International Errorist

THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE ABOLITION OF HELL CONTINUES IN THE SECOND EDITION OF THE BIENNIAL OF PERFORMANCE BUENOS AIRES 2017.

Jus Sanguinis is the racist regime that establishes that only the babies that have Spanish blood are recognized as subjects with the right to the nationality at the moment of the birth. In this way, the sons and daughters of migrant people that are born in the Spanish territory inherit their parents nationality as well as their legal status. This babies are not recognize as spanish citizens. This is how minors who are racialized are put under the violence of the Immigration laws since they are born.

Today on the national television They ask him why it is timely to speak today, now. He believes it is necessary because, for years, the leaders have dedicated themselves to misinform the audience through lies and myths. Even more, he dares point out that this kind of forced ignorance would be the cause that people share that general unrest in their daily lives. He believes there exists a big problem and he illustrates it with examples in this way: the governments evidence shortcomings in the system, which the press amplifies, and then they act in a contradictory way, since they do not work to find solutions, but just to manage the same system, to improve it. He points out emphatically that the present government has been responsible for validating this model, according to them imperfect, and that his concern resides precisely in this inflection. How could people not be confused if, on the one hand, they show the people that there is a crisis and, on the other hand, they work to consolidate it? Why don't the governments change the system tomorrow morning? Why do they have projects sleeping in the parliament for years? He deeply believes that in this country they say "A", they deceive people, they act "Z", and they keep the economic system, and the pensions system intact, the Constitution of the country, the private companies...

Or, how overcoming our greatest error involves confronting our greatest terror, and vice versa In the graduate program where I teach, we often ask our students to propose successive lists of keywords to help them name the intuitions that motivate their research agendas. At first, the words tend to be unadventurous, conforming to a received horizon of expectations — a kind of residual fear of using the “wrong word” leads to the error of falling prey to lexical hegemony — but by slowly digging beneath the dominant vocabulary, they invariably come upon slightly new ways of talking better suited to their tasks and desires. Lexical errancy of this kind has a heuristic effect and the word lists often end up being quite surprising. Recently, one young researcher proposed a list containing the following words: Millenarianism, Faith, Celestial Jerusalem, Rainbows, Stars, Hope, Revolution… Odd as they seem at first glance, the words don’t so much delineate a field of research as open a horizon and point to something far beyond. Such terms name a horizon that we — secular leftist intellectuals — have mistakenly given up on. Hence the relative discomfort we feel when we hear tell of Millenarianism or Celestial Jerusalem (except of course it comes from a Jehovah’s Witness). We have given up, no doubt erroneously, on any and all forms of transcendence, which we have come to associate, not without some justification, with the most iniquitous predatory projects (colonialism, exploitation, and so on) at the heart of which transcendence functioned as a kind of metaphysical palliative. But not only have we made transcendence a bad word; worse still, we have replaced it by a form of “pure immanence,” which, having no anchor point in our Western tradition, has ended up playing the role of an inverted transcendence. The pure immanence of possessive individualism, and the system of accumulation that is inseparable from it, have imposed themselves, through the collapse of any horizon, as the abyssal immanence of consumerism.

It is September 11th , 43 years of the coup in Chile and 15th of the attack to the Twin towers in the United States. This issue propose to think and discuss the notions of “(T) Error and culture / Financial Terrorism”, as a substantial part of the bio-political control in this permanent state of emergency and crisis. We have invited colleagues and collaborators from different countries and disciplines, most texts have been written or edited for this issue. Other articles have adapted or translated for publication in this site. We have decided to compose this edition in stages we invite a large number of employees who have accepted the invitation, so the launch of this number will be weekly throughout the month of September.

I spent the first years of the ’80s in Manhattan. I went there as a writer for a musical magazine based in Milano. I wrote about the after punk no wave scene of New York, about street art, and Keith Haring's graffiti, and Rammelzee and Basquiat. In 1977 the city of New York had declared financial bankruptcy, and many industrial investors flied away to more healthy states of the country. When I got to New York the urban landscape was impressive: wide areas looked like abandoned cemeteries, deserted factories, empty stores. A visionary Major, whose name was Ed Koch, had a brilliant idea: he opened the city to the artists and young adventurous people inviting them to give a new life to downtown areas, particularly to the East Village and Lower East side. Special grants and low rents were offered for urban renovation. Thousands flocked and restructured lofts turning them into places of creation, technical and existential experimentation, and cultural exchange. Musicians, artists, tech-savvies made the city a sort of laboratory of the possible futures. Then AIDS came. Things are always more complicated than our explanations, of course, but I think that this is a way to describe the most intimate core of the digital mutation that followed decades of social solidarity and free eroticism. The acquired immunity deficiency syndrome jeopardised and overturned self-perception in daily common life, dissolving the community of erotic egalitarian friendship that we had formed in the two previous decades. Depression may be described as the condition in which the conscious organism loses ability to find meaning in the surrounding world. But the meaning does not lie in things, or in the signs of language. It is generated by the endless shift from an interpretation to the next, from the uncertain and ambiguous exchange of gestures. Meaning is the effect of affective communication among agents of language. As meaning emerges in the relational dimension, the possibility of meaning dissolves when the community of bodies disaggregates. This is the starting point of depression. Digital technology has spread during the decade that followed the eruption of the Aids epidemics. Although it was generated by sexual contact, AIDS was mainly a psycho-media epidemic. It was based on the communication of a retrovirus, but it resulted in the communication of fear. When the contact with the other's body became a danger, when the perception of danger spread in the social unconscious, language transmigrated from the conjunctive to the connective sphere.

