your seat

A Dream of John Ball

Illustration to William Morris' A Dream of John Ball

Wood engraving, 1892

 

'Ah, ye good people, the matters goeth not well to pass in England, nor shall not do till everything be common, and that there be no villains nor gentlemen, but that we may be all united together, and that the lords be no greater masters than we be. What have we deserved, or why should we be kept thus in servage? We be all come from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve: whereby can they say or shew that they be greater lords than we be, saving by that they cause us to win and labour for that they dispend? They are clothed in velvet and camlet furred with grise, and we be vestured with poor cloth: they have their wines, spices and good bread, and we have the drawing out of the chaff and drink water: they dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and travail, rain and wind in the fields; and by that that cometh of our labours they keep and maintain their estates: we be called their bondmen, and without we do readily them service, we be beaten; and we have no sovereign to whom we may complain, nor that will hear us nor do us right.'

John Ball, in J Froissart, Froissart's Chronicles (1385) translated by GC Macaulay (1895)

ANDERSON, Benedict 1991: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Revised Edition. London and New York: Verso

In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the 
nation: it is an imagined community – and imagined as both inherently 
limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the 
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, 
or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their 
communion. (...) The nation is imagined as limited because even the 
largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has 
finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation 
imagines itself coterminous with mankind. (...) It is imagined as sovereign 
because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and 
Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, 
hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history 
when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were 
inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, (...) 
nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and 
emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. /

Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and 
exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal 
comradeship. (p. 5-7

WAR OR LAND // YOU ROGUES

http://thomas-spence-society.co.uk/3.html

wherein she was common, and hath begun a property.

Sec.30. Thus this law of reason makes the deer that Indian's who hath killed it; it is allowed to be his goods, who hath bestowed his labour upon it, though before it was the common right of every one. And amongst those who are counted the civilized part of mankind, who have made and multiplied positive laws to determine property, this original law of nature, for the beginning of property, in what was before common, still takes place; and by virtue thereof, what fish any one catches in the ocean, that great and still remaining common of mankind; or what ambergrise any one takes up here, is by the labour that removes it out of that common state nature left it in, made his property, who takes that pains about it. And even amongst us, the hare that any one is hunting, is thought his who pursues her during the chase: for being a beast that is still looked upon as common, and no man's private possession; whoever has employed so much labour about any of that kind, as to find and pursue her, has thereby removed her from the state of nature, wherein she was common, and hath begun a property.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/politics/locke/ch05.htm

Fernand Deligny

.....Writing here is possibly an expression of the innate, and is thus not about “making” sense but is merely the innate ritual of “acting”, the mode of the Arachnean. It is what Deligny would call “a-conscious”, outside the conscious or subconscious. As the Brazilian philosopher and Deligny scholar, Peter Pàl Pelbart states,

“Deligny refers to the turtle traced by the aborigine in a tree’s bark, then abandoned–the essential there is the tracing, the movements of the hand that come and go, not being this “his” hand, just as the web is not this one spider’s…and our emotion comes from the fact that this drawing is common; a sense common to us, human, since the human has for common the hand in motion. Common, communism. When conscience is eclipsed it is worth looking, as if at a lunar eclipse, and what is seen, even if it is not visible, are the traces of the Arachnean.

.....
It is within “acting” in an innate, unattached manner, keeping a distance from one another, that the network was spun

“[…] anyone who came from one of the distant collectives and passed by the silk farm would place, lettuce, blackberries or cheeses on the stone which were from another collective, and then would take back with them whatever had been placed by someone else on their own collective’s stone. For the most part, all of this took place without anyone else being present besides the passerby from the collective.”

A profound detachment to naming and to others at once proximate and distant...

Drew S. Burk

 Cartes et lignes d’erre, 1969-1978  

nancy /communism

nancy /communism

History of the Commune

13 April - The Manifesto of the Federation of Artists proposes that Art should be run by artists, free of commercial considerations, and promises without exception to preserve the treasures of the past, to illuminate the work of the present and to educate for the future. Plans for a program of exhibitions and a journal are established and teaching reforms instituted.

Barricades de la Commune, avril 71. Coin de la place Hotel de Ville & de la rue de Rivoli.

