policy {glossary}
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done. –Peter F. Drucker
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quote is from fragments of an anarchist anthropology [graeber policy law]
.@davidgraeber on policy https://t.co/ntHr8gj4Zz
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/youngdayjob/status/824698268546273280
human\e constitution ness
cfr (foreign policy)
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imagine we simplify/humanize:
and/or..
abandon..
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We’re suggesting a [new/old] narrative that cuts straight to the heart of the matter. One that questions the essence of what it means to be human and alive. One that questions if we are doing what matters with the hours of our days.
We’re suggesting, perhaps, a solution, an awareness, a betterment, …, that involves just two simple guidelines:
1. attachment – being known by someone. co-creating. being us.
2. authenticity – finding the thing you can’t not do. talking to yourself. being you.
Imagine we become efficient at just those two things..
imagine pruning out the busyness of a day, by focussing on just two things.
[a typical district has 500+ policies.]
——attachment & authenticity
Unfortunately, when we aren’t experiencing a healthy attachment, we seek to satisfy that hunger in ways that rarely bring rest [ie: pleasing people, accolades/diplomas/degrees]. Too often, we let that longing for attachment trump authenticity. And then the cycle continues. We end up with 500 policies/rules for living each day. We end up getting little that matters done. We end up in unrest. -paraphrase Gabor Mate
Work (school/whatever) is where we get the least done. – Jason Fried
Schools teach but a billionth of a percent of the knowledge in the world, yet we quibble endlessly about which billionth of a percent is important, and the order in which is should be presented.
– Seymour Papert
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.–John Maeda.
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from Fred and Stefano‘s the undercommons:
5 – planning and policy
74
what we are calling policy is the new form command takes as command takes hold. . in the undercommons of the social reproductive realm the means, which is to say the planners, are still part of the plan. and the plan is to invent the means in a common experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night. this ongoing experiment w the informal.. is what we mean by planning.. planning in the undercommons is not an activity.. not fishing/dancing/teaching/loving, but the ceaseless experiment w the futurial presence of the forms of life that make such activities possible.. it is these means that were eventually stolen by, in having been willingly given up to, state socialism whose perversion of planning was a crime second only to the deployment of policy in today’s command econ..
75
what policy represents is a new weapon in the hands of these citizen deputies..t
So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. – Bucky
76
planning is self sufficiency at the social level, and it reproduces in its experiment not just what it needs, life, but what it wants, life in difference, in the play of the general antagonism..
policy deputises those willing to, those who come to want to, break up these means as a way of controlling them, as once it was necessary to de skill a worker in a factory by breaking up his means of production.. and it does this by diagnosing the planners.. policy says that those who plan have something wrong w them, something deeply – ontologically – wrong w them.. this is the first thrust of policy as dispersed, deputised command. what’s wrong w them?..t.. they won’t change.. they won’t embrace change. they’ve lost hope.. so say the policy deputies.. they need to be given hope.. they need to see that change is the only option. by change what the policy deputies mean is contingency, risk, flexibility and adaptability to the groundless ground of the hollow capitalist subject, in the realm of automatic subjection that is capital.. policy is thus arrayed in the exclusive and exclusionary uniform/ity of contingency as imposed consensus,..t which both denies and at the very same time seeks to destroy the ongoing plans, the fugitive initiations, the black operations, of the multitude..
as resistance from above, policy is a new class phenom.. because the act of making policy for others, of pronouncing others as incorrect..t.. is at the same time and audition for a post-fordist econ that deputies believe rewards those who embrace change, but which, in reality, arrests them in contingency, flexibility, and that administered precarity that imagines itself to be immune from the judith butler might call our undercommon precariousness.. this econ is powered by constant and automatic insistence upon the externalization of risk, the placement at an externally imposed risk of all life, so that work against risk can be harvested w/o end..
77
every utterance of policy, no matter its intent or content, is first and foremost a demonstration of one’s ability to be close to the top in the hierarchy of the post-fordists economy
as an operation from above designed to break up the means of social reproduction and make them directly productive for capital, policy must first deal w the fact that the multitude is already productive for itself. this productive imagination is its genius, its impossible, and nevertheless material, collective head. and this is a problem because plans are afoot, black operations are in effect, and in the undercommons all the organizing is done. the multitude uses every quiet moment, ever sundown, every moment of militant preservation, to plan together, to launch, to compose (in ) its surreal time. it is difficult for policy to deny these plans directly, to ignore these operations, to pretend that those who stay in motion need to stop and get a vision, to contend that base communities for escape need to believe in escape.. .. of course, some plans can be dismissed by policy – plans hatched darker than blue, on the criminal side, out of love..
78
so how does policy attempt to break this means, this militant preservation, all this planning? after the diagnosis that something is deeply wrong w the planners comes the prescription: help and correction. policy will help… policy will help w the plan and , even more, policy will correct the planners.. policy will discover what is not yet theorized, what is not yet fully contingent, and most importantly what is not yet legible..
legible ness
policy is correction, forcing itself w mechanical violence upon the incorrect, the uncorrected, the ones who do not know to seek their own correction.. policy distinguishes itself from planning by distinguishing those who dwell in policy and fix things from those who dwell in planning and must be fixed..
this is the first rule of policy. it fixes others..t
sounds like our delirious ness about work
and because such policy emerges materially from the post fordist opportunism, policy must optimally allow for each policy deputy to take advantage of his opportunity and fix others as others, as whose who have not just made an error in planning (or indeed an error by planning) but who are themselves in error.. and from the perspective of policy,… there is indeed something wrong w those who plan together..