A literal conversation has pierced our recent history: every time the Argentine State has talked about “internal security”, it said: “internal commotion because of human action”. A literal conversation has pierced our recent history: every time the Argentine State has talked about "integration to the world", it said: “to go into debt in order to integrate us and grow”. What is “unprecedented” about this literality is that the previously mentioned conversation has not been a reason for debate. And it is a conversation that shakes our corporeality daily, given that, for the last fifty years, the bodies that have revolted against this conversation have undergone two particular fates: disappearance or debt. And in the “second survival” (those of us who have not disappeared but got into debt) this conversation has politicized our bodies to the extreme.

The doctrinaire body of State terrorism in Argentina, its main source of ideology -with its corresponding practical implementation-, was spread massively by means of certain novels of popular literature. Not only did these books offer a heroic and exculpatory story for the military, of all ranks, regarding their most unscrupulous actions, but probably they also seduced a significant part of the population through simplistic views –such as the "ticking time bomb scenario"- that justified the worst crimes.

Errorist Comrades of the world, welcome to the International Errorist movement's website. This issue proposes to think and discuss the notions of State of Emergency - State of Exception, not any more as temporary situations but as a constant condition in a permanent state of crisis. We have invited colleagues and collaborators from different countries and disciplines. Most of the texts have been written or edited for this number, and some articles have been adapted or translated specially for their publication on this site.

Fifteen years ago, the world took a turn on its history: the towers of financial capital collapsed and the old specter of the terrorist enemy revived. The numerology of the calendar wasn't casual: a call to 911 that relighted theories of complot and conspiracy to a global scale. Lodges and clubs of businessmen that try to dominate the world through a plan of permanent wars and crises. Like global warming, the old cold war was reheated in the microwave of the same continental blocks. The democratic dictatorships of a two-party system were reinstalled in a simulation of civic participation. The illusion of continuation in a Welfare State was so deceitful as the hope of recovery in the post-war period. Resources plundered from the colonies for centuries seemed to be exhausted and the logic of terror-error was the solution to justify new wars and invasions in search of fuel, minerals, water, food and imaginary weapons.

Capitalism is dead, and we live inside a corpse. Frantically we are searching a way out from the corpse, and not finding it. Thirty years of neoliberal aggression are presenting the bill, and it’s going to be harsh. Financial capitalism has systematically depredated society, and after the 2008 collapse social resources have been transferred to the bank system, while salaries went down. Not surprisingly the demand is free falling, and the economy is going towards a slump. Should we regret the extinguishing of the economic flame? Well, yes and not. An alarming article by Clifford Krauss appeared in the New York Times on Jan 9th: China’s Hunger for Commodities Wanes, and Pain Spreads Among Producers “The flood of raw materials is pressuring prices, prompting a painful shakeout. Oil companies have laid off an estimated 250,000 workers worldwide….

They’re out in force again, jumping on the bandwagon of terror: all those who’ve been sitting on their reactionary ideas on identity and on sealing off the borders and who have long had their draft laws on national security ready and waiting. After the attacks in Paris, they feel the time has now come to push their agendas. Even before the attacks it was almost impossible to have a rational discussion on migration. And yet we have to. Migration was, is and will be a fact of life. According to the UNHCR, an estimated 60 million people were displaced in 2014 alone. But contrary to the impression often given, nine out of ten refugees stay in their own region, i.e. in the countries of the so-called Third World. Only a tenth manage a longer journey. The question is, how will Germany, and Europe, respond?

Enemy leaders look like everyone else; enemy combatants look like everyone else; enemy vehicles look like civilian vehicles; enemy installation look like civilian installations, enemy equipment and materials look like civilian equipment and materials. -American Defense Science Board “It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals, “write two New York Times reporters. “ Every week or so, more than 100 members of the governments’ sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, top ore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.[i]” In Washington, this weekly meeting has been labeled” Terror Tuesday.” Once established, the list of nominees is sent to the White House, where the president orally gives his approval to each name. With the “Kill List” validated, the drones do the rest.

Emergency! It is the choked shout of a life that unmultiplies in zones of adaptation and comfort and zones of suffering and rage. Is it all about learning to control our passions? Isn't precisely this power of auto-regulation what we have been stripped of? Isn't this last chapter, about the individual and community subjective dispossession, what we basically call neoliberalism? Is there a possible politics without questioning this disappropriation that makes us governable, without appropriating ourselves of a collective passion autonomy?

