Lipos-polis (towards Amphi-polis) - from the series Amphoteric Poems & Sound is a Sound Argument

Collaborations from Mayakov+sky Platform featuring 

poet Lara Durback, composer/sound artist Savvas Metaxas 

and electronica performance duo Raspberry Fields

 

Kepos (Leitmotif)

    

    Cherry Tree (Skylight)

 

Circuit  

EX to EXO (☒ to ⦻)

i) Threading the system 

ii) Stitches, circling the square 

(Naughts@Knots to Notes & Nots)

 

iii) Smorgasbord 

iv) Brains and Drains

Studies in Amphoteric Architecture 

1. Cyclical Structure
2. Hyper-Optimization
3. Gradual Clarity to Mass Alacrity
4. Pseudo-Vertical Breathing Centrifugality
5. Mobile Dynamics
6. Tangent Plasticity (Nymphaea Effect)

1. The Nations of Capitalism

  a) Public Transportation Möbius Strip

 

2. Hysterohistory (towards an architecture of history) 

a) Communal Space  

3. Phases

A) Identifying   

B) Modifying (Residue – Digestion)     

 

a) Congestion - (B)rains in (P)reason  

b) Autogestion & Public Transportation Möbius Strip  

 

4. Metastasis   

 

 

5. Beehive Behaviorism  

6. hellen-hol(o)=hol(o)-hellen  (Nymphaea Effect)  

 

Re-Fugue   

in loving memory of poet Csaba Polony

Amphoterics (Degradation)  

 

Capitalist recipe for sale    

  

Insurrectionary Plateau and 

the Staircase Effect (on Perpetual Praxis)  

&

Syllogism

Moon Contour II (Re-gnomon no Monger) 

Golden Ratio of the Revolution  
   

towards Eggydemia

Delta (in between)   

 

Robin Banks 

& the Valences (Fillers) of Money/Value

   

Manifold

 

Elephantiasis

for Kojin Karatani

Not a hyperbole (the problem with dialectics) 

Winds of change

Notes on Amphoterical Economics

1.    Let’s hypothesize. There is a hacker named Robin Banks. She has managed to hack a PayPal account.  She enters a store that sells computers (new and second hand). She has chosen this store specifically because she knows that you can buy a computer with a PayPal account. She chooses a second hand laptop. She plays with it for a little bit (the plan) and affirms to one of the employees that she wants to buy it. She (the plan) asks for the store’s website and mentions that she can buy the laptop on the spot (thru the laptop itself) using her PayPal account. She shows a fake ID (the account’s real owner), buys the laptop and leaves.

Let’s talk about ontology. This paradigm would have been the first in economic history where a consumer buys a commodity by using the same commodity. The ultimate economic Ding an sich. Just think about it. She bought the laptop with the laptop itself (Eugene Ionesco would have called it The self-buying laptop). The Marxian categories (currency, surplus value, production, circulation, consumption and so on) by no means vanish (per se). Nevertheless, the variables Internet, meaning fourth dimension, meaning software, meaning services, meaning electricity, meaning binary system, meaning neo-materiality of currency and value, mean that we must urgently understand and confront the new reality (of capital(ism)). The above hypothesis is a prime example of an amphoteric.  Money does exist but in this case, via hacking and the rest of the hypothesis M-C-M' becomes M=C=M', or in other words Wertding = Wertkorper. The forms are not just perverted, they are dematerialized. We want the workers to produce the (final) Crisis but what happens when the Crisis is easily (de)immaterialized or when the worker is not the only one who creates new value?

2.    Let’s hypothesize. There is an inventor and engineer named Robin Banks. In collaboration with other communist scientists (the question already arises: where are these communist scientists?) she manages to build a 3D printer that builds 3D printers. This amphoteric (speculation) is crucial in considering the idea and procedure called factory. One of the biggest mistakes Lenin and his communist party ever made was the failure to investigate and produce the idea of a purely communist architecture i.e. an effective architecturally and functionally communist factory (My proposal being Kepos (Leitmotif)). Whether seizing a factory or constructing a strong industrial(ist) nation he would have (and he did) to just (unjustly amphoterically in macro and micro) return to “the” Keynesian. The form, the structure, the architecture called factory begs for a manifold of surpluses and division(s) of labor into classes (i.e. not communism). Nonetheless, what do we learn (for the future) from the permutations: small-scale manufactory and 3D printer?  The capitalists are planning a future of maximum individualism, the self-factory, the autonomous consumer, the self-monopoly (overaccumulation of capital). 

