tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23487598455218631752024-03-13T20:03:23.061-07:00Of C.L.R. JamesWriting about, inspired by, and tangentially related to the work of the great Trinidadian MarxistChris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.comBlogger75125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-3452529928476941742016-11-06T13:49:00.000-08:002016-11-06T13:54:01.185-08:00Election Fatigue / Politics Fatigue <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Election fatigue. It’s a thing people enjoy jokingly
discussing as the election winds down: the ways that we’ve been made to suffer
through a horrible, seemingly endless spectacle, the general feeling that we
just want it to be over. We have rituals, therapeutic utterances, regimes of
ironic self-care. “Here’s a video of a dog surfing on a duck that is also
vaping to help you get through the election.” “Wake me up in [X unit of time]
when the election is over.” Enough with the election already—enough with
politics for a while. Let cat gifs just be cat gifs, not small inoculations of
ordinariness against the extraordinary time of the election cycle. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So, everyone is tired. Really fucking tired. And it is in
this national exhaustion with the election—which, for much of the nation, is an
exhaustion with politics as such—that we can detect the degrading impact of
electoral seasonality on non-electoral political movements. You will of course
recall hearing, and hearing routinely, a liberal-progressive voting friend say
something like, “Voting takes [X small unit of time]. Do it, then get back out
there, organizing for other things.” The slogan wants to say that voting is
just one item in a possible political repertoire; we shouldn’t over-emphasize
it, one way or another, but we should still do it, if only because it doesn’t
inhibit our ability to do other political things. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is an obviously incorrect statement. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We know that for many people voting doesn’t take a small
amount of time at all. There’s the problem of getting proper ID, registering,
finding a polling place, traveling there, and so on. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We know, furthermore, that people are investing more and
more time into learning things about candidates. The actual content of that
information might be dubious, wrong, or just whacky, but even the dude who
thinks HRC is a lizard person is taking time to think about voting. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Most importantly, what we now know through this election
cycle, in our feelings of fatigue and exhaustion, is that voting does not take
time as a discrete unit: X minutes at the polling place, X hours or days sitting
with debates and press releases and a horde of pundits and their takes. The
election takes time, and takes it as such; it appropriates social time, and
refashions it according to its bizarre rhythms. These rhythms have nothing to
do with the ordinary time of the social. (I’ve never heard anyone in
non-electoral years invest the worst day of the second worst month with any
kind of value.) It’s an alien time that superimposes itself, and then subsumes,
everydayness—the quotidian time of the social, with all its quotidian
deprivations and depletions that mobilize movements.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Fatigue is the experience of being compelled to be present
to a world despite your sense that it is depleting your ability to move within
it. To describe our collective relation to the election as one of fatigue is to
concede the foundational heteronomy that conditions our relationship to the
parliamentary state. We might want to sleep in until the election is over—but we
can’t. We have to go about our lives. And the election insinuates itself into
all aspects of waking life, it’s hard to shut out or shut off, even with
gestures of intense negativity, and it promises to come back, ever 2 years,
every 4 years, and many call this mass suffering democracy. To an extent, then,
the generalized feeling of fatigue marks an ordinary, pop-anarchistic desire to
negate State time. We’re literally tired of it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That’s cool, but I have a simple worry, which is obvious
from everything I’ve written: given the dominance of electoral politics in the
U.S. social imaginary, for many people electoral politics are more or less
collapsible into politics as such. As voting comes to appropriate social time,
the electoral appropriates the political at the level of lived feeling. Election
fatigue becomes politics fatigue, including even those broad genres of
political mobilizing that have little to do with electoral politics. It becomes
hard to imagine the other political things that lib-progressives imagine they’ll
be doing just after they do that temporally insignificant thing of voting, given
that they and everyone else are just so fucking tired. Put in the form of a
thought experiment: Can you imagine a less propitious day for the eruption of a
social movement than the second Tuesday of November?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Elections are devices by which states seasonally re-appropriate
political being from the plebs, attempting to de-compose non-statist political movements
into the drama of king-making. Just think of the sheer amount of work the state
and its deputized apparatuses put in to getting people to do what is supposed
to be at once (and impossibly) a right and a privilege. In this election
season, this appropriation is taking place to the extent that we’ve become
affectively aware of the operation. Feeling fatigued, we all want to say, “To
hell with politics, take it away, technocrats!”—even as we feel like we can’t,
because this election is too important or whatever. (Has there ever been an
election that didn’t bill itself as the most important for a given population
at the time?) Voters will vote, and then hasten to sleep. Shit’s been
exhausting; it’ll be good to go back to ordinary time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Anyone who has hashtagged NoDAPL or BLM should know that
there is no ordinary time on the horizon. Anyone who has hashtagged NoDAPL or
BLM should know that primary political antagonisms of our day engage temporalities
utterly out of sync with the electoral temporalizations of the liberal state. It
is in the horizon of these centuries-long struggles, carried out by indefatigable
oppressed peoples, that we should think the meaning, and function, of election-induced
politics fatigue. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-62001282465346548862016-06-03T17:37:00.000-07:002016-06-04T08:02:07.097-07:00On Eggs and Political Violence<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The most commonly cited
aspect of Weber’s definition of the state is that it possesses a monopoly on
the legitimate use of force. The accent of the phrase falls on “legitimate.”
Obviously, private individuals continue to use physical force in various ways;
the point is that such force lacks legitimacy. To use force without the
authorization of the state is criminal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">But Weber doesn’t talk about
the legitimate use of force as something simply and once-and-for-all secured to
the state. He writes, rather, of “The claim of the modern state to monopolize
the use of force”—a phrasing that introjects a lot more uncertainty into the
issue. A claim is just a claim; it is as good as one’s ability to enforce it.
He elsewhere writes that the state “lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate
physical violence within a certain territory.” Here, the tense of claims making
is open, iterative; the state is only a state to the extent that it
continuously lays claim to this monopoly. It lays claim to this monopolized
violence by enacting its violence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">There’s an important
flipside to all of this, though: the state’s claim to the monopoly of
legitimate violence functions through an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">expropriation</i>
of violence from non-state actors. It is as a result of this expropriation that
violence becomes riven by a binary—legitimate and illegitimate—that did not
preexist this process. The idea that non-state actors might commit political
violence becomes almost a contradiction in terms; only the polity, as the
state, can legitimately commit such violence. Only the state can have its
violence modified by the adjective “political.” Moreover, this process of
expropriation is just as iterative and ongoing as the state’s constant claim to
its monopoly. The hyper-violent state operates by depriving its subjects of
their capacity for political violence. It works to render such a capacity for
violence unthinkable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The state’s ongoing
expropriation of subjects’ capacity for political violence: this process is
important to keep in mind when we consider the “violence” that occurred at the
Trump rally in San Jose. The line taken by liberals has been predictable.
Jamelle Bouie, for instance, tweeted, “Nothing good comes from political
violence, period.” Obviously, the claim is falsifiable by many, many historical
examples. Not so obviously, the violence complained of here is less the use of
physical objects or fist fighting and more the plebian violation of the
administered normal. It’s basically a deontological argument masked as a
consequentialist one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">I’m more interested in a
line I’ve heard from people on the left. It goes something like this: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Violence like this is probably
inefficacious. Yet, if you insist on the possibility of using some form of
physical violence as necessary for antifascist political work, your level of
violence is laughably inadequate to the threat you claim to be responding to.</i>
The implication of such a line is that a) the object we’re attacking isn’t
actually fascism, or we would be attacking with greater vehemence, b) most of
the political violence we’ve seen (regardless of whether it should be called
violence) amounts to enactments of manarchist fantasies detached from concrete political
realities and c) stop doing this shit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">It’s pretty interesting,
really. I think we have broad swaths of the U.S. left that are not normatively
anti-violence but who also would be reluctant to accept that any single
instance of political violence—a smashed window, a thrown egg—has any positive
effect. From this perspective, the proof of the pudding comes in the scalable
effects of any single instance of political violence: a thrown egg didn’t
defeat fascism, so throwing the egg was at best an ineffectual gesture. A
smashed window didn’t end capitalism. The point always boils down to the
obvious: we are not at a revolutionary conjuncture in which such acts might
turn into anything. (The implication for many is that we never will be.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">This is why turning to
Weber, and his narrative of the state’s ongoing expropriation of political
violence from ordinary people, is important. Very simply, we’ve been made dumb
about violence. Over the past century, the massive expansion of what counts as
“violence”— in the liberal, Chris Hedges, finger-wagging sense—is staggering.
The definition of violence is itself a very important political weapon: such
definitions encode and reproduce the value-relations of our world. Liberals
clutch pearls over smashed glass; the enforced displacement of humans called
gentrification, not so much. More to my point, the expansion of the term’s
ambit inversely correlates to its expropriation from the political repertoire of
ordinary, non-state actors. A large part of this expropriation of violence has
been bound up with the material recomposition of classes and the state through
the twentieth century. The unions have been gutted that could (and did) more or
less wage small wars against state-backed companies; meanwhile, police forces
have been augmented in all the ways we know about. A significant part of this
expropriation of violence also registers at the level of ideology and the
formation of a collective corporeal habitus. We’ve been trained to feel like
our bodies, and our modes of extending them, cannot have effects on the
political and economic structures that require dismantling. Fascism, after all,
didn’t vanish with that thrown egg. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Consequentialist approaches
to small acts of political violence—if violence is even the proper term—are
complicit with the state’s expropriation of violence to the extent that they
induce a feeling that our bodies are always already incapacitated to impact the
political, to violate its administered normal. The idea that political violence
only makes sense in conditions of a full-blown revolutionary conjuncture
obfuscates the fact that re-appropriating political violence from the state is
a necessary condition for anything like a revolution to occur. This process of
re-appropriation takes time, and is intimately bound up with the revolutionary
process. These small acts are moments of collective self-pedagogy where subjects learn, slowly and haltingly but truly, what our bodies can do, and
what they can do without the state-form. They are an organic part of the
process of communizing the monopolized violence of the state and its
racist-fascoid fanboys. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Fascism didn't vanish with that thrown egg, but it will never have vanished if it hadn't been thrown.</span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-34228157049042757202015-12-03T11:18:00.000-08:002015-12-03T11:23:40.044-08:00Thoughts and Prayers and the Terror of Politics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">“Who, if I cried out, would
hear me among the angels’ orders?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">I always think about the
first line of Rilke’s first elegy when I think about what comes first in poetic
address because it stages the primal fact of any address: It is probable that
no one is listening, that no one can hear what you would want heard. All lyric
address begins in the phatic mode, as a query, “Hey! Hey?” But—and this is
second originary fact of lyric address—the poem must proceed as if no one is in
fact listening, as if no one is there, as if the addressee won’t and can’t
respond. The non-response of the one whom the speaker wishes to respond opens
the space of the poem; it creates the realm of privacy in which the speaker
encounters subjectivity as deprivation. This deprivation isn’t sad, though. Or,
if it is, sadness is not the worst one risks experiencing by opening one’s
mouth and shouting to the angels. There’s something worse—and that is,
precisely, to have been heard, to have been made intimate to the one whom one
addresses. What if the angels heard Rilke’s speaker, and responded? Terror
would follow, he claims: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">“…and even if one of them
pressed me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">in that overwhelming
existence. For beauty is nothing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">but the beginning of terror,
which we still are just able to endure, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">and we are so awed because
it serenely disdains<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">to annihilate us. Every
angel is terrifying.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Lyric is the condition of
where the negation of a desire precedes its articulation, where not wanting to
be heard incites one’s very act of address. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">I’ve been thinking about
these lines of Rilke since I encountered liberal-oriented critiques of
people—presidential candidates, sure, but ordinary folks too—who responded to
the San Bernardino shooting by tweeting out their “thoughts and prayers.” Now
is not the time for prayers, the commentary goes; prayer does nothing. What we
need is real action, or at least a commitment to real action. Not this
supernatural nonsense whose sole purpose is to assuage the troubled consciences
of a Christian Right whose love of guns prevents real action from being taken.
