magic and activism

08 Jan 2021

(little piece from my zine-in-progress Witchcraft Is Social Change)

WHAT IS WITCHCRAFT? AND WHAT IS WITCHCRAFT IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL CHANGE?

There’s two ways to define witchcraft or magic that intertwine. The first one is to play it safe. It’s when you define magic as a a way to change reality in order to attain some results. In this context, everything is magic. Seduction can be magic. Coding can be magic. There’s in my opinion nothing wrong with that, except that it can also allow the interpretation of a rationalized magic that would eventually deny the real magic.

The second definition of magic would be the one that specifically in describe this magic we believed in when we were children. The magic of the unexplained. The magic of nature’s mysteries not yet discovered (or even impossible to discover/apprehend). The magic behind a shaman levitating, behind your first birth chard reading that illuminates so many things of your life.

I will – of course – not stop myself at the first definition and rather extend to and englobe the second when I will talk about magic or witchcraft here. I do use magic and witchcraft interchangeably, but I do recognize a little nuance in the two. Magic is everywhere, naturally. Witchcraft involves human interventions. But at the same time, I recognize that magic is a human concept and that, maybe, we just label magic things we cannot explain since the beginning of time, that maybe, at the end of the day, what we are doing when we are practicing magic are acts that are less supernatural than we could think.

What does witchcraft means in the context of social change? What does witchcraft looks like as a political tool? Well, if we look at our first definition, we could dare to say that activism, or any kind of attempt to alter status quo, is witchcraft. But this does not satisfy me. It would be a ‘‘play if safe’’ answer. For me, to use witchcraft as a political tool is :

• an answer to Audre Lorde famous words saying that ‘‘we cannot unbuild the masters’ house with the masters tools’’
• to acknowledge the importance of the symbolic and engage in fight on symbolic ground (and therefore acknowledge that the “battle of the imagination” is not frivolous)
• in the spirit of diversity of tactics, to leave the realm of the purely rational and include the poetic and the magical in our arsenal
• to follow emergent strategies that mimics the wisdom of nature
• to use divination tools to better guide and strategize our actions and movements
• to reclaim personal power and agency
• to allow the bigger forces of the universe to help us in our quest for social justice and to recognize the relational nature of all things
• to cherish our intuition as our intuition is our strongest tool to keep us in satefy while we march toward the tommorow we seek (because the world is now too complex to be apprehended in its entirety by the mind alone)

cultural premonition

19 Dec 2020

When I was studying in International relations, I fell in love with constructivism. Because in international relations theory there is few proeminent intellectual currents, namely the realist school, who are just a bunch of pessimists folks who seek war, and the liberalists, which are a bit better but never convinced me. Well, I fell in love with my idea of constructivism because when I looked back into the definition of it in the context of international relations, I realize it didn’t meant what I thought it meant.

The realists would say that wars are inevitable. The liberalists would say that they can be avoided if states are strongly interdependant. The real constructivists would say that it depends on how the states perceive themselves, or something like that.

Maybe in my misunderstanding I was foreshadowing my future, now current, anarchist view of the world (in the political sense, not the international relations sense). Because in my understanding of constructivism, it wasn’t about ‘‘states self-perception’‘…. like states don’t have consciousness, they merely exist since they are afterall just abstract concept (something that people don’t stress hard enough in my opinion). No, my understanding of constructivism was that international relations were, at the end of the day, shaped by the perceptions of real people. Like not only politicians and diplomats, but the regular people too.

With this in mind, my constructivist take on wars would be ‘‘if the people think war is legitimate, then war will happen, but if the people think it’s illegitimate, then it won’t’’.

Even if I don’t study international relations much anymore, it doesn’t interest me much, this constructivist thinking stayed with me in my new fields of study. Well, I’m still having a hard time drawing the lines about what my current fields of study are but let’s say that I’m all about how to shape the future. I wouldn’t say it’s futurism in and on itself, but I guess I could say that I’m doing some very transdisciplinary futurism.