     They will keep the (factory) working class exploited and decentralized in the periphery (overaccumulation of labor) to produce the basic “materials” of capitalism and they will take in their hands “a” (but not all) production. It is still in its infancy but we gradually observe a new upper class that makes its own bread, grows vegetables in its back yard, builds its own (minimalist, modernist, mobile) houses and “communities” within urban centers. Urban farming, nonetheless, has emerged as a new form of anti-capital struggle.  Is Software the new factory, a new kind of class? Are we living the era of Coder (upper class), Hardware (proletariat) and Software Class (Bourgeoisie)? Are robots & 3D printers the new labor subjects? The computer is not the same constant capital as the traditional machine.

3.    Electricity. Repetition is the mother of knowledge. Electricity. If the hacker Robin Banks could hack or/and sabotage/jam satellites, that would be enough to destroy the world banking system. Repetition is the mother of knowledge. The world banking system cannot function (at all) without satellites. Satellites, meaning electricity. Electricity (energy) and internet, meaning the real currency of our times (see note 1 and 2). Satellites are a new kind of constant capital, a thermosphere/exosphere capital, which complicates the notion & praxis of (class) struggle and capital expansion. Let’s not forget that electricity is produced in factories. It’s a commodity. Nonetheless, electricity is, amphoterically, a potential anti-capital commune.

4.    Capitalism is experimental unlimited. A perpetual unfinished form. Chronocidal (time exists because it appears as commodity). Capital equals private (ownersh)ipso facto(ry). 

5.    Electricity is an Amphoteric (=commodity & currency & capital & capitalist imaginary & military weapon & fourth-dimension & energy & signified + signifier & Anthropocene)

i) The First Transcontinental Railroad (1,912 miles) was constructed, between 1863 and 1869, in the United States with the help of almost 15.000 Chinese workers that were “imported” (by labor contractors) straight from China because the white (predominantly) labor power was in scarcity.

ii) During the summer of 2016, TrainOSE S.A., the only company that operates all passenger and freight trains in Greece decided to go on strike, a decision that could have brought catastrophic consequences in the region. The Chinese shipping and logistics company COSCO did not break a sweat. They utilized the equation Port of Koper (in Slovenia) + feeder lines (a transportation route that is subdivision of the main lines) that were cheap at the time. The result was a zero loss of its global competition advantage. 

The above paradigms are not unique and unprecedented in the history of capital but the argument remains (see note 3). Let’s study, closely, HABITAT I, II & III.

6.    The fundamental forms of society wherein human relations exist are morphing into amphoterics. Digital economy and drones. Banks in a palm. Loans & rents. Their dating. Concentration of bourgeois society in the form of electricity. Belligerent value brilliant. The State as credit factory. Taxes & sex at politics. Reproductive debt & internal colonization. Rates of immigration & the development of underdevelopment (crises). The spectacle is sociology. Capital is ingrown hair. All co(u)ps are capital(’s). Hence, the terminal hypothesis: This very moment all human beings disappear. Would civilization continue? Is it still civilization? Is it still humanity or anthropogenic capital? Is it an electrophoretic Riemannian Manifold? Has all this objectified/institutionalized (reified) gnosis that Castoriadis identifies, via Marx, gone beyond the subject’s hand/economy? All capitalist enemies should be taken seriously. All capital is (a) “the” present (see note 4). As Anti-capitalists, we must confront the present as organized Amphotericists (Anarchists/Communists/Feminists/Autonomists/Anti-Authoritarians), namely, thru immediate international multifarious present and suprapresent struggle (sabotage/re-appropriation of the capitalist mode of production/imaginary, and as importantly, the construction of a synthetic global, solidaritarian, participatory Amphoteric pedagogy/imaginary/architecture) against all patriarchal binaries/social compositions. We abolish class, gender and the state in our daily praxes. We are egress, epiphytes and lichen. Not only transitions but transmissions of new humanisms. We rise above the banality of obvious truth. We are new truths. Yes, we are Eutopia (we'll leave Utopia to the bourgeoisie, its academia and art) and Eggydemia (academia comes from the word εκάς (far) + δήμος (the people), in other words, it means: away/far from the people). Eggy-demia is close (εγγύς) to the people, the dispossessed, the workers-(re)producers-mothers of this totality called Earth. We are Robin Banks.
  