And on. And on. It’s even got a couple of hashtags: #thoughtsandprayers and
#ThoughtsAndPrayersAreNotEnough. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">What immediately struck me
about this prayer-trolling is the functional indistinction between prayers to
an absent god and randomly shouting shit on a Twitter hashtag. Unless you are
@’ing a bud bound to respond, almost any tweet you write is necessarily
oriented toward a non-present superaddressee, toward the possibility that
someone might be listening even when there is no empirical proof that anyone in
fact is. Both prayer and social media participate in the lyric structure of
address that Rilke limns when he begins by asking if anyone is listening at
all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">Prayer bares the device of any
social media platform that desires political efficacy. We want to imagine
social media as a new instrument in the repertoire of participatory democracy,
as a new means for establishing broad consent and pressuring state officials to
norm their actions with out represented desires. Our secular liberals would
probably be okay if our prayerful tweeters simply shifted addressees and made
demands upon Obama instead of supplicating God. But such a shift in addressee would
not shift the structure of address. Neither God nor the state is listening;
neither will respond. Even if a response arrives, there is no secure connection
between public representation of its desires and state action, no conduit that
converts that force of the former into a force that acts upon the latter. Any
connection between what we say to the state and what the state does is the
effect of a miraculous, magical causality. To engage in or with the public is
always to be praying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">On one side, then, the
theological mystifiers; on the other, the humanist demystifiers. God and the
State. What links these two positions is their profound incapacity to think
action beyond making representations to a superaddressee. Instead of thinking
about concrete modes in which we might act to de-pathologize the social, we
call upon a transcendent being who will never adequately respond to
#DoSomething. Anything! Just give us a sign that you’re real, Obama.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "arial";">But what if the state
listens? When if angels hear our cries and act? Every angel is terrifying, Rilke
warns, and sometimes to be heard is to be complicit in one’s own annihilation.
What Rilke describes as an aesthetic terror might, in the realm of the
political, name an experience of what the state does once it responds to our
prayer that it do something, anything. Once it holds us close and tell us, yes,
it will #DoSomething for us. The angelic terror of having-been-heard echoes
through Iraq, through Afghanistan, through every drone strike, through the
sighs or cries of every person subjected to hours of intensified searching at
borders, through the affectless data plucked by the NSA and the rest. We wanted
the state to do something; it did. Great job. It might be safer to make no
demands, to simply pray, when every act by which the state commits itself to
doing something becomes an alibi for doing something worse. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Today’s politics of terror
are founded by a terror of politics. We pray for angels to act, even if in
acting angels become demons, because action for us and by us, undertaken in our
own name, is more or less unthinkable. The scale of action, the complexity of problems,
the simple fact of power differentials…these are indeed big problems. Huge. And
they require a lot of tactical and strategic thinking, and this always normed
by political practice. True political terror today comes from knowing that
to-hand formations of the political cannot help us, while also knowing that
there are no to-hand ways by which we might help ourselves. Anarchism begins with
the terrifying knowledge that there’s no transcendent structure, God or State,
who might help us, and with the equally terrifying knowledge that any such
structure will be worse than none at all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-57772769898679668842015-10-27T13:46:00.001-07:002015-10-27T14:33:32.284-07:00The School as Prison (no pipeline required)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Friends, a proposal: Let's stop using the
phrase "school-to-prison pipeline." It's misleading. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">When going to school looks not a little like
being in a prison, we're no longer talking about a subject's itinerary through
discrete times and spaces—the narrative geography wherein a student, routed
through a school that can only fail her, finds herself pushed into juvenile or
adult criminal justice systems. The rigidity of <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-student-led-backlash-against-new-orleanss-charter-schools/283597/">disciplinarity</a>
in the post-public public school system intimates the tendential identity of
the prison-function and the school-function. When a teacher calls an
administrator who calls a cop who then brutalizes a student for failing to move
from her seat when ordered, neither students nor observers need schooling in
Althusser or Foucault to see the school operating as a prison. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">All the same, school and prison’s tendency
toward an identity of function can be hard to see. First, it is only emergent, a
tendency, a possible future that nonetheless enacts itself in the present and
points us toward what is in the process of becoming. To read this process of
becoming is not the same as declaring an accomplished identity. Indeed, to say today
“the school is a prison” is also to compute with the fact that it also is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not </i>a prison, not really, not yet. In
describing a tendential identity, then, one always risks a kind of
overdramatization, the inflation of an instance into a sign of things to come. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Second, this emergent identity is masked by the
entrenched persistence of signifiers—and not a little sentiment, too. We
continue to call “schools” institutions that are functionally indifferent to
the task of fostering the creative, intellectual, and affective capacities of
those whom we continue to call “students.” We continue to call “teachers” those
people whose skills and good intentions are perverted by an apparatus and a
world that doesn’t care about anyone’s intentions. And these signifiers are so
sticky because they are so affectively saturated. We all have a favorite
teacher, and few of us are prepared to acknowledge that we were bonding to someone
who unwittingly substitutes for a cop. And then plenty of folks on the left are
wary of critiquing school and schooling today for fear of sounding like a Milton
Friedman acolyte. Let’s just remember that it is utterly possible for two
opposed political orientations to have a critique of a shared object; that
doesn’t mean they have a shared critique. One can mark the tendential identity
of schools and prisons and (as I do) still support teachers unions—if only to
block and roll back the recoding of schools by the police function.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The idea of the school-to-prison pipeline gets
around these barriers through dissociation. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to </i>situates the students in a cartography of linked but discrete
spaces, which enables us to cognitively and affectively sunder school <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">from </i>prison. The case of the phrase is
accusative, but the critical disposition and political fantasy it sustains is in the ablative. And
so it becomes harder to see the prison in the school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">My recourse to grammar might seem pedantic, but
it’s not. Slogans are the residues of past struggles and the seeds of new ones.
They travel so well because they are so economic in their language. And they
are so powerful because they teach so quickly. (Try to recall the first time
you heard the phrase “school-to-prison pipeline.” I actually can’t, because I
can’t imagine not knowing it, the way it let me rethink the institutional
fabric of the world. That’s powerful teaching, and all in just four words.) In
a movement phrase, every word counts, every word is made out of and remakes a
movement’s orientation toward the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">I wouldn’t dream of trying to coin a new
slogan, but we need a different vocabulary—one that, in terms of grammar, opts
for the conjunction over the preposition. Where the preposition posits discrete
time-spaces, the logic of the conjunction allows us to see the overlapping but
non-identical functioning of these two institutions and their rationalities.
Non-identity matters: after all, the teacher called an administrator who called
a cop; the teacher and administrator could not beat the student on their own
authority. What that moment revealed was neither a school-to-prison pipeline
nor the achieved identity of the two. Rather, that moment displayed school <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> prison operating in the same
time-space as an articulated assemblage. Cop and teacher, hand in hand. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">It also revealed, I think, the way that Spring
Valley High School is situated in a broader social terrain where school
functions <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as</i> a prison—that is, where
the labor of human cultivation is subordinated to simple and authoritarian
order maintenance. In the school-as-prison, the aim and activity of pedagogy is
repurposed to conform to the aims of the police. To be sure, schools have
always worked to produce orderly subjects, but such ordered subjectivities were
produced <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">through</i> the pedagogical
process itself. (Just think of everything implied in the act of raising one’s
hand.) Now, police are taking over the application of discipline in schools,
and teachers and legislators are handing it over to them. Niya Kenny, the
student who filmed the event, was arrested for “<a href="http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/sc-student-arrested-for-recording-school-cops-violent-assault-on-classmate-sitting-in-her-desk/">disturbing
school</a>,” an honest to Jesus <a href="http://www.scstatehouse.gov/query.php?search=DOC&searchtext=disturbing%20schools&category=CODEOFLAWS&conid=8026597&result_pos=0&keyval=338&numrows=10">law</a>
that legislators recently attempted to <a href="http://www.scstatehouse.gov/query.php?search=DOC&searchtext=disturbing%20schools&category=LEGISLATION&session=0&conid=8026606&result_pos=0&keyval=1190297&numrows=10">amend</a>
to increase fines from one to two thousand dollars and jail time from ninety
days to one year. (Thanks to Ed Kazarian for sharing the “disturbing school”
link.) This handoff in disciplinarity marks less a differentiation of function
between cops and teachers and more a willed subordination of pedagogical space
to the police. Think about this absurdity: a student refusing to leave her seat
sparks an event that compels the Richland County Sheriff <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/us/spring-valley-high-school-sc-officer-arrest.html?hp=&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur">to
fly back</a> from the cop conference in Chicago like a sovereign returning to
his troubled land. In this school-as-prison arrangement, cops rule. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">School and prison, school as prison, yes. But
the most troubling possibility, I think, is school <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">or</i> prison. By using this locution, I don’t intend to invoke the
uplift narrative that posits education as a means of avoiding criminality or,
really, criminalization—a narrative that the “school-to-prison pipeline”
concept has already undone. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">or </i>of
my “school or prison” marks not a choice between alternatives but an identity produced
through the indifferent interchangeability of functions. It is sort of like the
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sive </i>in Spinoza’s “Deus sive natura.”
It would sound like this: “School or prison—whatever, what’s the difference.” The
school is rapidly and intensively being inscribed as an institution in the
state’s carceral network; the logics of policing are overwriting the ideal
logics of pedagogy. The racialized poor of the U.S. are sent to school to learn
how to do time in prison, and the effectiveness of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i> pedagogy indicates the tendential interchangeability of school
and jail. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The minimal demand to combat this tendency is
very simple: No cops at school. Neither police nor private security guards
should ever be involved in administering ordinary classroom discipline. No
teacher or administrator should ever have the thought that this could be a good
idea or a necessary thing. These are pretty easy fixes, because incredibly
concrete. But minimal demands are just that—minimal—and the prison-function of
the school is not limited to the fact that cops are on campus. To think beyond
the minimal requires some account, perhaps, of the multiple systemic forces
that overdetermine the becoming-prison of the school. But the question is not
simply one of knowledge, of planning, of finding the best systemic points at
which to undo the carceralization of the classroom. It is also one of
dispositions and orientations and the creation of new imaginings of the world.