My constructivist take on shaping the futures is all about narratives and the collective unconscious in some way. I’m a big fan of Jung and even if I sometimes forget about him for a while, he’s always there in my heart. Therefore, I am guilty, just like all the other academics, to bring Jung to the table to feel credible when I talk about esoteric matters hehe.

Remember when I mention capitalist realism in my It always goes back to ambitopia post? Well this idea of “it’s easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is very anchored in my constructivist story. (Just to mention that I am starting to be very more critic of the term “end of the world” or apocalypse but I won’t dive into this here.) The Youtube channel Some More News recently put online their Some More News : The Movie video and it really helped me connect the dot. This 2 hours “movie” is in fact more like a homemade documentary about american apocalyptic science-fiction and pop culture. They look at sci-fi movies from the 70s to ours days and the constat is quite clear : since the 70s, American cinema is selling us the idea of the end of the world, the idea that we are doomed, that nobody will act upon the upcoming crisis and that the new generations’ aims must simply be survival. One great example of this is how people born in the 1990 grew up with what seemed innocent back-then The Land Before Time (or Petit pied in French) which follow a bunch of dinosaur kids who are trying to survive extinctions (the only adult, the mother of the main charachter, dies at the beginning of the movie.)

A few days after watching this video, I remembered a podcast I listened to when I used to live in Rosemont and had to walk on Beaubien in 2019. I managed to find it back, it was an episode of Occulture, more precisely the Sync or Swim episode with synchromystic Chris Knowles. The guest, Knowles, is blogging about how pop culture can predict the future (he also wrote a book about the matter). He is especially into comics and superheroes if I remember correctly. And this idea of pop culture premonition very resonate with my understanding of the collective unconscious. It also fits well my narratives-centered approach to futurism.

I recently started to dive more deep into africanfuturism. I must say I am mesmerized by the Black imagination and I am ashamed I haven’t started reading Black authors earlier in my life. Of course, since I just started to discover this universe, I feel like I’m seeing it everywhere now. I mean, for sure, it’s partly in my head, but also I haven’t hallucinated the ampleur of the movement Black Lives Matter. The stories in Black SF are incredibly realist but also incredibly hopeful quite often. They don’t simply offer entertainment, most of the time they offer creative way to counter-attack oppressive forces. And this brings a lot of joy and excitement to me. And… you know where I’m getting… If this become the mainstream (or at least, reach the mainstream), and if to be in the mainstream = to be a premonition in some way, it gives us such a more fertile future.

EDIT 31/01/2021 : I am a bit more critical of Jung since I wrote that, thanks to an enlightning conversation with a friend. I feel noob navigating the academic world sometimes, and I often have a hard times make it work with my decolonial approach, but hey, that’s the journey. The ideas in this text still stand though.

topics to explore in 2021

18 Dec 2020

I honestly don’t think I’ll be able to stick to any plan in 2021. I am always changing my plans. But here’s a few certainty for 2021 :

• I will do at least one semester in Animation culturelle at UQAM.
• I will try TELUQ’s system by taking at least one class from the Majeure en éducation aux adultes.
• I will run for mayor or municipal advisor in the upcoming municipal elections in Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

Regarding those facts, here some stuff I absolutely want to study in my spear time or throughout my school project :

• Municipalism and history of Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve
• Critical analysis of school (bell hooks, Eli Meyerhoff)

And then in general, here’s a few things I’d like to try in 2021:

• Actually read more sci-fi novels than texts about the revolutionary potential of sci-fi novels
• Also read, write and submit more poetry (and essays?) to magazines
• Do at least 1 workshop/bookclub on a political topic
• Record podcasts for real
• Create a platform to cover the municipal elections/connect with people through the municipal elections

On a more personal side, I’d like to continue :

• To study tarot, namely through Lindsay Mack’s classes
• To deepen my astrological practices by learning more about aspects, synastry and medical astrology
• To persevere in my investigation at the intersection of divinations tools and activism
• To read more about indigenous spiritualities
• To read muslim feminists and Tunisian writers
• To practice glitch art and painting and drawing and dancing
• To get better at taking care of a variety of plants
• To deepen my care praxis and understanding of the ethics of care

EDIT 31/01/2021 : Well, I changed my mind about trying to go to TELUQ and I’m also somewhat giving up in advance in reading more novels than last year.

