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Title: Anti-Capital Projects Author: Various Authors Date: November 2009 Language: en Topics: academy, identity, race Source: Retrieved on November 29, 2009 from http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/
18 November 2009.
The University of California is occupied. It is occupied as is the
Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and the Technical Institute of Graz; as
were the New School, Faculty of Humanities in Zagreb and the Athens
Polytechnic. These are not the first; they will not be the last. Neither
is this a student movement; echoing the factory occupations of Argentina
and Chicago, immigrant workers occupy forty buildings in Paris,
including the Centre Pompidou. There is still life inside capital’s
museum.
We send our first greetings to each of these groups, in solidarity. We
stand with everybody who finds themselves in a building today because
they have chosen to be, because they have liberated it from its supposed
owners — whether for the hint of freedom’s true taste, or out of
desperate social and political necessity.
This declaration and this action begin with contempt for those who would
use their powers to cordon off education, cordon off our shared world,
those who would build “opportunity” on the backs of others who must
inevitably be exploited. This is why it begins here in this building
with its Capital Projects, its Real Estate Services, its obscenely named
Office of Sustainability — it begins in the corridors of accumulation,
the core of the logic that privileges buildings over people. But it also
begins with love for those who would refuse such enclosures, who are
committed to the deed rather than the petition, who are committed to
deprivatization as an act. This antagonism cannot be negotiated out of
existence. We make no demands but the most basic one: that our
collective life shall admit no owner.
Whoever has watched the disease of privatization, precaritization, and
financialization spread through the University of California will not
fail to recognize it as the plague of neoliberalism insinuating itself
into every corner of the globe, every minute of our lives. In the most
recent revelation, we have discovered the obscene student fee increases
are being used not for education but as collateral for credit operations
and building projects. This is the Regents’ will. If bonds aren’t
repaid, the fees — that is, our days and years of work, extending into
an empty future — must be used for repayment.
There is a grotesque irony to this. Student fees are being securitized
and repackaged exactly like the toxic assets that triggered the latest
economic collapse. Four years ago it was subprime mortgages; now it is
“subprime education,” as Ananya Roy says. The very strategies and
schemes that bankrupted millions of lives, and that showed the
bankruptcy of the economic sphere — it is to these that the university
has turned for its salvation, even after such strategies failed
spectacularly. The Regents reveal themselves not simply to be dishonest,
venal, and indifferent; they are too stupid to learn the most basic
lessons of recent history. Or perhaps this is their idea of solidarity:
that all members of the university community (save them, of course) must
join the nation and the world in its immiseration, must be battered
equally by a nightmare economy built on real human lives. We say to
them: if you summon forth such solidarity, do not be surprised when its
power escapes you.
The arriving freshman is treated as a mortgage, and the fees are
climbing. She is a future revenue stream, and the bills are growing. She
is security for a debt she never chose, and the cost is staggering. Her
works and days are already promised away to raise up buildings that may
contribute nothing to her education, and that she may not be allowed to
use — buildings in which others will work for less than a living wage,
at peril of no wage at all. This is the truth of the lives of students,
the lives of workers (often one and the same). This is the truth of the
relation between them and the buildings of the university, in the eyes
of the Regents and the Office of the President.
No building will be safe from occupation while this is the case. No
capital project but the project to end capital. We call for further
occupations, to pry our buildings and our lives from its grip. We call
for a different university, and a different society in which this
university is embedded. We call for a different relation between lives
and buildings. We do so freely. We are the power.
Why occupation? Why barricades? Why would an emancipatory movement, one
which seeks to unchain people from debt and compulsory labor, chain the
doors of a building? Why would a group of people who deplore a
university increasingly barricaded against would-be entrants itself
erect barricades? This is the paradox: the space of UC Berkeley, open at
multiple points, traversed by flows of students and teachers and
workers, is open in appearance only. At root, as a social form, it is
closed: closed to the majority of young people in this country by merit
of the logic of class and race and citizenship; closed to the underpaid
workers who enter only to clean the floors or serve meals in the dining
commons; closed, as politics, to those who question its exclusions or
answer with more than idle protest.