I’m thinking of the student who was beaten in South Carolina. By media
accounts, the student wasn’t participating in class but also refused to leave
it. Maybe she doesn’t like the subject, maybe she didn’t like the pedagogical
mode, maybe she was just tired and having a bad day, maybe she just hates
school. But her refusal to participate in a given pedagogical arrangement
interacts dynamically with her refusal to leave the scene of learning; indeed,
we might say she was beaten because her refusals to participate and to leave
staged the difference between the learning she wanted and the schooling she
got. The cop, then, was not simply enforcing order but reproducing a
pedagogical norm: You will learn this subject in this way and not express
dissatisfaction with this fact. This command links pedagogical modes across
varied institutional terrains, from the underfunded public schools to the neoliberal
charters to, indeed, my own classroom, probably, alas. Getting cops out of
schools will be meaningless if a post-police pedagogy is unimaginable; the cop
will always be invited back in and, indeed, will never have left. What I want,
then, is to imagine the time, place, and form of encounter whose possibility is
conjured in the student’s refusal to participate and in her refusal to leave—a
world of learning otherwise where desiring alternatives won’t get you clubbed
by a cop.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-65813370692263038572015-06-23T13:40:00.001-07:002015-06-23T13:40:23.298-07:00The Civil War and Farcical Politics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Well, it happened: We got
Bill Kristol to quote Marx. He writes <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
It's our own mini-French Revolution, expunging history in a frenzy of self-righteousness. Luckily, so far: 1st time tragedy, 2nd time farce.</div>
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) <a href="https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/613420555178496000">June 23, 2015</a></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Kristol is, of course,
citing the opening of Marx’s 18<sup>th</sup> Brumaire. Let’s quote it in full: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Hegel remarks somewhere that
all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He
forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière
for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the
Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew in place of the Uncle. And the same
caricature occurs in the circumstances surrounding the second edition of the
Eighteenth Brumaire!</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We’ve been fighting a
second-edition Civil War for some time now—since the electoral season that led
to Obama’s first term. I've called it <a href="http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2013/02/antebellism-neoliberal-compromise-of.html">antebellism</a>. It’s tiring and tiresome. The primary problematic effect
of mobilization around the Confederate flag in South Carolina has been to
displace concerns to take down white supremacist organizing into the symbolic
field of the Civil War. (Of course, I’m happy it’s not flying, but we’re
talking effects here, not moral norms.) In this regard, Kristol’s citation of
Marx is telling. White supremacists and their mainstream allies have undertaken
a discursive operation that attempts to shunt the possibility of a world-historical
tragedy—a robust, decisive encounter between competing nomoi, a decisive
encounter between the racists and the anti-racists—into something farcical, a
re-enactment of the Civil War undertaken entirely through cultural symbolics.
Kristol <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wants</i> this farce. It’s far
better than a material challenge to white supremacy, racial capitalism, and the
racial state. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">For anti-racists, the
solution is to not get entrapped in this symbolic field—although this is hard.
In the next paragraph of the 18<sup>th</sup> Brumaire, Marx writes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The tradition of the dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And, just when
they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and
their material surroundings, in the creation of something which does not yet
exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up
the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans and
costumes so as to stage the new world-historical scene in this venerable
disguise and borrowed language. Luther put on the mask of the apostle Paul; the
Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the
Roman empire; and the revolution of 1848 knew no better than to parody at some
points 1789 and at others the revolutionary traditions of 1793-5.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here, Marx encourages us to
think symbolic belatedness as an index of a movement’s political and social
weakness in the time of its unfolding. It looks back because it possesses no
idiom of itself to address the composition of the present—or the future. White
supremacists present their politics indirectly, in the garb of future’s past,
because the future of a white politics is the undoing of any futurity, the
dissolution of the world. A fully whitened world would radiate disaster
triumphant, and so the content needs to hide in ambiguous or illegible
phrasing. A Confederate flag is obviously nostalgia for slavery—but no, it’s
heritage! Hitler can’t be heiled without a numerical transcription of the
alphabet. And most white nationalists, in their public remarks, deploy the
idiom of liberal multiculturalism in order to pose whiteness as just any other
political-racial-cultural identity. Political whiteness knows it can’t be
present in its presence. To be sure, symbolic weakness does not equate to
political inefficacy or an incapacity for outrageous violence; moreover, the
order of the world remains white supremacist regardless of the political
strength of white-supremacist movements. The point here, I think, is that the
cultural-symbolic remains a safe space for white supremacists in public because
it is the point at which politics can be articulated that otherwise can’t be,
and in polysemous, unstable ways that refuse—at least notionally—fixity.
Heritage, not racism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">White supremacy presents
itself through “world-historical necromancy,” in other words, because it can’t
offer a vision of the present or the future that most of the world would want.
This is not to say, of course, that an anti-racist, non-anti-black world is a
vision of the present or the world that most of the world would want, either. I
do want to suggest, though, that we would do well to cede this past in our
quest to build an anti-racist future. Most of the past—especially if white
people, the state, and capitalism are involved—has very little to offer us,
anyhow. So let’s let it go. It’s a field where, at best, to win is to break
even. As Marx put it, as he attempts to call it quits with this necromancy, “The
social revolution…can only create its poetry from the future, not the past.” In
that claim I hear Fanon, whose poetry from the future seems to haunt Marx in the
past: “comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and
endeavor to create a new man [sic].” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poiesis, not history. We need to dedicate time to writing pieces that will train people in practical anti-racist tactics for the present, pieces that will circulate with the speed and popularity that three dozen articles on the cultural symbolics of the Civil War do. We need to materially organize to develop <i>new</i> ways of thinking in order to <i>create </i>the new human. What if think-piece publishers gave space to this endeavor, instead of shadowboxing with history's poltergeists? When
we make our new world, the Confederate flags will burn, anyhow, and the
monuments of Confederate generals will topple, too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-52197256610231115222015-01-04T15:12:00.000-08:002015-01-14T11:41:15.965-08:00"Police Shoot, Kill [X]"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">“Police shoot, kill [X].”
It’s the formula for an all too formulaic event. I’ve read it hundreds of times;
so have you. Google News returns <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%22police+shoot%2C+kill%22&oq=%22police+shoot%2C+kill%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.3067j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8#q=%22police+shoot,+kill%22&tbm=nws">19300
results</a> when you search for it. It would be wrong to say, though, that one
has read the formula “Police shoot, kill [X]” hundreds of times. I haven’t, at
least. I realized this upon encountering this headline a few days ago: “<a href="http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Person-Struck-During-Police-Involved-Shooting-in-Bridgeton-New-Jersey-287176751.html">Police
Officers in South Jersey Shoot, Kill Man During Traffic Stop</a>.” Normally I
would click through, accumulate information about the event, and become angrier
and angrier at cops who kill and the journos who invariably carry their
water.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Consider the first sentence: “A
traffic stop turned deadly overnight in South Jersey.” Serving as the
grammatical subject of the sentence, it as if the traffic stop mutated of
itself, as if the stop itself turned itself into something else. The scenario
absorbs agency and de-localizes responsibility.) This time, though, the formula
arrested my attention. I don’t know why.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">“Police shoot, kill [X].” We
might consider it a masterstroke of journalistic economy. Not only does it
communicate a great deal of information, but it economizes the communiqué by
truncating the relationship between shooting and killing. Grammar itself
becomes the grammar of the event: a comma links the event of shooting and the
event of killing. “Police shoot, kill [X].” Rhetoricians might call this
diazeugma, a figure of speech wherein a single subject controls multiple verbs.
It’s not, though: “shoot, kill” has achieved the status of a legal doublet
(like “aid and abet” or “cease and desist”), and so functions as a complex but
functionally unitary verb. The comma marks the complexity of a unitary process,
then, but it does so by leaving unremarked the substantive relations between
the terms. The formula is unreadable because it gives nothing to be read,
substituting the contingency of apposition—even if this contingency, this
being-beside-one-another, of “shoot, kill” seems ineluctable—for a reasoned
articulation of the terms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And so I found myself, as I
encountered the formula, generating a list of the possible relations that the
formula’s skeletal structure makes articulable but occludes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Police shoot, kill [X].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Police shoot and kill [X].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Police shoot and happen to
kill [X].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Police shoot and therefore
kill [X].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Police shoot and
accidentally kill [X].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Police shoot without intending
to kill [X].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Police shoot because they
intended to kill [X].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Police shoot because they
needed to kill [X].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Police shoot, and therefore
[X] was right to be killed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When police shoot, they
kill.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When police shoot, they can
kill.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When police can shoot, they
kill.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When police shoot, they
sometimes kill. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When police shoot, they
sometimes don’t kill. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When police shoot, they
intend to kill.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When police shoot, they
sometimes intend to kill. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">When police shoot, they
don’t always intend to kill. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This list is hardly
exhaustive. The skeletal quality of the formula “Police shoot, kill [X]” means
that there is a nearly infinite number of ways that the relationship between
shooting and killing could be enfleshed. We might say, then, that part of the
formula’s work is to evacuate the event of any reason in the anticipation of reason’s
post hoc construction. The forensic examination, the testimonies, the
administrative review, sometimes the grand jury, sometimes the trial, and
definitely us, as we read newspaper articles and debate on Twitter or Facebook:
the formula incites us, all of us, to acts of post hoc reconstructive
reasoning. And so we read past the headline, through it, in order to begin the
work of articulating and adjudicating the contingent but ineluctable
co-presence of shooting and killing. “Police shoot, kill [X]”: let the inquest
begin. Just keep reading.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The problem, though, is that
some of the possible ways by which the skeletal formula might be enfleshed are
administrative and legal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">impossibilities</i>
for U.S. cops. Consider, for instance, “Police shoot without intending to kill
[X].” It is inadmissible. If a cop feels himself or the public to be so
threatened that shooting a gun is required, the administrative rule is always
shoot to kill. (Indeed, it is when cops shoot and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">don’t </i>kill that something has gone wrong—not legally, but practically.
They missed.) Cops have roundly <a href="http://www.pfoa.co.uk/110/shooting-to-wound">rejected</a> shoot-to-wound
initiatives, and they have had the Supreme Court on their side. With <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Graham v. Connor</i>, the court ruled that
the “objective reasonableness” of a cop’s use of force determined the legality
of that use of force. Legally, this means that the 4<sup>th</sup> Amendment
(with the protections it affords against “unreasonable searches and seizures”)
trumps the due process clauses of the 5<sup>th</sup> and 14<sup>th</sup> Amendments
(which the plaintiff cited as the basis of his legal beef). One is not entitled
to due process in the scene of the law’s enforcement; due process always comes
before and after. The juridical void that attends the evacuation of due process
from the scene of enforcement is instead filled in with what cops determine to
be reasonable (or unreasonable). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is in part why <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/190937/why-its-impossible-indict-cop">it’s
impossible to indict a cop</a>. But it’s not just that the cops have “leeway”
or that the system “protects” them. Rather, retroactive attempts to determine
the legality of a police shooting shatter upon the realization that it is the
cop himself who determines the legality of the force they apply.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Police supply the legal rule. But this rule turns
out not to be law but situational reason. As <a href="http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=490&invol=386">Rehnquist</a>
put it in the court’s opinion on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Graham</i>,
the very dictates of situational reason refuse regularization or formalization:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">"The ‘reasonableness’
of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a
reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight…The
calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police
officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that
are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is
necessary in a particular situation.” And earlier, citing a previous case, he
notes, “The test of reasonableness is not capable of precise definition or
mechanical application."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There is no canon of cop
reason, but reason is all cops have. If there’s a bad shoot, cops haven’t so
much broken the law as they have acted unreasonably. But we can’t know if they
acted unreasonably, because the reason of hindsight differs from “the
perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene.” We’re not cops, and
certainly not the cops who were there. The activity of policing assembles a
present asymptotic with law’s time, but it does so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">through</i> the law: the provision against unreasonable search and
seizure becomes legally grounded on the fluid, flexible, formless reason of
cops. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Police render law
inoperative in the act of enforcing it. And so the truth of the formula “Police
shoot, kill [X],” which incites us to interpretive reason by its very refusal
to articulate the relationship between its terms. When police shoot, kill,
there is nothing legally judicable in the event—not for we who weren’t there,
for we who aren’t cops. For us, there doesn’t need to be a legal or even
reasonable connection between the components the event, because it is the
inaccessible, incommunicable rationality of police that articulates them. The
comma serves as an index of law’s presence at the event of its enforcement: it
is there, but silent, a mark without semantic value, a connection that cannot
speak what it connects because the cop’s reason will improvise the articulation
each time, every time. Not an aporia of law but a sign of law’s infinite
malleability. It just isn’t malleable for most of us. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Let’s take the comma, then,
as an incitement to move beyond normative idioms when relating to police
violence. The police are unencumbered by any superordinate normativity; they
give the law to themselves and to us through their situational reason. In this
situation, police violence can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i>
appear as a hyper-contingent materialization of force—because that is all it
is. Police shoot, kill. You get it in the headline, and it’s all we need to know.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-50719384581331278152014-12-18T17:27:00.001-08:002014-12-18T17:27:45.557-08:00Where to Begin Reading CLR James?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">[Some folks asked me where to start if they wanted to started reading CLR James. I was composing an email for them, but this actually seems easier. So here it is!]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Okay, so there is probably
no good way of developing an overview of CLR James’ work. He wrote a lot, for a
period of over forty years, and from and about a lot of places. The public
archive of his writing is unstable, too. He wrote under multiple pen/party
names for many publications, so it’s probable that occasional work in socialist
or black radical papers are floating out there and we don’t know about it.
