural, social and political orders. New technologies developed to allow soldiers to see living organisms through walls, and to facilitate their ability to walk and fire weapons through them, thus address not only the materiality of the wall, but also its very concept. With the wall no longer physically or conceptually solid or legally impenetrable, the functional spatial syntax that it created – the separation between inside and outside, private and public – collapses. Without these walls, Arendt continues, “there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town (asty), but not a city, a political community.”[15] The distinction between a city, as a political domain, and a town (here, the antithesis to the city must be understood as the refugee camp) is based on the conceptual solidity of the elements that safeguard both public and private domains. Agamben’s well-known observation follows the trace left by Arendt: in the camps, “city and house became indistinguishable.”[16] The breaching of the physical, visual, and conceptual border / wall exposes new domains to political power, offering thus a physical diagram to the concept of the “state of exception.”
When Kochavi claims that “space is only an interpretation,” and that his movement through and across the built fabric of the city reinterprets architectural elements (walls, windows, and doors); when Naveh claims that he would accept any border as long as he could walk through it, they use a transgressive theoretical approach to suggest that war and fighting is no longer about the destruction of space, but rather about its “reorganization.” If a wall is only the signifier of a “wall,” marking scales of political orders, un-walling also becomes a form of rewriting – a constant process of undoing – fueled by theory. If moving through walls becomes the method for “reinterpreting space,” and if the nature of space is “relative” to this form of interpretation, could this “reinterpretation” kill?
If the answer is “yes,” then the “inverse geometry” that turns the city “inside out,” shuffling its private and public spaces, and that turns the idea of a “Palestinian State” outside in, would bring about consequences for military operations that go beyond physical and social destruction and force us to reflect upon the “conceptual destruction” of political categories that they imply.

[1] On such a military conference organized in 2002 by the Faculty of Geography at Haifa University see: Stephen Graham, “Remember Falluja: Demonizing Place, Constructing Atrocity,” Society and Space, 2005, Vol. 23. pp. 1-10; and Stephen Graham, “Cities and the ‘War on Terror’,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 30.2 June 2006, pp. 255–276

[2] Yedidia Ya’ari and Haim Assa, Diffused Warfare, War in the 21^st Century, Tel Aviv: Miskal – Yediot Aharonot Books and Chemed Books, 2005 [Hebrew] pp. 9-13, 146.

[3] Eyal Weizman and Nadav Harel, interview with Aviv Kochavi, 24 September 2004, at an Israeli military base near Tel Aviv [Hebrew]; video documentation by Nadav Harel and Zohar Kaniel.

[4] Zuri Dar and Oded Hermoni, “Israeli Start-Up Develops Technology to See Through Walls,” Ha’aretz, 1 July 2004; Amir Golan, “The Components of the Ability to Fight in Urban Areas,” Ma’arachot 384 (July 2002): 97; also see Ross Stapleton-Gray, “Mobile mapping: Looking through Walls for On-site Reconnaissance,” the Journal for Net Centric Warafre C4ISR, 11 September 2006.

[5] “With the growing integration of industrial society, these categories are losing their critical connotation, and tend to become descriptive, deceptive, or operational terms. […] Confronted with the total character of the achievements of advanced industrial society, critical theory is left without the rationale for transcending this society. The vacuum empties the theoretical structure itself, because the categories of a critical social theory were developed during the period in which the need for refusal and subversion was embodied in the action of effective social forces.” Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston Mass., Beacon Press, 1991

[6] David Ronfeldt, John Arquilla, Graham Fuller and Melissa Fuller, The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico, Santa Monica, Ca.: RAND, 1998.

[7] Gal Hirsch, On Dinosaurs and Hornets: A Critical View on Operational Moulds in Asymmetric Conflicts, RUSI Journal (August 2003), p .63

[8] Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars, p.15

[9] “War […] is not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass but always the collision of two living forces.” Carl von Clausewitz, On War, p. 77

[10] On this, see Ryan Bishop, “‘The Vertical Order Has Come to an End’: The Insignia of the Military C3I and Urbanism in Global Networks,” in Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo, eds., Beyond Description: Space Historicity Singapore, Architext Series, London & New York: Routledge, 2004.