Démarrage (an animation poem)

The donkey of eu(-) 

(eats the straw that breaks the camel’s back)

for Gilberto Francisco Ramos Juarez

(in loving memory of Rod Dibble)

 

Meconium - Poem of the initial (Amphoteric) poem

for my goddaughter R.

 

 

  

Upper & Lower

Abstraction is the only utopia and that is not a compliment

[ c.a.p.i.t.a.l ]

Timomachia – Reddish Green

On Capital and Amphoteric Value

Sarcomachia

 Studies in topology and materiality 

materials studied: wood, hair, concrete, leather, leaves, skin (human palm)  

Archemachia – Helixpolis

 Capital’s Gewalt/Gestalt

Physimachia

for Vilém Flusser

The children revolts
(Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez)

Virus
featuring poetry written and recited by Lara Durback 

Lara Durback's text* included for further study 

*a segment from her book

A Lizard, a Smashed Safe, and a Pillow (Encountered on a Walk in Oakland)

          The man offered me a plum.

She turned to me and said, “Watch out, stay back.”                          [first cough]

And there was a vertical line of one man running at the other man and the one running toward would shove at the other’s shoulders and the other would push back and skip

            back     back     back     back     back                     all the way across the room.

And they would get addicted to it, push

            back     back     back     back     back

almost to the wall of the room.

The same pusher every time, pushing to an edge.  The pusher’s eyes look over the head of the other person and never look at their face. And they go

back     back     back

skip     skip     skip     skip     skip                                       across the room.

Twice they fall backwards but smoothly.

Twice they nearly collide with me.

When they are done they are giddy and laughing, visibly charged.

They run back and do it over and over, like a child to a sliding board.

A lot of this is about tricking the mind so you can act.

You need to see directly, you need to pierce someone with a laser.

You have not seen the stars for a long time and it doesn’t matter. You don’t need them. You don’t need them you are fine.

So is that one.

They are fine, they have everything they need, food and all. They had a wire armature covered in soft fabric, it was as good as a mother. They had a body that you didn’t have, a body that indicated something but also naked, unclothed with the suit of heavy schooling, or falling into finance.

They were safe from the NSA. They were safe from the things the NSA kept from you. They were so safe that they never had to worry about that. Safe from the use of a bank account, safe from being discriminated against for health insurance that didn’t exist. Without it, a smaller island, less need to spread, why leave a 10-block radius, not needed.

Have you ever used the airport?  Without the airport, they never had to worry about turbulence.

[From Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Worker’s Cough]

“I hear the worker coughing down below;

his cough comes up through the ground floor grating

giving onto my garden, so that it avoids resonating among the plants

touched by the sun on this last morning of good weather.

He, the worker, down below, intent at his job, coughs now and then pretty sure no one’s hearing it.

When illness comes it’s received heroically: a worker’s always 18, even if he has kids bigger than him, ones new to that heroism.

In short, in those wracking coughs the tragic meaning of this beautiful October sun is revealed.”

Curtains
featuring music composed and 
performed by Savvas Metaxas

Glaukopis against Weltschmerz & Ersatz
featuring music composed and 
performed by experimental project Raspberry Fields

Unicode of the poor

*Poems/music/animations/films were written/made by Nicholas Komodore, unless indicated otherwise. 

All photos were taken by Nicholas Komodore 

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic 

(CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) for all the above content.