All space is already occupied by the enemy

Gustave Courbet is one of the leaders of the Commune. He instigates the demolition of Napoleon's statue in the Place de Vendome because it is a symbol of militarism and imperialism. He writes I get up, I eat breakfast, I sit down and preside for 12 hours a day, my head begins to feel like a baked apple. But despite all this unaccustomed turmoil of the head and brain, I’m in a state of enchantment. Paris est un vrai paradis. The poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud are also involved. In the last days of the Commune, Edward Manet draws heartbreaking pictures of the Communards slaughtered at the barricades by the French Army


http://marxists.org/history/france/paris-commune/index.htm

May 16th 1871 /// to demolish the Vendôme Column

Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.ccwgraduateschool.org/a-conversation-between-michael-asbury-and-sean-lynch/

Iskra

“Wealth inestimable is ever flowing through these workshops, and the hands that have been stained with gold-dust, as likely as not, some day extend themselves in petition for a crust.”

In 1966 Johnnie Williamson pointed to the first translation by Helen MacFarlane of The Communist Manifesto hanging on the wall protected in glass casing.  “A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe.  We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism “ is how she rendered the passage more familiarly known to us as “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.”  Look into the etymology or the philology of “hobgoblin” and “spectre” and you’ll find the difference between revolutionary intellectual abstraction and the gothic of the peasant’s lore of the commons.  Be that as it may.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/01/archiving-with-may-day-rooms/#.UQ_Ga2QCs7k.facebook

 

herobrine // he is a persn who likes 2 destroy mc worlds

The Commune of 1871

On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space. In his space capsule he carried the remnant of the red flag flown over the Hotel de Ville in the heart of the Paris Commune in 1870.

 

the French insurrectionist Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-81), ... spent most of his adult life in prison, and whom Walter Benjamin (writing in the 1930s) judged the most famous revolutionary before Lenin. Blanqui was elected as leader in absentia by the Paris Communards who offered to release hostages in exchange for him, but were refused, and it was in the wake of the Commune’s failure that Blanqui wrote his cosmological treatise L’Eternite par les astres (1873). In an infinite universe made from atoms of a finite number of types, Blanqui argues, the same combinations must arise again and again.

“The entire universe is composed of stellar systems. In order to create them nature has only one hundred simple bodies at its disposal… Every star, whatever it might be, thus exists in infinite number in time and space, not only in one of its aspects, but as it is found in every second of its duration, from birth until death… What I write now in a cell in the fort of Taureau I wrote and will write under the same circumstances for all of eternity, on a table, with a pen, wearing clothing… The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space… These aren’t phantoms: they are the now eternalized.”
Whereas Tegmark emphasises spatial repetition and variation (the idea that there is another “you” reading this article right now), Blanqui additionally highlights temporal repetition, leading him to conclude that progress is illusory; everything that can possibly happen has already occurred. It was this aspect that led Benjamin to see Blanqui’s cosmology as a precursor to the doctrine of eternal recurrence in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-5).
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin considers Blanqui’s significance as both revolutionary conspirator and pseudo-scientist, concluding that Blanqui’s cosmology is a capitulation to the principles of bourgeois capitalism that Blanqui had spent all his life fighting against. Blanqui’s multiverse is, says Benjamin, “the phantasmagoria of history”, a nightmare projection of capitalism itself. 


Andrew Crumey

all this new work

whoever shall come for brick or for stone shall freely have the same for his pains
Commons Journals IV 309


La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques?



Hylomorphism
Aristotle -  clay is matter relative to a brick because a brick is made of clay, whereas bricks are matter relative to a brick house.
Aquinas - tiny pieces of brick remain in existence when the house goes out of existence... there can be no fireplace if the surrounding house has been torn down. We might say this pile of bricks once was the chimney, we cannot say that it is the chimney... characterised as a brick it still exists...

http://www.themasonictrowel.com/Articles/General/other_files/an_operative_bricklayer_builds_speculative_wall.htm

