Re: <nettime> Inside Networked Movements: Interview with Jeffrey Juris

[John Jordan <artactivism@gn.apc.org>]

There again we could all begin to look at history in a non linear  
way , without central moments and cause and effect, - as rebecca  
Solnit so beautifully put it in her wonderful little book "hope in  
the Dark" - "Cause and effect assumes history marches forward, but  
history is not an army. It is a crab  scuttling sideways, a drip of  
soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of  
tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do  
decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world;  
sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those  
millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change  
comes  upon us like a change of weather"

The uniqueness of the mid to late 90's movements was that it was a  
series of simultaneous events that emerged across time and space...   
we could say that these movements  started on news years day 1994  
with the Zapatista Uprising, or June 18th day of global action 1999  
( also first use of indymedia type software, simultaneous actions  
across the world etc.) or Apec 97, or Seattle, or the WTO actions in  
Geneva in 1998 .( see http://www.weareeverywhere.org/ for non linear  
historical versions of the movements) .

BUT maybe we will be closer to a vision of the worlds and logic that  
these movements were/are prefiguring if we stopped thinking of  
history,life, culture, our bodies etc as mechanical machines with a  
beginning and an end, a centre and a periphery, an origin and  
finality - but as networks and fields of events ( see Sheldrake -  
http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/morphic/ 
morphic_intro.html) that often take place simultaneously and build  
together like an intelligent flock of birds without leaders or maps  
to navigate......

the last few days of global meltdown should have shown us that there  
is no centre anymore.....thank god ( who is not at the centre !!!)

the revolution will be when we have shaken off this logic of cause  
and effect and we cant see the world as a series of objects and  
moments anymore, but a series of changing relationships....that dont  
always behave like we were told they would.....

JJXX


On 10 Oct 2008, at 19:51, > ! < wrote:

>>Inside Networked Movements
>>Interview with Jeffrey Juris
>>By Geert Lovink
>>
>>Jeffrey Juris wrote an excellent insiders? story about the ?other
>>globalization? movement. Networking Futures is an anthropological
>>account that starts with the Seattle protests, late 1999,
>
>Fascinating that Seattle still gets the attention when all the  groundwork
>was laid at APEC '97 in Vancouver, especially in terms of the  foundations
>of Indymedia, use of radio, cellphones, 2-way radios and online media,
>strategic protest, coalitions, resurgence of anarcho-SI tactics and  the
>issue at stake that defined the alter-globalization movement. But hey,
>anything that happens in the US is always big news. For those  interested
>in the 2 years of planning that led up to Seattle, read up on APEC:
 <...>

************************************
?Only People serving an apprentiship to nature can be trusted with  
machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those  
machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs,  
and not a denial of them.?

Herbert Read ? The Grass Roots of Art

our latest project www.utopias.eu

And still building movements to stop capitalism toasting life on  
earth www.climatecamp.org.uk


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