79
they need vision.. because from the perspective of policy it is too dark in there, in the black heart of the undercommons, to see.. the deputies can bring hope, and hope can lift planners and their plans, . above ground into the light..
it is crucial that planner choose to participate.. policy is a mass effort
spinach or rock ness and public consensus as oppression..
80
intellectual will write article in the newspapers, philosophers will hold conferences on new utopias, bloggers will debate, and politicians will compromise here, where change is policy’s only constant.
participating in change is the second rule of policy
now hope is an orientation toward this participation in change, this participation as change. this is the hope policy rolls like tear gas into the undercommons..
policy is not so much a position as a disposition, a disposition toward display. this is why policy’s chief manifestation is governance..
governance would not be confused w govt or govermentality. governance is more importantly a new form of expropriation (the action by the state or an authority of taking property from its owner for public use or benefit.. dispossessing)… it is the provocation of a certain kind of display, a display of interests as disinterestedness, a display of convertibility, a display of legibility.. governance is an instrumentalisation of policy, a set of protocols of deputisation, where on simultaneously auctions and bids on oneself, where the public and the private submit themselves to post-fordist production..
governance is the harvesting of the means of social reproduction but it appears as the acts of will, and therefore as the death drive, of the harvested..
the ones who would correct and the ones who would be corrected converge around this imperative of submission that is played out constantly not only in the range of correctional facilities that foucault analysed – the prisons, the hospitals, the asylums – but also in corporations, unis and ngos..t
81
governance, despite its own hopes for a universality of exclusion, if for the inducted, for those who know how to articulate interest disinterestedly, those who vote and know why they vote (not because someone is black or female but because he or she is smart), who have opinions and want to be taken seriously by serious people. in the mean time, policy must still pursue the quotidian sphere of open secret plans. policy posits curriculum against study, child development against play, human capital against work. it posits having a voice against hearing voices… policy posits the public sphere, or the counter public sphere, or the black public sphere, against the illegal occupation of the illegitimately privatized.
policy is not the one against the many, the cynical against the romantic, or the pragmatic against the principled it is simply baseless vision, woven into settler’s fabric. it is against all conservation, all rest, all gathering, cooking, drinking and smoking if they lead to marronage (the process of extricating oneself from slavery).. policy’s vision is to break it up then fix it.. move it along by fixing it, manufacture ambitions and give it to your children. policy’s hope is that there will be more policy, more participation, more change. but there is also a danger in all their participation, a danger of crisis..
when those who plan together start to participate w/o first being fixed. this leads to crisis.. participation w/o fully entering the blinding light of this dim enlightenment, w/o fully functioning families and financial responsibility, w/o respect for the rule of law, w/o distance and irony, w/o submission to the rule of expertise; participation that is too loud, too fat, too loving, too full, too flowing, to dread; this leads to crisis.. people are in crisis. economies are in crisis. we are facing an unprecedented crisis, a crisis of participation and crisis of faith.. is there any hope..? yes, there is, say the deputies, if we can pull together, if we can share a vision of change.. for policy, any crisis in the productivity of radical contingency is a crisis in participation, which is to say, a crisis provoked by the wrong participation of the wrong(ed). this is the third rule of policy..
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we plan to stay, to stick and move.. we plan to e communist about communism, to be unreconstructed about reconstruction, to be absolute about abolition, here , in that other, undercommons place, as that other, undercommon thing, that we preserve by inhabiting. policy can’t see it, policy can’t read it, but it’s intelligible if you got a plan..
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CityLab (@CityLab) tweeted at 5:25 AM – 30 Nov 2019 :
In California, more than 90 percent of law enforcement agencies use policies written by Lexipol, a private company with no public oversight. #citylabarchive https://t.co/SYf3gWrutK (http://twitter.com/CityLab/status/1200752618773123072?s=17)
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from david’s fragments of an anarchist anthropology – quoted on top of page in tweet from:
89 [9]
against policy (a tiny manifesto):
the notion of ‘policy’ presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will on others. ‘policy’ is the negation of politics; policy is by defn something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted..
policyness.. and any form of people telling people what to do – any form of m\a\p
graeber policy law
so.. the question becomes: what sort of social theory would actually be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to govern their own affairs?
this is what this pamphlet is mainly about.. for starters, i would say any such theory would have to begin w some initial assumptions.. not many.. probably just two.. 1\ another world is possible.. that institutions like the state, capitalism, racism, and male dominance are not inevitable.. that it would d be possible to have a world in which these things would not exist, and that we’d all be better off as a result..
act of faith.. it might turn out such a world is not possible.. but one could also make the argument that it’s this very unavailability of absolute knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative: since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today..
this is ridiculous ness.. dawn of everything (book) ness.. and..
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen (fitting with his first proposal – another world is possible)
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people (fitting with his second proposal – no coercion.. no inevitable history.. but a bit of a stretch as his/this second proposal is talking democratic admin org.. which is better.. but not legit freedom..ie: observed/repeat-back ness.. we need imagine if we ness)
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be you. 