EDIT 03/03/2021 : Well, I finally just signed up to a Knowledge Management class offered by TELUQ. Also, I finished two novels (one sci-fi) and I am planning to read at least two others in the near future (also one sci-fi, plus a Tunisian writer) so I guess I am not giving up on my reading ambitions.

research is ceremony

09 Nov 2020

So I’ve been posting erotic glitch art on Instagram for a few months now, but it’s been a perilous path : Instagram doesn’t like erotic content. It got me to experiment with Are.na again (here’s my profile!) and I’m very happy I did go back to this platform. I realized that there’s so many cool kids over there researching all the weird things I’m interested into (guerilla theory, cybernetics, decolonization, that kind of thing). The latest treasure I’ve found on Are.na is this scanned document on Indigenous research methods and I was just in awe in front of this text.

First, since I’ve been reading mostly articles online for so long, I felt very nostalgic to see this scanned document with little marks on the pages to indicate which parts are important. Second, I felt very happy to see that somebody somewhere took the time the highlights of this book (which felt different once again, from me usually just downloading whole books and browsing through them in my solitude). Also, the way the author of this book write (I was about to write speak, and I think speak would be adequate here for once) really warmed my heart. For once, an academic text didn’t feel cold. It isn’t surprising from an Indigenous writer honestly.

I was happy to realize that, despite the fact that I have found this text in an obscure corner of the internet, the book in and on itself wasn’t that obscure and could be downloaded. I’m very excited to dive more into Indigenous methodology and praxis in academia. But for now I’d like to just let here the most important passage of what I’ve read so far.

[…] an Indigenous methodology must be a process that adheres to relation accountability. Respect, reciprocity and responsibility are key features of any healthy relationship and must be included in an Indigenous methodology; Cora (Weber-Pillwax, 2001) call these the 3’R’s of Indigeneous research and learning. In and Indigenous research paradigm, the researcher must ask :

• How do my methods help to build respectufl relationships between the topic that I am studying and myself as researcher (on multiple levels)?
• How do my methods help to build repectful relationships between myself and the other research participants?
• How can I relate respectfully to other participants involved in this research so that together we can form a stronger relationship with the idea that we will share?
• What is my role as researcher in this relationship, and what are my responsibilties?
• Am I being responsible in fulfiling my role and obligations to the other participants, to the topic and to all of my relations?
• What am I contributing of giving back to the relationship? Is the sharing, growth and learning that is taking place reciprocal?

Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is Ceremony, p.77.

mental health and how to fight for uncertainty

13 Sep 2020

Lately I’ve been thinking about making some kind of “Emotional Intelligence Toolkit for Activists”. This toolkit would include tips on

• self-knowledge, including knowing one’s own limitations
• dealing with a complex and overwhelming world
• sustainable ways to maintain hope

While, on one hand, I see an urgent need for something like that in activist circles, in the other hand, I see value in such a toolkit for everybody.

But today’s reflection is more on the last point, aka sustainable ways to maintain hope. In fact, what I’m going to present might seems for some a very twisted way to do so, but I still think it’s worth exploring this idea.

So I have read the text Beginning with the End by Roy Scranton and what is stated in this essay is that “[t]he world has already ended, over and over, for countless peoples and epochs”, in an attempt to re-frame what we consider “the world”. The other focus point of Scranton is that the only certainty about the future is its uncertainty.

He starts by acknowledging how uncertainty can be troubling for the human psyche, by talking about we collectively need meaning.