Moreover, more and more stuff is being republished (or functionally published
for the first time) as part of the CLR James Archive series at Duke. Finally,
James himself is something of an authorial catachresis: many of his texts were
co-written. The mass of writings, coupled with the heterogeneity of his
concerns, means that any number of CLR Jameses are possible: James the Marxist
historian, James the pan-African anticolonialist, James the cultural critic,
even James the fiction writer. On and on. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The list of James assembled here reflects my own interests in James as someone whose work a)
attempted articulating Marxism to black radical traditions and b) theorized key
features of capitalism that align neatly with various forms of workerism and
autonomism. (They align so neatly, I argue <a href="https://www.academia.edu/7531747/The_Refusal_of_Work_From_the_Postemancipation_Caribbean_to_Post-Fordist_Empire">here</a>,
because the work of James and his coterie was actually read by those who would
give us the sexy European post-marxisms we know and love; the black radical
tradition is the denegated center of much Marxism today.) My aim is also,
really simply, to keep reading manageable. I know y’all don’t have oodles of
time, comrades. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">These aren’t presented in
any particular order. Publication dates can indeed matter a lot with James. A
great deal of his work in the 40s was occasioned by sectarian squabbles in the
world of U.S. Trotskyism, and so the immediate occasion for any writing might
be localizable to the need to respond to Shachtman or Cannon. Moreover, James’
break with Trotsky—in terms of party affiliations, yes, but also
intellectually—decisively impacted his work in the 50s and 60s. That said, all
of this material has implications that exceed the polemics that occasioned them
(e.g., party disputes on the status of the Soviet Union, debates over the Negro
question, and so on). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">On with the show.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">* The Black Jacobins</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> (1938/1963). I probably don’t need to say much about
this one at all. If you can find it, I highly recommend reading James’
“Lectures on The Black Jacobins,” published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Small Axe</i>. I say “if” because I’ve just gone through the journal
online and haven’t been able to locate it; it’s supposed to be in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Small Axe</i> 8. It is worth finding,
though, because James reads <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Black
Jacobins</i> alongside Du Bois’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black
Reconstruction</i> and it is pretty much amazing. I also highly recommend David
Scott’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Conscripts-Modernity-Tragedy-Colonial-Enlightenment/dp/0822334445">Conscripts
of Modernity</a></i> for a reading of the significant reorientation of the
text’s political horizons in the second edition (which is the edition you would
read anyhow). This could also be paired with (the somewhat sloppy) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The History of Negro Revolt</i> (1938),
later republished as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The History of
Pan-African Revolt</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">* “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1943/negro43.htm">The
Historical Development of the Negroes in American Society</a>” (1943). (This is
included in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/C-L-James-Negro-Question/dp/0878058230/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418951801&sr=1-1-fkmr2&keywords=clr+james+negro+question">CLR
James on the ‘Negro Question’</a></i>, and I recommend the entire volume.) This
is a crucial text for understanding the practical relationship that should
obtain between black struggle and Marxist political organizing. He begins by
sketching the dialectical tension of racial capitalism: “side by side with his
increasing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">integration</i> into
production which becomes more and more a social process, the Negro becomes more
than ever conscious of his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exclusion</i> from
democratic privileges as a separate social group in the community.” For James,
this dynamic means that black organizations and mass movements agitating for
inclusion in the polity would necessarily bring it into a confrontation with
capitalism itself. Indeed, “such today is their proletarian composition and
such is the interrelation with the American proletariat itself that their
independent struggles form perhaps the most powerful stimulus in American
society” toward revolutionary socialism. James would argue, basically, that
Marxist parties should trust to the intensity of this dialectic. Instead of
trying to steer black democratic movements or subsume them into Marxist
organizations, “</span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the party, with the fullest
consciousness of the significance of the mass independent struggles of the
Negroes, considers that its main agitational work among Negroes is the
stimulation and encouragement of these mass struggles.” Put simply, “[The
party] sharply condemns that distortion of Marxist truth which states or implies
that the Negroes by their independent struggles cannot get to first base
without the leadership of organized labor.” To be sure, there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> residual vanguard-y Party-talk in
here; it was, after all, a party document. But it operates in tension with the
analysis provided. So one thing to take away is that James’ ultimate break with
the Party-form is very much an effect of his engagement with black activism—not
simply a result of his interpretation of the emergent political economy of
post-Fordism, as we’ll shortly see. Another thing to take away: I think that
this is a crucial analysis for any leftist or left organization trying to map
the potentialities of, and its own relation to, the ongoing revolt. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">* <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://libcom.org/library/facing-reality-clr-james-grace-lee-boggs-pierre-chaulieu">Facing
Reality</a>: The New Society: Where to look for it & How to bring it closer</i>
(1958), written with Grace Lee (soon Grace Lee Boggs) and Cornelius
Castoriadis. “The whole world today lives in the shadow of the state power.
This state power is an ever-present self-perpetuating body over and above
society…Against this monster, people all over the world, and particularly
ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices, are rebelling
every day in ways of their own invention.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Facing
Reality</i> marks James’ starkest break with vanguardism, and it makes sense:
the text was published in the wake of the Hungarian workers revolution of 1956,
which exemplified for James the ordinariness of the desire for freedom <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> the extreme level of political sophistication
possessed by “ordinary working people” everywhere. For James et al., this event
signaled the definitive end of the Party-form, whose logic of organization was
as monstrous as that of the state. In a Negrian idiom, Party and State
organizations were functionally apparatuses of transcendence that blocked or
appropriated the immanent functioning of the social. (He and his crew articulate
this wonderfully in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">State Capitalism and
World Revolution </i>[1950].) We also get a sense in this text of why it was
that James became so preoccupied with the cultural fabric of U.S. life, as
shown in texts like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Civilization
</i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mariners, Renegades and Castaways</i>.
For James, culture isn’t just a repository of prolie dreaming, although it is
that. It is more importantly a primary place at which the cognitive, affective,
and social competencies of people are enhanced—an inchoate articulation of the
social factory thesis.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>What remained
for radical organizations? Aside from showing up—at the demo, at the strike, at
the barricades—nothing more than publishing a newspaper, elucidating the global
state of things and the tendential drift of the world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">* “Marx’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte</i>
and the Caribbean,” “Marx’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital</i>,
the Working-Day, and Capitalist Production” (late 1960s) in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.akpress.org/youdontplaywithrevolution.html">You Don’t Play
with Revolution</a></i>. These are lectures that James gave to some Caribbean
students in Montreal in the late 60s, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whoa</i>:
they are amazing. I mean, the entire collection is just fantastic, but James is
actually a wonderful reader of Marx. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brumaire</i>
essay is in many ways an attempt to read the current political scene of
Trinidad (and Eric Williams in particular) through Marx. For James, it doesn’t
quite translate: the political and social composition of Trinidad scrambles the
operative analytic categories of Marx’s text. It’s James at his best, putting
two things together in order to transform our understanding of both of them.
His reading of the “Working Day” section of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital</i>
is equally brilliant, and tracks the theoretical developments of workerism and
autonomism neatly. Basically, the scene of production is constituted by
political antagonism, and capital is reactive to the self-activity of workers.
Rad stuff.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">* Selma James, “A Woman’s
Place” (1952) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://libcom.org/library/power-women-subversion-community-della-costa-selma-james">T<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">he Power of Women & the Subversion of
the Community</span></a></i> (1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, should
include “A Woman’s Place”). A few things to say here. First, I think that it is
impossible to understand CLR’s theoretical trajectory through the 50s without
considering the impact of Selma James’ work on his thinking. Selma published “A
Woman’s Place” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Correspondence </i>in
1952, three years before she married CLR. Selma’s exploration of the doubly
worked working-class woman, the way that a particular form of subjectivity is
shaped in the unendingness of labor, not only shaped CLR’s thinking about
gender and capital; it also attuned him more concretely, I think, to the
necessity of recovering the concrete particularity of workers’ subjectivity. As
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Power of Women</i>: I’m never
sure how to understand the authorial relationship that obtained between James
and Dalla Costa. Some versions do not cite James as a co-author. I also think I
recall encountering James saying she doesn’t care to talk about disputes over
the text’s authorship. (But see <a href="http://radicaljournal.com/books/maria_dalla_costa_power/foreword.html">here</a>.)
