Category: Zines

Why this piece? Why this scattered scope of linking concepts? Why any essay at all? Is it another rancorous rapture from a sad eyed liberal whining over the loss of state sanctioned rights or some lack in peaceful protests? Or yet another tirade from fringe seeking far-right isolates who consistently confuse their rhetoric and tactics as something other than counterrevolutionary and niche? The aim here is to circumvent both of these camps of depoliticization and partied lifestyle-ism. We find Fred Moten and Giorgio Agamben to be extremely referential in this uprising. We seek to find a pathway through, with a myriad of thinkers and works, to better connect our positionality to that of a generalized insurgency of fragments. We aim to initiate and build a new cartography of the fragment: understanding that our maps and relations cannot cover everything. Nor do we wish them to. The social, in addition to capital, is one of our largest obstacles to overcome in this process towards the open. The stunted and divisive rhetorical dance of COVID-19’s ‘mask or no mask’ speaks to this terrain of socialized war. Under this socioeconomic hold, individuals recalculate as policing bodies aimed towards restoration and stabilization. We must be clear; we have no answers and find ourselves just as confused as the rest. Plainly put, those who claim to have answers are liars. The social, more so than not, is an unnamable. Yet, we aspire to understand our relation to the social to deactivate it and also to this uprising in the hopes of seeing it become something larger in scale and intensity. Over the last few months we have scribbled notes down on book linings, on invoices from work, on discarded trash blowing in the wind, on our flesh, on the tongues of lovers and on late-night computer screens to construct this piece. This is the first installment of this collection of fragmented notes. Why fragmented notes? Because we don’t proclaim this to be a complete program to follow. It’s a fragmented sketch of a map, antithetical in form to Borges’ map in “On the Exactitude of Science.” All the while holding true to the fact that ideas of wholeness and oneness are fictions of the state, Empire. From this we point ourselves towards the creative work of constructing a cartography of incompleteness. We hope this loose map of notes opens connective pathways to thoughts and possible lines of flight out of this hell. In the cleansing elements of destruction and regeneration, in fire and water, we greet you, friends.