“Nature” has no inherent meaning, yet paradoxically “nature” made humans conscious, social animals who find such groundlessness infuriating, nearly incomprehensible, and all but impossible to live with in a day-to-day way, since our daily activities, our sense of being in the world, and our sense of the world itself are motivated and made meaningful not merely by unconscious reaction and instinct, but by individually imagined and collectively produced symbolic structures, which is to say beliefs and stories […]

But he doesn’t leave the reader on such a disappointing note. With a zen approach in mind he suggests that “[t]here is another way” :

Accepting unknowing. Embracing the void. Recognizing the limits of human knowledge. Relinquishing our consoling fictions about the future. Acknowledging the transience of the present and seeing in the death of what is the birth of what will become. It may be true, as Kermode argues, that we cannot exist without imposing some order on the chaos of experience, yet this insight makes possible the realization that the relationship between order and chaos, form and emptiness, meaning and void, is not dichotomous, but dialectical, as articulated in the Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”

He introduces the concept of an “apophatic futurism”, following the spirit of the satori of Buddists and the “radical hope” of philosopher Jonathan Lear.

Apophatic futurism recognizes that we cannot know how climate change and ecological catastrophe are going to transform our world, how human civilization will change in response, how human beings will adapt to the new world of the Anthropocene, or who we will become in the future—yet it also remains committed to some future human existence, no matter what form that existence takes, no matter who that human is. Perhaps the least consoling form of consolation, this via negativa might also be the one most responsible to reality and the idea of collective human endeavor. Insofar as apophatic futurism insists on the impossibility of saying what the future holds, it is a kind of nihilism, a total negation, a learning to die, a great “No.” It accepts the end of the world as given. Yet insofar as apophatic futurism rejects all the spurious fictions of apocalypse which clamor to claim our faith, the utopian and the dystopian, the heavenly and the hellish, it remains committed to the possibility of a new world yet to be born.

I very like how he phrases it. I think it’s an interesting way to see it in the specific time we are in. Like, objectively, the impact of climate changes are getting more real everyday. Subjectively, we feel like it’s “more here than ever” because it’s happening in the USA right now (I’m thinking namely of the California fires) and the USA has more media coverage than the rest of the world.

I myself refrained from going to protest lately and became very less politically active on social medias because of anxiety. No matter how rational I’m trying to be, I’m getting stressed out. And I’m a very optimist person to begin with. Nonetheless, I try to remain aware of my feelings. I’m trying to see what’s beneath this anxiety and a lot of it is grief.

I once read an article I cannot find anymore which said something like this : the fight for social change is one where generations learn to lose over and over again, but every time stand up and “lose in a more effective way”. But in those days, I feel like no matter how much battles we lose and how many battles there is left, there is no way we can balance the score and win the war. But I don’t want to give up.

So I have this “funny story” I’m telling myself now, which goes in the vibe of what Scranton is saying himself, but it sounds very less intelligent on my end. Personally, I’m picturing myself an extraterrestrial civilization. I imagine them discovering the Earth in a distant future. We have “failed”, so maybe there is no human survivor (but there is probably still life on Earth, but it doesn’t really matter). If they decide to study our long gone civilization (I’m quite convinced some marks of our presence will remain in some way), I want them to discover that we try our hardest until the very end to fight against the barbarians capitalist, that until the very end we were making the best we could on this little time allowed on Earth.

Feel free to steal that little story. Otherwise, to study zen might be a good spiritual alternative to remain sane. And more seriously, the subject deserve much more thorough analysis and I shall come back to it.

In the meantime, let’s hold space for our collective grief.

EDIT 06/10/2020 : I’ve just read the speech of Russell Means, member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, from July 1980 and this passage offers a future worth meditating about.

American Indians have been trying to explain this to Europeans for centuries. But, as I said earlier, Europeans have proven themselves unable to hear. The natural order will win out, and the offenders will die out, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by over-populating a given region. It’s only a matter of time until what Europeans call “a major catastrophe of global proportions” will occur. It is the role of American Indian peoples, the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don’t want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear. That’s revolution.