“This refugee crisis we are facing...” announced the white and well-off European news presenter at the Spanish Radio and Television Corporation (RTVE). “Where is our humanity? I feel ashamed of being European,” wonders a Twitter user, sympathetic to the ideals of the progressive left-wing, “What are the values of the European Union?” they exclaim on different platforms of the white social movements, in relation to the deal between the European Commission and Turkey. Since the images of the border between Greece and Turkey started to appear in September 2015, most of the complaints have been centered on the loss of what the citizens, the media and political class in Europe, call the “fundamental values of the European Union”. To those same “foundational values” referred the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, with the phrase “we are the most open and the most tolerant continent and societies in the whole world”, during the press conference in which they presented the conclusions of the agreement between the European Commission and Turkey.

Preliminary considerations At the moment of writing this report, it is necessary to present a picture of what is happening right now in the country: the politicians, divested of every instrument to exercise national sovereignty, which has been ceded to supranational organizations, have decided to concentrate on a task they can do efficiently and without any kind of interference: we refer to the repression on the population, especially on those who organize themselves, what has led to the passing of laws (among which it stands out one commonly known as Gag Law) that take the country back to the years of Franco's dictatorship, of which this democracy is a heir. For these reasons we should conclude that the state of emergency, or at least the state of exception, by means of which the government determines who are the enemies, is the present condition of the Spanish society despite there has been no insurrection.

Let them, nevertheless, put through their anti-revolt bills, make them still worse, transform the whole penal law into india-rubber, they will achieve nothing but a new proof of their impotence. (Friedrich Engels) On his 1895 introduction to Karl Marx's The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Engels is sarcastic about the relation between socialists and parties of order, since the former show a pretty consistent democratic trajectory, while the latter -allegedly republicans-, the main mentors of anti-subversive laws, resorted to outright illegality to manage their government. Who were, then, the subversives ones? Engels seems to point at the necessity to face the weakness of "order" on its moment of largest exercise of accumulated power, with illegality without further ado and laws of exception. Together with Marx, since the 40s, they had bet on the worker's viewpoint, as a class in struggle and under construction, so that, all along their theoretical practice, the exception was on the side of the most active forces of the society in the making; the rest was a symptom of impotence.

State Terrorism has been so excessive and evident in Chile that different international organizations dedicated to the “Defense of Human Rights” have visited us to confirm what we have been denouncing for years. Fruitless visits -indeed- given that they have no concrete utility. Without going any further, today, members of the UN Committee Against Torture go all over Chile to see how different types of torture are applied in the country. Let's remember that less than a year ago, two young students of the UTEM University were brutally tortured after being arrested without a cause, in the context of a student protest. Their heads were covered with plastic bags to choke them, their limbs were broken, they lost consciousness for a couple of minutes, all this happening inside a police car that ran through the streets of Santiago, livened up by laughs of the pigs who enjoyed torturing these defenseless young men. And the point is that the police cars have become no man's land, and they are the scene of different beatings and tortures in a systematic way. In spite of the many complaints presented by different organizations and civil lawsuits against the institution Carabiniers of Chile, we know that it is useless because those are practices that have become institutionalized, validated and obsequious to the power.

An emergency traverses the Argentine language: if the disappeared disappears, Videla's words win as a project of daily speech; and it is necessary to take direct actions against the posthumous triumph of the dictatorship of the disappearance of persons. The Disappearance of persons is the worst crime a State can commit. And there are no antecedents in the whole world of State that makes its own citizens disappear in times of peace, without an armed conflict, without being at war. The Argentine State subjected all of the population under its responsibility to the systematic disappearance of thousands of its inhabitants, who were selected in state offices, by public servants, on lists written by ministers, secretaries, the military of all ranks, members of intelligence services who employed interrogation under torture against citizens who, after speaking, lacerated ad nauseam due to that physical and psychological torture, most of the time were also disappeared –and just a few hundreds survived to express what has no words: disappearance.

New World Summit recently started building a revolutionary public parliament in Derîk, open to all, and a true home for Rojava’s stateless democracy. Two cranes circle above a large pit in the ground, lifting heavy, black metal arches into the air. They are covered with hand-painted words: Yeksani Regezi, Gender Equality, Xwe-Bergîri, Self-Defense. Neighbors surrounding the construction site have walked out of their homes to see the choreography of cranes, cement trucks, and bulldozers — some of the machinery decorated with flags of political parties and councils. Among the observers is Amina Osse, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Cezîre Canton, watching the spectacle together with some women of the local security forces, the Asayish — famous for its public statements about the wish to auto-dissolve when the entire society has become capable of organizing its own self-defense. Osse is one of the driving forces behind the building process, one of its co-authors. The day passes by and her silhouette turns dark. In the remaining light a large spherical shape has emerged in front of her. A constructivist globe that we hope will be a symbol for a new world in the making.

We call for a #GlobalDebout day of action on may 15, 2016!

This is a fragment of the interview / conversation between members of Buenos Aires Section of the International Errorist and Santiago García Navarro about the foundation of the I.E during the events and protests to condemn the visit of former U.S. President George W Bush at the Fourth Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina. The full article was published in art magazine Latinart.