To occupy a building, to lock it down against the police, is therefore
to subtract ourselves, as much as possible, from the protocols and rules
and property relations which govern us, which determine who goes where,
and when, and how. To close it down means to open it up — to annul its
administration by a cruel and indifferent set of powers, in order that
those of us inside (and those who join us) can determine, freely and of
our own volition, how and for whom it is to be used. The university is
already occupied — occupied by capital and the state and its autocratic
regime of “emergency powers.” Of course, taking over a building is
simply the first step, since our real target is not this or that edifice
but a system of social relations. If possible, once this space has been
fully emancipated, once we successfully defend ourselves against the
police and administrators who themselves defend, mercilessly, the
inegalitarian protocols of the university, the rule of the budget and
its calculated exclusions, then we can open the doors to all who wish to
join us, we can come and go freely and let others take our place in
determining how the space is used. But we stand no chance of doing so
under police watch, having sat down in the building with the doors open,
ready to get dragged out five or six hours or a day later. Once our
numbers are sufficient to hold a space indefinitely, then we can
dispense with locks.
Our goal is straightforward: to broadcast from this space the simple
truth that, yes, it is possible to take what was never yours, yes, it is
possible for workers to take over their workplaces in the face of mass
layoffs; for communities where two-thirds of the houses stand empty,
foreclosed by banks swollen with government largesse, to take over those
houses and give them to all who need a place to live. It is not just
possible; as the current arrangement of things becomes evermore
incapable of providing for us, it is necessary. We are guided by a
simple maxim: omnia sunt communia, everything belongs to everybody, as a
famous heretic once said. This is the only property of things which we
respect.
If possible, we will use this space as a staging ground for the
generalization of this principle, here and elsewhere, a staging ground
for the occupation of another building, and another, and another, for
the continuation of the strike and its extension beyond the university.
Then we can decide not what we want but what we will do. If we fail this
time, if we fall short, so be it. The call will remain.
It is true that the upcoming vote at the Regents meeting — an almost
certain ratification of the 32% fee increase proposed by Mark Yudof and
the UC Office of the President — is merely the latest in a long litany
of insults and injuries. But it is also the moment where the truth of
the UC is undeniable, where its ostensible difference from the violence
of the larger society vanishes. The hijacking of student fee money for
construction bonds tells, in capsule form, the larger story of our
enchainment to debt: credit card and mortgage debt, student loans we
will spend our lifetime paying off.
We want students to see this increase for what it is: a form of
exploitation, a pay cut from future wages at a time when widespread
unemployment already puts those wages in jeopardy. Let’s be honest:
aside from all its decorations, university study is a form of job
training. We pay now in order to attain a better wage in the future. It
is an investment. But the crisis of the university and the crisis of
employment means that, for many, the amount they pay for a degree will
far exceed the benefits accrued. We could, at the very least, conclude
that it is a bad investment.
But stepping back for a minute, what would it mean to restore the public
university to its former glory as an engine of class mobility, as a
sound investment in the future? It would mean the restoration of a
system which, while ensuring that some individuals, here and there,
ascend the rungs, also ensures that the rungs themselves remain
immovable. The best we can hope for is that different people will get
fucked next time. There is no escape from this fact. The university
can’t be made accessible to all without the absolute devaluation of a
university degree. To save the university means to save poverty, pure
and simple. It means to save a system in which some people study and
some people clean the floors... The same goes for the entirety of the
education system — there is no way to reduce the inequality in K-12
education without a total transformation of society. The schools are
designed to produce this inequality. If they were equally funded and
equally administered and we still lived in a class society, then the
education received there would be meaningless as a claim on future
livelihood. There has to be an underclass. This is the truth of
education. And it is the one thing we are supposed to never learn in
school, the one thing which, despite all the gestures of solidarity,
divides the campus student movement from the most exploited university
workers.
This is why we must seize these spaces — spaces that were never ours —
and put them to new uses. If there is any value to the university it is
its centrality as a point of transmission, an instrument of contagion,
in which struggle is broadcast, amplified, and communicated to the
society at large. If we achieve this or that reform along the way — save
wages and salaries, lower fees — this will make us happy. We understand
how meaningful such achievements are for the people who work and study
here. But we also understand how meaningless they are for the society at
large. Sometimes saving the university is a stop on the way to
destroying it. There is no insoluble contradiction, then, between us and
the larger movement. We are one face of it.
First, because anything we might win now would be too insignificant.
Countless times past student struggles have worked months and years —
striking and occupying buildings and mobilizing thousands upon thousands
of people — only to win back half of what they had already lost, a half
that was again taken away one or two years later. But in any case, we
are as yet far too small to win anything on a scale remotely close to
the mildest of demands — a reduction or freeze of student fees, an end
to the layoffs and furloughs. Even these demands would mean only a
return to the status quo of last year or the year before — inadequate by
any but the most cowardly measure. If we set our horizons higher — free
education, a maximum salary differential of, for instance, 3 or 5, a
university managed by faculty and students and workers — then we must
realize, immediately, that nothing short of full-scale insurrection
could ever achieve this. And if we were strong enough to bring the
existing order tumbling down around us, why would we stop short and
settle for the foregoing list?