[11] Hannan Greenberg, “The Commander of the Gaza Division: The Palestinians are in shock,” Ynet 7 July 2006 http://www.ynet.co.il/.

[12] Amir Rapaport, “Dan Halutz is a Bluff, interview with Shimon Naveh,” Ma’ariv, Yom Kippur Supplement, 1 October 2006.

[13] Halutz did not directly confront the theoretical concepts produced at OTRI. The General Staff’s Operational Concept for the IDF is still rooted in OTRI’s theoretical doctrine of systemic operational design. See: Caroline Glick, “Halutz’s Stalinist moment: Why were Dovik Tamari and Shimon Naveh Fired?,” Jerusalem Post, 17 June 2006 and Rapaport, “Dan Halutz is a Bluff”. Currently Naveh is employed by US Marine Corps Development Command as senior mentor to their operational experiment “Expeditionary Warrior.”

[14] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 63-64.

[15] Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 63-64.

[16] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 188.

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/weizman/en

ghosts

2011-11-21T06:08:00.001-08:00

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

(from gengangere by henrik ibsen)

awad al shimi

2011-11-21T05:53:00.001-08:00

edvard munch

2011-11-21T05:43:00.000-08:00

always a big shadow behind the back like a hole in space or a ghost.

shadows of our forgotten ancestors

2011-11-16T14:10:00.000-08:00

what a film.
what a title!
beautiful beautiful parajanov.

shāhnāmé (the persian book of kings)

2011-11-15T12:43:00.000-08:00

david malin

2011-11-15T05:54:00.000-08:00

the coolest subway map in the world.

2011-11-15T03:04:00.000-08:00

but beirut definitely needs a stop. and mombasa too. and a couple more too. but it's a very good start.

that's us

2011-11-10T11:48:00.000-08:00

what a hit!

gee wiz

2011-11-10T11:40:00.001-08:00

one must be absolutely modern.

2011-11-08T16:58:00.000-08:00

life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

i say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.

i have seen the sunset, stained with mystic horrors,
illumine the rolling waves with long purple forms,
like actors in ancient plays.

rimbaud

the immortal jellyfish

2011-11-08T07:56:00.000-08:00

"Turritopsis nutricula is a hydrozoan whose medusa, or jellyfish, form can revert to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known case of a metazoan capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage. It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation. Cell transdifferentiation is when the jellyfish "alters the differentiated state of the cell and transforms it into a new cell". In this process the medusa of the immortal jellyfish is transformed into the polyps of a new polyp colony. First, the umbrella reverts itself and then the tentacles and mesoglea get resorbed. The reverted medusa then attaches itself to the substrate by the end that had been at the opposite end of the umbrella and starts giving rise to new polyps to form the new colony. Theoretically, this process can go on indefinitely, effectively rendering the jellyfish biologically immortal, although in nature, most Turritopsis, like other medusae, are likely to succumb to predation or disease in the plankton stage, without reverting to the polyp form." (from wiki)

i have the feeling of reverting to a sexually immature, colonial stage on a daily basis abandoning my sexually mature, solitary stage. but since i am no jellyfish and am guaranteed to succomb to either predation, disease, homicide, suicide or the failure of my organs, this is probably not considered rather miraculous to the majority of people capable of thinking.

the invention of the mattress

2011-11-07T09:45:00.000-08:00

i love it.

desert-dwelling

2011-11-06T15:51:00.000-08:00

the bedouins

vernon wray

2011-11-06T15:24:00.001-08:00

afe ato yen bio!

2011-11-03T07:51:00.001-07:00

lone runner

2011-10-28T07:18:00.001-07:00

friend of the night

2011-10-26T05:36:00.001-07:00

peter rogiers

2011-10-26T05:24:00.000-07:00

kourosh yaghmaei - کوروش یغمایی

2011-10-23T13:23:00.000-07:00

wicked 70s persian lo-fi.

taiyo onorato & nico krebs

2011-10-21T07:43:00.001-07:00

zeit der götter

2011-10-21T07:39:00.000-07:00

a film by lutz dammbeck on arno breker

jalal toufic

2011-10-19T12:28:00.000-07:00

photograph from Jalal Toufic's book "Vampires. An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film".

nicholas nixon

2011-10-19T04:04:00.000-07:00

is it all over my face?

2011-10-18T03:56:00.001-07:00