Whatever the case, it is a brilliant extension and concretization of some of
the concepts that were only incipient in CLR’s work. That is to say, in
addition to all of its billion merits, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Power of Women</i> allowed me to re-read CLR in a more productive fashion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">So, that’s it! Like I said,
I wanted to reduce the reading load. Some of my favs aren’t on here: his book
on Nkrumah (which has the best dedication ever), “Dialectical Materialism and the
Fate of Humanity,” and on and on. But if you find this useful and trust my
taste, I’m totally willing to do another. Or feel free to yell at me for my omissions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-35718959368028576802014-09-09T15:58:00.000-07:002014-09-10T15:50:35.998-07:00A Brief Note on The Economist's Slavery Problem<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial;">The Economist</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> has a slavery problem, as Greg Grandin <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/181532/economist-has-slavery-problem">has
recently called it</a>. Grandin’s wonderful article is a response to a series
of lamentable book reviews published by <i>The
Economist</i> that deal with the topic of slavery: Grandin’s own <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EGJ7KX6?btkr=1">The Empire of Necessity</a></i>, and more
recently Edward Baptist’s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told-ebook/dp/B00JZBA9K6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1410385909&sr=1-1&keywords=ed+baptist">The Half Has NeverBeen Told</a></i>. The list goes on, as Grandin reports. But, as he continues, this
slavery problem is old, well pedigreed even. During the U.S. Civil War, he
notes, <i>The Economist</i> “stood nearly
alone in supporting the Confederacy against the Union.” If cheap cotton was
blood cotton, so be it. Summarizing this long running slavery problem, Grandin
concludes: “<i>The Economist </i>seems committed to making sure that white
people aren’t taken for total villains and darker-skinned folks held
accountable for their share of world’s inequities. It also seems dedicated to
make sure the economic system created by slavery [i.e., capitalism] is denied
its parentage, and on insisting that the miseries that continue to be produced
by neoliberal capitalism can only be cured by more neoliberal capitalism.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Indeed. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i>’s “slavery problem” is even older than Grandin
suggests, though. It dates back to the very first issue of the paper itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It’s almost certainly a
coincidence, to be sure, but a suggestive one, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i>’s first issue was published on 1 August 1843. That
is, on the ninth (or fifth, to account for the end of Apprenticeship in 1838)
anniversary of Emancipation Day. The anniversary was celebrated throughout the
Atlantic world. <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/90/1104.html">Emerson</a> and <a href="https://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=4398">Douglass</a> gave speeches on it; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003Z0BKW4?btkr=1">US abolitionists</a> held
picnics</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">—</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">and of course gave speeches too</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">—</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">to mark it. In the British West Indies, shops shut
down, holidays were granted. Newly freed folk prayed in church and celebrated with
whatever means were available to them; the better off feasted and drank (with
plenty of toasts to Victoria and the Empire). Creole newspapers would go all
prolix on the event, taking the anniversary as a chance to reflect on the
beneficence of empire as well as the work still to be done to secure a
meaningful (or, for the plantocracy, sustainable and profitable) freedom. And
so, given the liberal bent of </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">The
Economist</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, given its belief in the glorious mission of Britain in this our
fallen world, one would imagine that it too would participate in the convention
of mouthing a “Glory be to Empire!” or toasting Wilberforce on the anniversary
of emancipation. It was simply what Britons did.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Nope. Not a word. It’s not
that the West Indies don’t make an appearance, though, in the august prospectus
heralding the emancipation of the market. They do. But as refuse to be
jettisoned. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It all has to do with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i>’s guiding principles.
Simply put, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist </i>was founded
as a pressure rag for free-trade agitators. Its first issue offers a lengthy
essay that details both the economic problems derived from Britain’s
“restrictive system” of mercantilist tariffs and the glories that awaited a
free-trade Britain. Sound familiar? Like something you might have read in it
yesterday? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i> is literally
the most ideologically consistent publication to have ever existed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">For <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i>, two commodities in particular figured the
irrationality of the “restrictive system” of mercantilism: corn (i.e., cereal
grains, in particular wheat) and “the greatest foreign article of consumption,
and therefore of exchangeable ability, SUGAR.” Together, corn and sugar
accounted for most of the caloric intake of your average Briton. For this
reason, the price of corn and sugar was understood as having a strong
determining effect on wages, and so the costs of production, and so the costs
of goods, and so the costs of production, and so on and on. The cheaper these
primary goods, the lower the cost of production, the greater would be the
abundance of Britain. The problem, though, was that tariff walls favoring
British farmers on one hand and West Indian sugar planters on the other kept
the prices of these goods high.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Quite high. Sugar production
in the British West Indies didn’t totally collapse after emancipation—it’s a
debated topic, anyhow—but it dropped. It had been dropping for years, as an
effect of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, soil exhaustion, bad
cultivation technique, the collapse of estates due to impossible debts, the
quotidian resistance of the enslaved, and so on. With the end of slavery, many
more plantations went bust, free people worked out multiple arrangements with
plantations that invariably entailed a diminished production of sugar, and no
British capitalists were really willing to sink much into most of the islands.
Free trade agitation, too, affected the capitalization of the islands; it was
widely understood that it was only the restrictive tariffs that kept the West
Indies afloat, and few capitalists were willing to risk the investment when the
tariff walls were starting to come down. And so the situation: More Britons
were consuming sugar, but the supply was inadequate, and so expensive. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The West Indies and their
protected markets were thus a primary target of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i>, the best example that one could find to describe the
idiocy of anything but liberalized markets. (It’s always a shame to me, when
reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Great Transformation</i>,
that Polanyi so absorbed the Little Englandish imaginary of free-trade liberals
that he can’t think sugar with corn, his primary example.)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>And so the solution: liberalize sugar markets. “We must be willing
to take,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i>’s first issue declares,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“the sugar and coffee of
Brazil, Cuba, and Java,” “to avail ourselves of the vast and rich
productiveness of Brazil, Cuba, Java, &c.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of course, the “rich
productiveness” of Brazil and Cuba owed everything to slavery. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i> didn’t agitate for the
resumption of slavery in the British Empire, no; it simply demanded what
amounted to its externalization. On a day when about a million emancipated
humans celebrated their freedom, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Economist</i> agitated for a position that would intensify slavery elsewhere. When
news reached Cuba that an act to liberalize sugar markets was passed in 1846,
the slaveholding elite reportedly partied well into the night: they now had
access to the biggest sugar market in the world. British capital poured into
Cuba and Brazil—it had been for some time—and so too did enslaved humans
captured in Africa. (Following Engels on the late re-constitution of serfdom in
Eastern Europe, Dale Tomich with good reason calls the period following
liberalization the “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Through-Prism-Slavery-Capital-Economy/dp/0742529398/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410389108&sr=8-1&keywords=dale+tomich">second slavery</a>.”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In one of the weirdest
about-face alliances in British political history, some antislavery activists
joined with the West Indian plantocracy to protest liberalization—but not many.
By the 1840s, free-trade activism absorbed much of the utopian impulses of
antislavery organization; free-traders cribbed antislavery organizational
practices to boot. Friendships were shattered, groups dissolved, and all because there
was a simple choice: free trade in “slave sugar” or moral trade in “free
sugar.” Free trade activists with prior antislavery connections such as Richard
Cobden insisted that slavery could <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i>
be abolished through free trade, when rational, liberalized markets would
reward the best, most rational form of production, which was always taken by
liberals (with good evidence to the contrary) to be free-labor production.
Freedom meant cheapness; cheapness meant freedom. Or, as <i>The Economist</i> put it in its first issue, "we seriously believe that FREE TRADE, free intercourse, will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilization and morality throughout the world<o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">—yes, to extinguish slavery itself."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">By opening British markets
to “slave sugar,” Britain effectively guaranteed the hyper-underdevelopment of
the islands. Indeed, if just a decade earlier, abolitionists insisted that
enslaved humans were just like any other British subject, entitled to the same
rights and protections, liberalization cut into this flickering moral
geography, decisively constituting at the politico-economic level an inner
Britain and an outer one. The postemancipation world was rendered
institutionally foreign and so not as deserving of British care regarding its
level of economic development—or, really, much care at all. In practice, then, liberalization
entailed the economic and political abandonment of the islands. As Disraeli
later asserted, the "wretched" colonies had been a "millstone" about Britain’s collective
neck; he tore the millstone away. (He didn’t, and it’s weird that he, an arch-protectionist,
should say he did, but free trade had become so ideologically hegemonic that
down was up.) It became common to compare creoles’ resistance to emendations of
tariff protections with Luddites’ destruction of machinery—with the
implication, of course, that machines won out in the end. Nature following its
course, Providence providencing. (Marx would absorb this figuring of the West Indies in his <a href="https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1848/01/09ft.htm">remarks</a> on free trade, but only to insist that flows of capital and distributions of commodity production are <i>not</i> natural.) Still, </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">plenty of liberals fantasized that the islands
would simply sink into the sea. "[</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">I]f we could," Anthony Trollope writes in his <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=fokt8aXUmjsC&q=fain+forget#v=snippet&q=failing&f=false">West Indies and the Spanish Main</a></i>, "we would fain forget Jamaica altogether. But there it is," he lamented. Indeed. Brontë's Rochester responded to the inconvenient presence of the West Indies in manorial Britain by locking his mad creole wife Bertha in the attic.</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Just think about how some Yanks think of
Detroit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The result of liberalization,
then, was not simply to intensify slavery throughout the Americas or to more
fully saturate British markets with slave produce. Nor was the result simply to
decimate an already decimated West Indian economy, although it did that too. Most
importantly, the result of liberalization was to reduce Britain’s relationship
to the West Indies, and to West Indians, to a market rationality, and one
wherein the market directed Britain’s attention from subjects who just a decade
earlier had been the focus of Britons’ intense political and moral concern. (As <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Slavery-Eric-Williams/dp/0807844888/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410388994&sr=8-1&keywords=eric+williams+capitalism+and+slavery">Eric Williams</a> half-melancholically, half-sarcastically put it, echoing Burke, "The age of empire was dead; that of free traders, economists, and calculators had succeeded, and the glory of the West Indies was extinguished forever.") </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">That is, of course, not how the emancipated understood their relationship, not
normatively. Not when they offered letters of thanks to Victoria for their
emancipation, not when they wrote petitions to Victoria soliciting economic
assistance for the islands, not when they declared themselves British subjects
and so entitled to all the rights and privileges attaching to that quality.
It’s hard for us to read such documents now, with our postcolonial eyes, and
see anything but imperial hegemony. But in such supplications we gain quotidian
access to what emancipation, at least in part, meant for creoles: freedom to
transact with Britain, to be included in an expansive polity, and to possess a
legibility there that differed from the logic of the market.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The Economist</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> has a slavery problem then, to be sure. But it has another one, too,
and a bigger one. Call it a freedom problem. It’s partly, as Grandin suggests,
that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i> offers the same
(neo)liberal solution to every (neo)liberal problem: more freedom (for
capital). And yet, were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i>
to recognize the complicity of its ideology in the production and persistence
of slavery, I’m not sure much would change. After all, the publication was
quite conscious that cheaper sugar purchased on liberalized markets entailed,
in the short run, intensified slavery abroad. One lesson here, one I wish
people effusing over new studies of capitalism and slavery or the new
capitalism studies stuff, is that we need to stop thinking that somehow naming
capitalism’s imbrication in slavery in any way constitutes a radical act, an
emancipatory gesture. Capitalism already knows how shitty it is. It doesn’t
care.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The Economist</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">’s freedom problem runs deeper than its willingness to capitalize on a
form of production premised on freedom’s negation. It is rather that its
monochromatic definition of freedom as market freedom rendered it incapable of
hearing the other kind of freedom articulated both as a demand and as a gift in
each black creole missive of gratitude or supplicatory petition to the queen.
In composing freedom in the economy, as the economy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i> rendered itself, and its liberal readers, and a
liberalized Britain, incapable of hearing the aneconomy that inheres in every
demand for black freedom. To be a person, not a thing; to be described in print
as a British West Indian, not metonymized as sugar; to be a subject one hangs
around with, celebrates emancipation with, and even after the cane juice isn’t
worth the squeeze. Indeed, sticking around when there’s no good reason to do so
is probably the basis of any politics worth sticking with; such a practice entails a collective fracture of social necessity that originates (as) anything I’d call freedom. The
rebels of Morant Bay didn’t get going because their economic prospects were
bleak; they were always like that. They got going because the queen told them
to fuck off.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">And so let’s say this: If <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Economist</i>’s slavery problem consists
in its abandoning ideological responsibility for capitalism’s deep ties to
slavery, its freedom problem consists in its redefinition of freedom as the
capacity to abandon. Ex-slaves were the first, and foundational, victims of
this freedom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-13326429436205401732014-08-26T17:27:00.002-07:002014-08-26T17:52:23.669-07:00Selling Loosies, Stealing Cigars, and Cribbing from Hamilton<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The other comment I want to make concerning this
relationship between police and, let’s say, urban existence, is that you can
also see that police, the establishment of police, is absolutely inseparable
from a governmental theory and practice that is generally labeled mercantilism,
that is to say, a technique and calculation for strengthening the power of
competing European states through the development of commerce and the new vigor
given to commercial relations.</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">- Michel Foucault, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Security, Territory, Population<o:p></o:p></i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Eric Garner sold loosies.