The process of negotiation — the settlement of demands — is a dangerous
one for a movement. It often signals its death. We have no illusions
about this. We understand that, if we were to become powerful enough,
and if we remained steadfast in our refusal of all negotiation or
settlement, someone, some group, would step in and begin negotiating for
us. There is no avoiding that. Once we become a threat, then the
bargaining will begin. If the first or second set of demands seems a
worthy terminus, then we have a piece of advice. Become a threat first.
You just might win something. But you’ll never become a threat by
determining to fight over the crumbs.
The whole theory of demands as it currently exists seems to rest upon a
fundamental misconception. The demand is never really addressed to the
existing powers. They can’t hear us — everyone knows that. And, in any
case, they’ve never responded to petitions or requests, only force. The
real addressee of the demand is on our side, not theirs. A demand
defines those who utter it; it sets the limits of the struggle,
determining who is and who is not in solidarity with a given fight. And
such demands are, invariably, bound to exclude some party or group. We
recognize, of course, that they can be useful in this respect — useful
as a means to constitute and unify body in struggle, but this body can
only be partial, fragmentary, divided from further support. Some groups
attempt to get around this problem by making their demands an eclectic
laundry-list, but such solutions always end in absurdity. This is why we
make no demands. Because we want to be in solidarity with all who are
oppressed and exploited. We will not say who they are in advance. They
will define themselves by rising up and standing with us.
Well, it’s perfect, isn’t it? As the UC levies students with
ever-steeper fees and drives workers further into poverty in order to
continue with its inglorious expansion — football stadiums, high-tech
research centers, new administrative buildings, $1.35 billion in new
construction during a supposed crisis — we can see no better target than
one of the nerve centers of this strategy of accumulation, one of the
routing points of this logic which privileges buildings over people.
Capital Projects indeed. Even if the university is not, in a strict
sense, profit-seeking like a capitalist corporation, the leveraged
transformation of ever-greater levels of personal debt into new
buildings, the congealment of our living activity into dead matter
designed to react back upon us, to become the newest labyrinth of our
unfreedom, is nothing less than a little blazon of the project of
capital itself: capital which is nothing if it is not growth, expansion,
multiplication, investment, and which continues along this path without
the slightest regard for human needs. This is no less true of the UC,
which will grow and build at any cost. Any growth is good growth, as the
front page of the Wall Street Journal tells us. Gross Domestic Product
knows no qualities. A pile of guns is the same, to it, as a pile of
anti-malarial drugs. It is a system which must grow or die, which
requires more and more resources and energy, more and more workers,
regardless of what this work is doing. This is why no patchwork of
reforms and technology and consumer morality could ever address the
growing ecological crisis — a crisis, at base, of a system which knows
no limits. And so we take our stand here, at the Office of
Sustainability, Real Estate Services, Capital Projects. We will not
create more of what people do not need. Not today. Here, in this
building which coordinates the acquisition of property and the
optimization of real estate assets, we refuse to be subordinate to the
logic of accumulation. And we call upon all of those in solidarity with
us to take over other spaces on campus, in their communities, to take
over their workplaces, to refuse the rule of things, the rule of dead
matter. It is easy enough. Countless buildings lie ready for the taking.
We can, all together, chant Whose university? Our university! And we can
really mean it.
With It?
As the California population has grown more ethnically diverse, the
privatization of the public sphere has been sold to the electorate
through a seemingly endless parade of racist bogeymen: immigration,
affirmative action, bilingual education.
For children of immigrant parents, for immigrants themselves, for the
first to attend college in their families regardless of their ethnicity,
skyrocketing fees and cuts occur at a time when we can least afford it.
We have been told that the real responsibility for the current crisis of
education lies elsewhere: in Sacramento, in a larger economic crisis not
caused by Wall Street speculators and bailed out investment banks but
somehow by minority communities themselves.
We are told to divert our attention toward our legislators and away from
the extreme bureaucratic waste and disastrous internal budgetary
priorities of university administrators. We are told to write yet
another petition by leaders who simply ignored the minimal demands of
the 9/24 walkout and numerous alternative budget proposals.
Senior administrators, many with deep ties to the same Sacramento
politicians they have asked students to petition, have refused to submit
to an independent audit to prove that student fees are not in fact being
used to finance construction projects instead of basic instruction and
services. In other words, we have been told to “share the pain” but
never the power to democratically decide how public funds are spent and
by whom.
