<underfire> re fluid borders, structured chaos, weak discipline

[John Hopkins]

>
>  >> The originary event of peace is compassion.
>
>I love the nobility of this (communicated!) thought. There are people,
>including Vattimo, who have suggested understandings of the "eventual"

...snip...

>(carefree), and we tend to forget the meaning of care as "caring for".
>Is caring not an art?
>
>Kate, your suggestion of
>>  peace is a relationship.
>
>Would correspond to the notion of caring/compassion, but how does a
>relationship occur? To what kind of actions does it give rise that would
>be historically "real". This lead me back to the epistemological
>question. If radical and experimental art is the place whre we might
>look for an "event of peace", than perhaps that event of peace might
>include transforming modes of perception, storage, archivation and
>distribution of works. It would be a matter of radically re-inventing
>media.

I feel that there is a direct relationship between peace and war in 
terms of both being a state of relationship, and specifically, the 
formulation of living energy flow between two people.  In peace this 
flow of relationship, of relation, as mediated by the noumenal world, 
finds pathways between the two that are open despite the inherent 
risk in opening to the unknown Other.  When there is an opening, and 
a flow of relation exists, it fosters a state of compassion, of 
caring.

In war, the social system in which the two are embedded has 
(pre-)determined the conditions of that open flow between the two 
individuals is dangerous and not in the interests of the system. 
Therefore, that relation must be restricted and re-formulated in the 
self interests of the system.

(or that the individuals have relinquished their 
autonomy-of-life-decision and have taken on the vision/image that the 
social system has projected without objection, effectively closing 
any possible open pathway except the energy exchange pathway of 
violence that in the end destroys both -- one through receiving the 
energy of violence, a destroyed body, the other destroyed internally 
through the act of projecting the energy of violence.)

Media, or mediation, is 'that which carries energy' between the two 
beings mentioned above.  In the case of peace, whatever the mediative 
pathway, there is a 'natural' flow.  In the case of war, there are 
significant blockages to the flow, and also the imposition of those 
socially-determined pathways of relation.

Indeed it is an art to care, to practice compassion, and it is only 
half of a dialogue of relation...

cheers
John