Sold individually, priced from fifty cents to a dollar, loosies enable folks
who want to smoke but can’t afford an entire pack at once to fill their lungs. They
may also, per pack, secure to the seller a tidy profit on top of what a pack
normally goes for. Given that lots of loosie vendors are supplied with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/nyregion/05loosie.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">untaxed cigarettes from states like Virgina,</a> they make a tidy profit indeed. So they’re
illegal. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so it was that cops went to
Eric Garner’s market, in part, to pick him up for selling untaxed cigarettes. He was then
murdered. We know that a black man can be killed by a cop for just about
anything—and, of course, for no reason at all—but the fact that Garner’s death
was touched off by individually-sold cigarettes struck many of us as ludicrous.
Rightfully so. Ordinary cops are rarely called upon to enforce tax laws. The US
has a host of agencies responsible for enforcing those such laws: the IRS for
income tax, US Customs and Border Protection for the taxation of trans-border
commerce, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thus, even as there was something grippingly, urgently present about
Garner’s murder—the intensification of antiblack policing, the consolidation of
the New Jim Crow—there was something excessively strange about it, too, about how selling a loose, untaxed cigarette could have such consequences. Kind of anachronistic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">One might even say mercantilist.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I’ve been thinking a lot
about Eric Garner since reading Christian Parenti’s “<a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/reading-hamilton-from-the-left/">Reading
Hamilton from the Left</a>” today. Through a reading of Hamilton, Parenti recovers
a Founding-Dads idiom for critiquing the neoliberal withdrawal of the state
from the field of the economic. Hamilton’s work, as he puts it, “reveals the
truth that for capital, there is no ‘outside of the state.’ The state is the
necessary but not sufficient pre-condition for capitalism’s development. There
is no creative destruction, competition, innovation, and accumulation without
the ‘shadow socialism’ of the public sector and state planning.” And so the
remainder of the article is basically a listicle of the dope things Al
demanded, some of which he got: central banking, protective tariffs
(eventually), industrialization (such as it was), and so on. Unlike Thomas
Jefferson, who “feared the proletariat” (insofar as, well, he didn’t want to
see white Yankees proletarianized), Hamilton leaned into a pro-industrial, protectionist,
nationalist development model. And it would’ve worked, if it weren’t for those
meddling Jeffersonians. (Then Jacksonians. And then a war happened.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Fine. Look, I get nostalgia
for mercantilism. Really truly. I’m writing a book about a bunch of West
Indians who wanted nothing more than the retention of the British mercantilist
policies, the very ones a putatively progressive Hamilton attempted to mimic in
‘Merica. (Indeed, Parenti’s article was basically published in every planter newspaper
across the British West Indies by 1854.) And I get that our neoliberal world is
so imaginatively depleted that one might have to look back to look forward,
Marx’s prolie poetry of the future be damned. But when I try joining Parenti in
looking back to Hamilton in order to look forward to a socialist future, all I
can see is a lot of folks getting killed for doing things like selling untaxed
cigarettes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I think of Eric Garner, in
other words, because state-interventionist economic policies have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">always</i> involved the police. Even in the
neoliberal world left behind when the welfare state cheesed it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Indeed, the police sit at
the origin of all mercantilist policies. It’s what “police” meant. When Adam
Smith offered his <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7197564M/Lectures_on_justice_police_revenue_and_arms">lectures
on “justice, police, revenue and arms,”</a> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">police</i>
referred to forms of economic governance. As he puts it, “The [analytic] objects
of police are cheapness of commodities [and] public security and cleanliness.”
The police, in this sense, refers to the “policy of civil government,” or more
specifically “the regulation of inferior parts of government,” those that dealt
with material provisioning of the population. It was utterly conventional
usage, hardly unique to Smith. And so we get in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wealth of Nations</i>: “The police must be as violent as that of
Hindostan or Egypt…which can in any particular employment, and for several
generations together, sink either the wages of labour or the profits of stock
below their natural rate.” Examples can be proliferated. Today lazy critics and
lazier supporters of neoliberalism tend to think of Smith as anti-state; he
wasn’t, or not in those terms. Indeed, when he uses the term “state,” he is
most frequently using it to describe a level in a stadial progression, or in
the diffuse sense of a politico-ethico-economic totality akin to the Hegelian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stadt</i>. He almost never used “state” to
describe the machinery of governance. He did talk about police, though, and he
didn’t like what he saw. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of course, the violence that
Smith is talking about in his complaint about EIC-ruled Hindostan has little to
do with the forms of embodied violence visited upon folk who couldn’t get with
the program; he’s talking about how laws, protections, tariffs, and bounties
shape markets. But the immaterial violence Smith laments always entailed
actual, physical violence against ordinary people in British South Asia, in
Egypt, in Britain, in New York. In a very simple way, all mercantilist programs
for development entailed the extension and intensification of the powers of the
<a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Sinews_of_Power.html?id=uqzA-Xp416YC&redir_esc=y">fiscal-military
state</a>. This isn’t an abstract conceptual thing; mercantilist policies
mobilized <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a lot </i>of people who did a
lot of things, all for the state. Surveying land, counting bodies, collecting
taxes, inspecting ship bottoms. No statist development without police, because
it’s through surveillance and force that the state directs, in quite quotidian
fashion, value from one sphere to the next. The state doesn’t work through the
market, as a producer of value, so force latent or actual is what it has—all to
make the market work. Passes on market days to prevent glutting. Restrictions
on purchasing to prevent specie drains. Officers patrolling wharves to ensure
that goods aren’t being smuggled in tariff-free from non-treatied, driving
domestic prices down. High taxes on cigarettes to shape biopolitically
normalized bodies; cops making sure cheap smokes aren’t being sold singly. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">To say “mercantilism” is to
say “police,” as Foucault suggests in what I’ve tagged above, and modern police
forces are one of the most vibrant vestiges of the era that liberals like Smith
hoped to call quits with. It’s not a huge leap from the forms of petty
peculation that West-India merchant and police theorist <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sx49OgFD4uAC&pg=PR25&dq=Patrick+Colquhoun&as_brr=1&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Patrick%20Colquhoun&f=false">Patrick
Colquhoun</a> attempted to interdict on the eighteenth-century Thames—theft
that both diminished private profit and state revenue—and that the NYPD
attempted to interdict on Staten Island. The <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=e1gSL-DP-WEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=london+hanged&hl=en&sa=X&ei=kiP9U_f_CaqB7QaKvoH4BQ&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=london%20hanged&f=false">gallows
at Tyburn</a> or transportation for the former; extra-judicial murder for the
latter. (Tobacco remains a constant.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">My point, of course, isn’t
that liberal critiques of “the mercantile system” were somehow anti-police.
They weren’t, and they haven’t been. Smith’s theory of value was first
articulated in the sections of his lectures on police, and the liberal value
theory it originated basically attempted to calibrate British forms of
policing, making them adequate to what all those Scottish guys thought of as a
commercial society. We know, too, that <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LW8I66EGmfcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=bernard+harcourt&hl=en&sa=X&ei=SCT9U_7oA4aN7Qba-YGYAw&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=bernard%20harcourt&f=false">neoliberal
economic policy in practice</a> requires the mass policing and incarceration of
people, most of whom are of color. Indeed, the opposition between neoliberal
and statist economics is best viewed not as an abstract conflict of doctrine,
but as opposing strategies deployed by different states in different constellations
of and from different positions within the world-system. This was Friedrich
List’s point, whom Parenti wants to recover but for all the wrong reasons. (You
might get the impression, from the article, that Marx and List were somehow on
the same page. They weren’t. The latter hated the former, and was an
<a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/free-trade/">anti-anti-free-trader</a> to boot.) The analytic assumption underlying all of List’s
arguments is that all markets are products of (nation-)state policy. Whether
free-market or mercantilist, whether derived from the Manchester School or
aligned with the American System, the state is right there—after all, it’s the
state that “mercantilist” or “free-trade” would grammatically predicate.