Last year UC paid $4.2 billion dollars to its management, or 21% of the
systemwide budget, as opposed to the 8% devoted to instruction. Senior
executives regularly cite “market competitiveness” as a justification
for excessive compensation packages which are not determined by any
“market” but by insulated boards which possess the extraordinary power
to raise their own salaries.
The internal budgetary priorities of California public universities thus
mirror those of the state. In California alone corporate profits have
risen 580% since 2001 while for the past 30 years “strategic deficits”
and regressive taxation have been used to “starve the beast” of spending
on basic public needs like food, affordable housing, education and
health care. According to the logic of privatization, none of these
public goods should exist.
While fee raises and cuts have disproportionately affected communities
of color, we have once again been told that the responsibility for this
lies elsewhere. Demands for racial justice and equality are assumed to
be incidental or “niche” issues which do not affect “the average
student” or “the average worker.”
For decades the UC administration has attempted to isolate the most
“diverse” constituency on campus: the service workers. As some of the
most courageous and outspoken critics of current university policies,
these workers have the most to lose and continue to demonstrate the
astonishing power of collective action.
Routinely used as exhibits of victimization and vulnerability, students
of color are often viewed as passive and frightened objects rather than
radical political subjects who have a crucial role to play in
transforming a broken institution.
Shared culture is no guarantee of political solidarity. And so we stand
together with all those who are working to build a democratic mass
movement powerful enough to challenge the twisted logic of privatization
which makes structural racism routine. Neither students nor workers can
accomplish this task alone. Current UC leaders are counting on the fact
that we remain isolated from each other.
As formerly insulated middle-class communities face economic upheaval
and “fear of falling,” they experience what most underrepresented
working class communities of color have confronted for quite some time:
systematic underinvestment, hyperexploitation and structural barriers to
equality written off as individual failure or cultural pathology.
We encourage everyone to join the public conversation about the future
of the movement and to take immediate action. We also call on all
students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations across the
state to massively mobilize and organize for a general strike in
education beginning on March 4, 2010.
Occupied UC Berkeley, 18 November 2009.
“Being president of the University of California is like being manager
of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is
listening.”
— UC President Mark Yudof
“Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living
labor.”
— Karl Marx
“Politics is death that lives a human life.”
— Achille Mbembe
Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here there are no dirges, no prayers,
only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and
debt. The classroom just like the workplace just like the university
just like the state just like the economy manages our social death,
translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from our
family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social
conflict.
Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student
body representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations
officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social
death? What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we
assume, what desires we dismiss?
And in this moment of crisis they ask us to twist ourselves in a way
that they can hear. Petitions to Sacramento, phone calls to Congressmen
— even the chancellor patronizingly congratulates our September 24^(th)
student strike, shaping the meaning and the force of the movement as a
movement against the policies of Sacramento. He expands his
institutional authority to encompass the movement. When students begin
to hold libraries over night, beginning to take our first baby step as
an autonomous movement he reins us in by serendipitously announcing
library money. He manages movement, he kills movement by funneling it
into the electoral process. He manages our social death. He looks
forward to these battles on his terrain, to eulogize a proposition, to
win this or that — he and his look forward to exhausting us.
He and his look forward to a reproduction of the logic of representative
governance, the release valve of the university plunges us into an abyss
where ideas are wisps of ether — that is, meaning is ripped from action.
Let’s talk about the fight endlessly, but always only in their managed
form: to perpetually deliberate, the endless fleshing-out-of — when we
push the boundaries of this form they are quick to reconfigure
themselves to contain us: the chancellor’s congratulations, the
reopening of the libraries, the managed general assembly — there is no
fight against the administration here, only its own extension.
Each day passes in this way, the administration on the look out to shape
student discourse — it happens without pause, we don’t notice nor do we
care to. It becomes banal, thoughtless. So much so that we see we are
accumulating days: one semester, two, how close to being this or that,
how far? This accumulation is our shared history. This accumulation —
every once in a while interrupted, violated by a riot, a wild protest,
unforgettable fucking, the overwhelming joy of love, life shattering
heartbreak — is a muted, but desirous life. A dead but restless and
desirous life.