6.4 The Knocks

You will notice in the laying of the blocks you always hear the ringing of the trowel. This is music to the Brickie's ears since it indicates bricklayers at work which means money, security, and the good things of life. In like manner the knocks in a speculative lodge when heard outside the door indicate that the speculative masons are at work .... There is a certain rythem to the knocks. In the first degree they always remind me of the pound pound pound of an apprentice .... But by the time they get to the Third Degree they carry the sound of Mozart's Magic Flute .... And have the characteristic of a Master Mason lightly touching the block into its appointed place.

clairefontaine

ceann mor

 

http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/41760

http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/commoning-patterns-and-patterns-commoning-short-sketch

Nunc fluens facit tempus,
nunc stans facit aeternitatum

mobile vulgus

the Trojan Horse of planetary domination

The diffusion of seduction relations through the whole of so- cial activity also signifies the death of everything that once was alive about it. The generalization of simulation too makes it more and more manifestly impossible. It is thus at the moment of the greatest unhappiness when the streets fill with enjoyers without hearts, seducers mourning all seduction, the corpses of desires that no one knows what to do with.

It would be a physical phenomenon, like losing an aura. Like the electrification of bodies caused by an intense separation be- ginning to express itself until it disappears. A new closeness would come out of it, and new distances.

A total exhaustion of desire would mean the end of commod- ity society, and, of all society.

The landscape of a devastated eros

“As a general thesis, social progress and changes of era take place accordingly as women progress towards freedom.” (Fourier)

When the Young-Girl has exhausted all artifices, there is still one last one left, that of renouncing artifices. And that one, is truly the last.

By making itself the Trojan Horse of planetary domination, desire has stripped itself of everything that flanked it that was domestic, secluded, private. The prerequisite for the totalitar- ian redefinition of the desirable was in effect its becoming au- tonomous from all real objects, from all particular content. By learning how to apply itself to essences, it has unwittingly be- come an absolute desire, a desire for the absolute, which nothing earthly can satisfy anymore. This dissatisfaction is the central lever of consumption as well as of its subversion.

A communization of bodies is to be expected.

Tiqqun/ Jeune Fille

The thirde tractate of the offices of the comyn peple. The fyrst chapitre is of the office of the labourers and werkemen.

This booke conteyneth. iiii. traytees/ The first traytee is of the Invencion of this playe of the chesse/ and conteyneth. iii. chapitres.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Game and Playe of the Chesse, by Caxton

The Strength of Weak Ties / Mark S. Granovetter /1973

The Waltham Black Act

"After the first day of June, 1723, any person appearing in any forest, chase, park, etc., or in any highroad, open heath, common or down, with offensive weapons, and having his face blacked, or otherwise disguised, or unlawfully and wilfully hunting, wounding, killing or stealing any red or fallow deer, or unlawfully robbing any warren, etc., or stealing any fish out of any river or pond, or (whether armed or disguised or not) breaking down the head or mound of any fishpond, whereby the fish may be lost or destroyed; or unlawfully and maliciously killing, maiming or wounding any cattle, or cutting down or otherwise destroying any trees planted in any avenue, or growing in any garden, orchard or plantation, for ornament, shelter or profit; or setting fire to any house, barn or outhouse, hovel, cock-mow or stack of corn, straw, hay or wood; or maliciously shooting at any person in any dwelling-house or other place; or knowingly sending any letter without any name, or signed with a fictitious name, demanding money, venison or other valuable thing, or forcibly rescuing any person being in custody for any of the offences before mentioned, or procuring any person by gift, or promise of money, or other reward, to join in any such unlawful act, or concealing or succouring such offenders when, by Order of Council, etc., required to surrender, shall suffer death."

RICHARD PARVIN, EDWARD ELLIOT, ROBERT KINGSHELL, HENRY MARSHALL, EDWARD PINK, JOHN PINK AND JAMES ANSELL

The "Waltham Blacks," who were executed at Tyburn, 4th of December, 1723, for Murder and Deer-Stealing

goose and common / common and goose

Interview with Peter Linebaugh: The Magna Carta Manifesto

manuscript basis of human liberty:

magna carta / protection against autocracy & tyranny: habeas corpus, prohibition of torture, trial by jury.

a charter for the forest / subsistence for all: woodland = energy habitat, pharmacopia, pasturage

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

some principles of the commons

Dick Gaughan - World Turned Upside Down

division of the commons

transfer print / 40" x 36" / 2011