Indeed, List’s critique of Smith wasn’t that the latter was methodologically
individualistic, as Parenti suggests, but that the free-trade tenets of British
political economy were simply the form that mercantilist practices took for the
hegemon of the world-system. Free-trade Britain was just the global cop, and
they have a roster of small wars throughout the Pax Britannica to prove it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The “state” versus
“anti-state” economic binary, in other words, is a false binary, and the
primary subject that unifies these seemingly opposed parts is the police. From
the petty smugglers hanged to prevent poorer folk from enjoying a bit of baccy
in the heyday of mercantilism, to the black bodega owner killed in part because
he sold loosies in the era of antiblack neoliberal penality, the most basic,
transhistorical, and violent agent of state economic development has been the
police.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">What’s weird to me about the
Parenti article is that, ultimately, I think he gets that. As he put it in a
line I’ve already quoted: “for capital, there is no ‘outside of the state.’” But
he does so only to conclude: “Like Hamilton, we face a profound crisis rooted
in an economy that demands to be <i>remade</i>.” But why indeed would we
want to remake the economy at this moment, which would necessitate remaking the
state, when we might call quits with both? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This question becomes all
the sharper when we consider what we’ve seen of the state in the midst of being
“remade” over the past few weeks—the murder of Eric Garner, yes, and then the
murder of Michael Brown. It can’t be forgotten that, when the rebellion in
Ferguson set off, it was small business owners who demanded the saturation of
the area with police—small capital demanding the state to reappear in what
might have been a neoliberal, post-state paradise. And then, when a harassed
police department attempted to produce post mortem justification for the murder
of Brown, they reached about in the grab bag of mercantilist ideological
material. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">He stole cigars, they said. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-9400091475990224632014-08-02T17:53:00.001-07:002014-08-02T17:53:35.457-07:00Katy Perry and the Self-Abolition of Whiteness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What’s the
line between appropriation and self-alienation, a consumption of another so as
to inflate oneself and a throwing of oneself to others so as to get rid of what
you are? This question, I think, haunts the short long arc of Katy Perry’s
career, and it’s one that anyone interested in anti-racist action needs to
linger with. Because Perry offers us, in however mutilated and compromised a
form, a master class on the (im)possibility of the self-abolition of whiteness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Perry
appropriates, and does so through the invocation of terribly racist
signifiers—there’s no doubt about that. <a href="http://mic.com/articles/95444/5-racist-examples-proving-why-katy-perry-is-pop-music-s-worst-cultural-appropriator">Derrick
Clifton</a> has offered an overview of Perry’s career in racial drag, and the
globality of her racial reach is truly amazing. Black, Native American,
Japanese, Egyptian… Wherever whiteness isn’t, Perry will be, transforming
alterity into a costume to be donned as she likes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So, an
appropriator. To be sure. But I’ve never been very comfortable with the
critical heft that the term appropriation provides, participating as it does in
a paradigm of culture that treats the latter as a kind of property—which is to
say, participating as it does in a paradigm of culture structured by
white-supremacist capitalism. Critiques of appropriation rely upon—and
performatively produce—an understanding of a racialized cultural field as a
regime of property, one populated by self-proper collectivities and regulated
by modes of navigation and behavior deemed appropriate. Within this imaginary
underwritten by the concept of property, raced forms of identification and
belonging are construed as formally equivalent to all others. Norms derive from
this conceptualization: as in all property regimes, one must recognize and
respect, not transgress upon or steal, the racial properties of others—history,
culture, language, a style or a feeling. But we know that that’s not what the
world is, that substantive inequality is the norm, that dispossession by
whiteness is the rule for darker folk, that dispossession is what racialization
is. So, <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">the conditions of formal
equality necessary for a rule against appropriation to be in force (or
enforceable at all) are substantively undercut by the superordinate rule of
white supremacy. The efficacy of the imperative “Don’t appropriate” relies upon
a becoming-sovereign of raced subjects, but the very enunciation of the
imperative indicates the endurance of racial non-sovereignty. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There’s also the problem, evident in the Miley Cyrus debacle, that
critiques of appropriation of black cultural property tend to valorize certain
forms of blackness as proper. How many people, for instance, raised eyebrows at
Cyrus’ aspirational attachment to crunk and Southern hip hop? Lots, and with
the implicit claim that she should have chosen a more worthy objects to
emulate, appropriate, and pervert. The anti-racism (when it is anti-racism) of
Cyrus’ liberal critics is laudable, but their liberalism isn’t, and the
multiculti politics of recognition that charged their critiques quickly became
a racial policing operation—not simply of interracial interaction, but of
blackness itself, which it defines and delimits and helps turn into a stable,
proper object.</span> <span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If Miley Cyrus’ desired
object—something, recall, that “feels black”—was less crunk and twerk and more
Miles Davis, especially the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kind of Blue</i>
Miles recognizable to anyone who has passed through a Starbucks ever, it’s
doubtful the outcry over appropriation would be as robust as it is. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/if-miley-cyruss-twerking-is-racist-isnt-janis-joplins-singing-also-racist/279162/">It’s
possible that people would not even recognize it as appropriation</a>. So, in
effect, the demand that the white-supremacist culture industry recognize and
respect black cultural property becomes functional for the disciplining and
production of forms of blackness that are recognizable as respectable—a kind of
value-adding operation that in the long run facilitates more appropriation.</span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">My final
problem with the term in relation to Perry is that charges of appropriation
tend to reconstitute the appropriator into a stable subject who could have
appropriated or not appropriated—and should not have done so. But, as Perry
herself puts it, she doesn’t really have a choice. For a white person to be a
person, to feel like a person, she has to be in proximity to blackness. Whiteness
is thrown away, albeit temporarily, in an act of self-abolition that is
necessarily an act of appropriation, because the void nullity that is and was
whiteness requires filling. Miley “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/27/miley-cyrus-twerking-cultural-appropriation">want[ed]
something that feels black</a>” because being white doesn’t feel like much;
Perry turns to racial drag because the alternative is “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-unbreakable-katy-perry-inside-rolling-stones-new-issue-20140730">just
stick[ing] to baseball and hot dogs, and that's it</a>”—that is, sticking to
nothing. We can, and should, pay critical attention to the ways in which
whiteness affectively recharges itself through fantasies of animated racial
others. But, in offering these critiques, we also shouldn’t foreclose the
possibility that these white desires for the racial other—to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">be</i> the racial other—mark an attunement
to a tonality and affectivity that resonate as the inappropriable source of
even the most appropriated stars of proper black American culture. I’m talking,
of course, about the refusal to be appropriated, to become property, about the
willed and unwilled function of being property’s persistent problem, about the
radical origins of black culture, about the quotidian sounding and resounding
of the black radical tradition. I’m talking, then, about the perpetual
parabasis of whiteness, the force that interrupts it, that calls it out from
itself, and calls it to be(come) other.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I mean,
really, looking at her career, is it much of a stretch to suggest that Katy
Perry can’t stand whiteness? That her career is simply an attempt to get away
from it, even if (or especially if) her attempts ultimately “fuck [her] in the
ass,” as she put it, because she’s also, clearly, a racist? She’d rather be
some kind of alien than an ordinary white lady—a transspecies maneuver that
itself necessitates mobilizing drum and bass, dubstep, and Kanye. It’s in
“E.T.” that Perry literalizes her program of appropriation as one of
self-alienation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But my
point here isn’t to exculpate. It’s rather to think through the imbrication of appropriation
and self-alienation, of the co-presence of taking and giving away in the field
of whiteness. Whiteness has a peculiar ontological status: it is the only thing
that can give itself away without giving anything at all because it is in fact
nothing. (Compare this to the work of people like Fred Moten and Nahum
Chandler, for whom the originary dispossession that is blackness converts into
an originary generosity, a fecundity, a giving-without-taking, an intimation of
a post-property undercommons.) If whiteness gives nothing when it gives itself
away, this giving-away always <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> a
taking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As with
Perry, so with anti-racist politics. All of this stuff on Perry might be a long
way of trying to figure out how I find myself typing on a blog initially about
CLR James, how I’ve come to write through the black radical tradition, how I
have come to take part in anti-racist work at all. The intensity of the
structural collapse of white appropriation and self-alienation reaches a fever
pitch in the figure of the radical anti-racist white, the figure for whom the
abolition of whiteness is simultaneously an abolition of self. For, quite
simply, the force that incites the radical white to undo his whiteness, to give
it away, to get rid of whiteness as such—this force is never immanent to whiteness
but is always taken from its outside. A list of names and movements could
follow here, all traces of some force I’ve appropriated, incorporated into
myself as my self’s undoing. To learn to desire the undoing of whiteness is
already to be taking a lesson from the black radical tradition. Whiteness takes
even when it wants to give itself away, to get rid of itself, to get lost. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’ve taken
this lesson from Du Bois. In one magical sentence in <a href="https://archive.org/details/johnbrown00dubo">his biography of John Brown</a>,
he writes, “Of all inspiration which America owes Africa, however, the greatest
by far is the score of heroic men whom the sorrows of dark children have called
to unselfish devotion and heroic self-realization…above all, John Brown.” An
“inspiration,” a “call[ing]” to “unselfish” acts, to acts that will ultimately
result in the undoing of his self, John Brown’s life, a life dedicated to the
death of whiteness, is structured by an impossible debt to Africa. To be
inspired to the abolition of whiteness entails assuming a debt to blackness
that can never be cancelled or repaid. In this sense, we might read Du Bois’
willingness to memorialize Brown’s life not as a yet another hagiography but as
a kind of debt forgiveness, an act of impossible generosity that, again, can
never be paid back. And Du Bois doesn’t demand repayment. Just more John
Browns—which is to say, more inspiration from, and more impossible debt to,
what he names “Africa.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Again, my
point isn’t exculpation. Far from it. It’s rather to suggest that Perry’s
trajectory lays bare a structuring feature of white anti-racist politics in our
white-supremacist world, a feature whose import vastly exceeds the representational
problematics of cultural politics. Operating in a zone of indistinction—where
appropriation and self-alienation, giving-away and taking-again, collapse into
one another—white self-abolition names an impossible politics that remains,
nonetheless, the only possible politics for white folk. A pessimistic politics
that only persists through the generosity of those from whom whiteness only
ever takes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-69146160541394925692014-05-18T21:31:00.001-07:002014-05-18T22:16:38.987-07:00Dad Rule: The Hatred of Students<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This commencement season,
the dominant narrative has centered on successful student campaigns to force
withdrawals and disinvitations of commencement speakers. Haverford, Rutgers,
Smith, Brandeis. It’s the wrong narrative—or, at least, it’s incomplete. What’s
shocked me has been the extent to which these examples of student self-activity
have incited university professors and administrators to publicize a barely
concealed disdain for students. This disdain saturates every stupid, snarky
word of Stephen Carter’s <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-05-15/dear-class-of-2014-thanks-for-not-disinviting-me">“Dear
Class of 2014: Thanks for Not Disinviting Me”</a>; it resounds in William Bowen’s <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20140517_Haverford_College_commencement_speaker_lambastes_students.html">commencement
</a>sermon to Haverford College. In a world where dads and the dad-like wring
their hands over those sillybilly millenials, apathetic spoiled and
self-absorbed, somehow students' attempt to recode the parameters of public spectacle
has been troped as an exercise in narcissism. It’s the selfie generation, after
all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">If the university once
(understood itself to have) functioned as the place where humans left their
self-incurred immaturity, as Kant might put it, if it once served as the place
where students prepared themselves to participate in public life, the Dads of
higher ed are now insisting with the primness of a period-piece dowager that
students should be seen and not heard. Literally. Bowen recalls a commencement protest
over the grant of an honorary degree to a Nixonite in the 70s. (You can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hear</i> the daddishness: “back in my day…”)
Happily, the “protestors were respectful (mostly), and chose to express their
displeasure, by simply standing and turning their backs when the Secretary was
recognized.” If ed gurus today salivate over tech-leveraged “disruption,” what
Bowen admires about these human swivels is their decision “to express their
opinion in a non-disruptive fashion.” No noise, just image, and the spectacle went on, with Princeton
investing a Nixonite with an honorary degree. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I’ve been insisting on the
term spectacle because, as everyone knows, the operative fiction of Carter’s
letter and Bowen’s sermon is bullshit. Not even your liberalist liberal, your
deliberativest deliberative democrat, could in good faith claim that
commencement speeches are scenes of open debate. They are, rather, capstone
moments where the university takes on a body, incorporates itself, and seeks to
establish the conditions of its corporate reproducibility. A lovely experience
validating 240k in cash or debt, a spectacle for parents and future donors—but
hardly a scene of debate or discussion! Just a droning message, some platitudes,
and the implicit promise that the fundraising office will soon track you down.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thus, Carter’s sarcastic
reminder that students are “graduating into a world of enormous complexity and
conflict,” his sarcastic injunction that childish student protestors not “sweep
away complexity and nuance’”—all of this is the height of cynical bullshit. I
can’t imagine that there’s a student protestor who would not have jumped at the
chance to address the middlebrow dads of the world in the august pages of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">BloombergView</i>, to be recognized as mature
enough to participate in the dads’ super-smart high-intensity debates, nuanced
and complex as they are. (I can’t imagine, moreover, that there’s a single
student protesting the IMF’s Lagarde who is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>
aware of the US’s historical involvement in it, I can’t imagine that there’s a
single protestor who would not be happy to disinvite the US—as Carter suggests
students would not be—should the Statue of Liberty or something try to give a
commencement speech. But Professor Carter insists on his students’ stupidity,
their lack of sophisticated thinking. Ad te fabula…) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">To demand nuance from those
without secure access to official publics is to inhibit access to publicness as
such. But Carter and Bowen don’t want publicness; they want an ideological plebiscite.
One in which students are free to say yes or no (or nothing, which counts as a
yes) to the options presented, sure, but they first need to be presented with
the options—options cooked up off screen, in the President’s office, with the
Board of Trustees, with the Dean of Student Life, wherever. They can turn their
backs, give a thumbs down, maybe the unruly will even boo (with pearls clutched
at Princeton), but first they have to listen. Bowen reserves particular ire for
the students’ decision to send Birgeneau a list of demands—that is, for their
attempt to intervene into public discourse in a way exceeding the axiomatics of
yea or nay. In a certain way, then, universities <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> preparing students for the forms of depleted publicness
available to Mature Nuanced Dads across ‘Merica: raging at television screens
and the de facto binary act of punching holes in ballots. (Let’s keep that in
mind: the pinnacle of official political being for most US subjects is so
semantically winnowed that its activity is prelinguistic. Nuance not required.)