The university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts
also, but it also steals and homogenizes meaning. As much as capital is
invested in building a killing apparatus abroad, an incarceration
apparatus in California, it is equally invested here in an apparatus for
managing social death. Social death is, of course, simply the power
source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of reform,
responsibility, unity. A ‘life,’ then, which serves merely as the public
relations mechanism for death: its garrulous slogans of freedom and
democracy designed to obscure the shit and decay in which our feet are
planted. Yes, the university is a graveyard, but it is also a factory: a
factory of meaning which produces civic life and at the same time
produces social death. A factory which produces the illusion that
meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the
empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life
(identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private
property). Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future. Everywhere
democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a
way acceptable to the electoral state, discourse designed to make our
very moments here together into a set of legible and fruitless demands.
Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the
proliferation of technologies of death. As elsewhere, things rule. Dead
objects rule. In this sense, it matters little what face one puts on the
university — whether Yudof or some other lackey. These are merely the
personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the
buildings, the flows of materials into and out of the physical space of
the university — each one the product of some exploitation — which seek
to absorb more of our work, more tuition, more energy. The university is
a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to absorb more
and more of the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery:
high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office complexes. And at
this critical juncture the only way it can continue to grow is by more
intense exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the
departments that fail to pass the test of ‘relevancy.’
But the ‘irrelevant’ departments also have their place. With their
‘pure’ motives of knowledge for its own sake, they perpetuate the blind
inertia of meaning ostensibly detached from its social context. As the
university cultivates its cozy relationship with capital, war and power,
these discourses and research programs play their own role, co-opting
and containing radical potential. And so we attend lecture after lecture
about how ‘discourse’ produces ‘subjects,’ ignoring the most obvious
fact that we ourselves are produced by this discourse about discourse
which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words
about words which matter. The university gladly permits the
precautionary lectures on biopower; on the production of race and
gender; on the reification and the fetishization of commodities. A taste
of the poison serves well to inoculate us against any confrontational
radicalism. And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which
contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution
inside books, lecture halls.
There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the
truth. The university is a graveyard — así es. The graveyard of liberal
good intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy. Here
the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living. We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the
skeletons of this or that social cliché. In seminars and lectures and
essays, we pay tribute to the university’s ghosts, the ghosts of all
those it has excluded — the immiserated, the incarcerated, the
just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and banished by a few
well-meaning phrases and research programs, given their book titles,
their citations. This is our gothic — we are so morbidly aware, we are
so practiced at stomaching horror that the horror is thoughtless.
In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the
conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within
prescribed identity categories — our force will be dependent on the
limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we are at odds with
one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums,
activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors,
politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/
administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we
are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or
faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or
we are custodians, or we are shift leaders — each with our own office,
place, time, and given meaning. We form teams, clubs, fraternities,
majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and
subcultures — and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial
plot. Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard?
In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation,
which in reality translates to a value of domination. We spend money and
energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else.
Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than
everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others.
It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should
never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a
bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from them their
capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing.
It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this
same dream of domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious,
young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this.
We are convinced, owned, broken. We know their values better than they
do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate of sacred
values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater — the
fight between the university and its own students — we have used their
words on their stages: Save public education!
When those values are violated by the very institutions which are
created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and
we call it injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for
them to adhere to their values. What many have learned again and again
is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not
for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are
not even our own.
The values create popular images and ideals (healthcare, democracy,
equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your
bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of
commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion
of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of
exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation
in general. They sell the practice through the image. We’re taught we’ll
live the images once we accept the practice.
In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the
British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to
be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically
and socially — which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an
escalation, a provocation. Their most recent attempt to reorganize
wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to
accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the
university, to see just how dead we are willing to play, how
non-existent, how compliant, how desirous.
Every institution has of course our best interest in mind, so much so
that we’re willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a
submissive pose in the classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the
dorm, and eventually or simultaneously in the workplace to pay back
those debts. Each bulging institutional value longing to become more
than its sentiment through us, each of our empty gestures of
feigned-anxiety to appear under pressure, or of cool-ambivalence to
appear accustomed to horror, every moment of student life, is the
management of our consent to social death.
Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our
own lack of meaning. It’s the positions we thoughtlessly enact. It’s the
particular nature of being owned.
Social rupture is the initial divorce between the owners and the owned.
A social movement is a function of war. War contains the ability to
create a new frame, to build a new tension for the agents at play, new
dynamics in the battles both for the meaning and the material. When we
move without a return to their tired meaning, to their tired
configurations of the material, we are engaging in war.
It is November 2009. For an end to the values of social death we need
ruptures and self-propelled, unmanaged movements of wild bodies. We
need, we desire occupations. We are an antagonistic dead.
Talk to your friends, take over rooms, take over as many of these dead
buildings. We will find one another.
“Life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather
political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely
only through a decision.”
— Giorgio Agamben