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And so the bankrupt cynicism
of claims that students immaturely, impulsively, undemocratically violated the
norms of democratic publicness. To think that fostering a culture of public
debate is a university pedagogical ideal is by turns hilarious and desperately
sad when we consider the story that put Bowen on Haverford’s stage and the
story he told while up there. Bowen spoke because Haverford students didn’t
want Birgeneau, the former chancellor of UC Berkeley who let his cops baton
student Occupiers in 2011, to speak. Bowen’s good-ole-days memory, meanwhile,
recalls the chill in campus activism in the 70s—in the wake, that is, of Kent
State. (The dignified, “non-disruptive” protest of turning one’s back is also
one that won’t get you shot or beat.) The campus public has been structured
dismantled; when it threatens to reappear, it is hyper-policed. Or University
Dads write letters in the rag of a billionaire’s news corporation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This round of student
disinvitation performatively refuses the pseudo-conversion of an ideological
plebiscite into an ersatz public. That they can recognize the difference is
miraculous, because it would appear, from Carter and Bowen’s responses, that
university educators flip to the end of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” when
assembling their pedagogy: “Argue about whatever you like as much as you like,
but obey!” This time, though, the obedience that University Dads demand would
entail students forsaking the already minimal space they once possessed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I’m not being as coherent as
I‘d like. Maybe not as nuanced as Carter would demand. There’s much more to be
said about the decimation of publicness in the US, the way it’s been
militarized and policed to hell. About the university’s betrayal of its
mission. About how nuance is meaningless in a world subsumed into the idiotic
violence of pure command. And on and on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But I’m more just angry,
pissed off, that my colleagues in higher education are so committed to
maintaining their dad-power that they write off those students <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">most</i> committed to opening a democratic
horizon as democracy’s greatest traitors. The idea persists that any student
with an idea is actually a kid with a tantrum; that student protesting is super
chic and just a blast; that responding to administration power is a kind of
oedipal thing that silly kids do, because they must, to feel (but not actually
be; no, not yet) like adults. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What Carter and Bowen refuse
to acknowledge are the doubtless long hours students spent in self-organized
meetings, arguing, drafting and re-drafting statements, figuring out what it
was they in fact wanted. What they can’t feel, and don’t care to feel, is the
scorn reserved for student activists on campus. But the scorn isn’t as bad as
the indifference, an indifference experienced in more long hours trying to hand
fliers to people who will probably trash them immediately, in conversations
with unreceptive classmates and student groups and, yes, most professors and
administrators. An indifference induced by the discourse that students are just
consumers, and primarily consumers of booze and sex—a discourse of the dads
that pretends to lament what it secretly hopes to reproduce. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And what they really, truly
cannot see is the fear, and the extraordinary and ordinary courages that match
it. The fear of isolation and mockery, to be sure. But also the simple fear
that necessarily runs alongside the act of becoming political in a space that
abjects politics—of becoming public in a world evacuated of publicness. The voices
that trembled when they first began mic-checking a speaker, only to crescendo
by the end. The moment of doubt that arrives just before the email is sent to
the student paper…but sent it is. Even just approaching someone with a flier is
a small breech of neoliberal norms, an act requiring a corresponding charge of
bravery. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">That these students exist at
all is miraculous. As always, it’s the educator who must be educated. Carter
and Bowen should thank them for the lesson. For it might not be too long,
perhaps, before they take Bowen’s advice and turn their backs on these
spectacles of depleted publicity—only to make a break for the undercommons from
which they emerged.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">#NoDads<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-75900819086946691782014-05-05T14:55:00.001-07:002014-05-05T14:55:31.354-07:00On the Locution "Check your privilege!"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the wake of responses to
Tal Fortgang’s “<a href="http://time.com/85933/why-ill-never-apologize-for-my-white-male-privilege/">Why
I’ll Never Apologize for My White Privilege</a>,” I want to think, very
briefly, about what kind of locution “Check your privilege” is. What do we
mean, and mean to say, when we say it? What’s at stake for me, as should be
obvious and as is usual around here, is not coming to an apologetics for a
terrible bourgie racist, but rather honing the efficacy of a key instrument of
today’s anti-racist repertoire—which is to say, interrupting the process by
which an anti-racist technique becomes functional for racial liberalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As is evident in his essay,
Fortgang responds to the charge “Check your privilege!” as a misinterpellation.
That is, the locution charges him (by “reprimand[ing]” him, as he puts it) to
inhabit a position with which he cannot identify. The reasons for this
inability to identify are in part ideological (meritocracy is a thing for him)
but are, more robustly, biographical: “So to find out what they are saying, I
decided to take their advice. I actually went and checked the origins of my
privileged existence, to empathize with those whose underdog stories I can’t
possibly comprehend.” His move, basically, is to oppose his privileged present
with his family’s underprivileged past. To be sure, Fortgang’s recourse to
narration disavows the privilege entailed in inhabiting legible and stable kin
structures, structures that transmit themselves in and as time, but let’s let
that slide for the moment; it’s the method that I want to think about.
Interrupting privilege talk’s synchronic present with the temporality of a
family’s history, Fortgang’s point is to mark the gap between contemporary
modes of mapping structure and lived relations to it. For Fortgang, the
locution “Check your privilege!” violently closes this gap. It’s not for
nothing that he figures its use as a high-speed missile, a missile to be lobbed
from a drone—“</span><span style="background: white; color: #282828; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends
recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my
pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness”—for </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">the locution traverses the space between structure and subjectivity that
he cannot cognitively or ethically travel. But the phrase, as a missile, misses
what it hits; or, rather, it hits by missing. For Fortgang is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> privileged, no, not a bit, for his
roots are with the underprivileged, the unprivileged, and he lives his relation
to the world as such.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">If Fortgang were to give a
linguistic term to this locution, it would be “insult.” I’ve written about the
insult <a href="http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2011/11/bloomberg-that-fucking-asshole-or.html">before</a>;
what I want to return to here is how insulting functions precisely through the
lack of fit between sign, referent, and signified. As Agamben puts it in his
little essay on friendship, an insult “is effective precisely because it does
not function as a constative utterance…it uses language in order to give a name
in such a way that the named cannot accept his name, and against which he
cannot defend himself.” For Fortgang, the performative locution (“Check your
privilege!”) is underwritten by an unearned constative (“You have privilege.”)
that, in his case, converts privilege-checking from a mode of regulating
discourse to a form of insult. An imposition of an improper name, a forced
inclusion into an improper set. Put differently, an alternative title to his
essay could easily have been “Why I am not an Asshole”—for Fortgang, the linguistic
operation of privilege-checking and name-calling are functionally identical. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Fortgang’s inability to
accept “privileged” as a proper naming of his social position can help us think
through some limits to how privilege checking functions today. We can see these
limits, for instance, in <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/05/04/ill_never_apologize_for_my_white_privilege_guy_is_basically_most_of_white_america/">one
Salon response</a> to Fortgang, which begins, “A college student who doesn’t
believe in the existence of structural racism or white supremacy wrote an essay
about why he would “never apologize” for his white privilege…” We see them
again in Jezebel’s response, “<a href="http://groupthink.jezebel.com/to-the-princeton-privileged-kid-1570383740">To
the Privileged Princeton Kid</a>,” which takes the form of a letter, a
second-person address intended to educate this “kid” into an alternative form
of subjectivity. In both cases, what’s at stake is inducing an imaginative relationship
(he “doesn’t believe”) or an ethical relationship (the proper “you” who would
non-allergically get his privilege checked) to social and political structure. The
problem is that Fortgang’s point persists: he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cannot</i> maintain an imaginative or ethical relationship to
structure. And with good reason. After all, he’s being asked to claim
authorship for, and mark his authorization by, a structure that he didn’t will,
a structure that exceeds his capacity to will—a political structure that is
indifferent to the ethical relationship one establishes with it. In other
words, Fortgang’s anti-liberal reception of “Check your privilege!” usefully
marks the disarticulation between the ethical and the political, between an
individual’s lived relation to the world and the political structures that
sustain or constrain it. When Fortgang asserts the excessiveness of history to
privilege’s present, what he’s saying is: I can’t do shit about it. And he can’t.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The problem with the kind of
privilege-checking that Fortgang critiques is that it asks subjects to maintain
an ethical relationship to a dispersed structure that exceeds the practical or
phenomenological horizons of the ethical. Fortgang’s allergic reaction to
privilege-checking is the mirror image of white anti-racist liberal voluntarists—the
kind we all love to critique—who posit their reformed ethical relation to
whiteness as a politics. In either case, the substitution of the ethical for
the political obscures the fact that it’s not possible to maintain an ethical
relationship to whiteness, because whiteness is nothing less—as we get from
Fanon—than the dissolution of ethical relationality. Just think: What would it
actually mean for someone like Fortgang to maintain an ethical relationship to
his whiteness, his maleness, his money? Why would we even want him to? Put in phenomenological
terms, I can only live right with my whiteness when I live against it, but this
counter-action is never derivable from myself. It comes from outside, in the
establishment of an oppositional political relationship, one that exceeds my
individual capacities of cognitive, imaginative, or ethical relation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">And it is maintaining a
political relationship, I think, that the locution intended from the beginning,
from its origins in activist practice. “Check your privilege!” is an activists’
tool for activists. It functions less to put power into an ethical relation
with its own terribleness than it works to keep our counter-power free from
residual traces of the world we’re trying to destroy. It’s not a locution
intended to traverse the friend/enemy divide in order to call the powerful to dubious
acts of moral accountancy. It’s neither a reprimand nor an insult. Rather, “Check
your privilege!” is a speech-act that intends the maintenance of anti-racist,
anti-misogynist, anti-capitalist groups against the persistent threat of
auto-corruption. One only says “Check your privilege!” to comrades, to those
with whom you <a href="http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2013/11/going-my-way-anarchist-inclinations-and.html">co-incline.</a>
It’s a locution that keeps political lines of communication clear from all of
the fucked-up shit we bring, and can’t not bring, to our collectivities. In
Jakobson’s terms, the function of “Check your privilege!” is phatic, a way of
saying, “I can’t hear you; you’re adopting an idiom unintelligible from the
perspective of our politics.” That is, the locution informs the addressee of
the conditions under which his words will be legible as a communicative act,
and does so after those conditions have been broken. The point of the locution is
to repair a political relation that has been interrupted, not simply to
regulate discourse or inspire an ethical consciousness that can never actually
be ethical. And it only makes sense within this political frame, where it works
powerfully. Otherwise, it’s just a liberal moralization of the political.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">A simple way of putting
this: One checks the privileges of one’s friends. One destroys those of one’s enemies.
One does the former in the service of the latter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-4913107208592211872014-04-23T14:26:00.000-07:002014-04-23T14:27:18.523-07:00Literature, Epistemic Democracy, and the Punky Piketty<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Instead
of Austen and Balzac, the professor [Piketty] ought to read "Animal
Farm" and "Darkness at Noon."</span></i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><span style="font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">--The Wall Street Journal </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Any
reading of Piketty’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital in the
Twenty-First Century</i> has to come to terms with the conditions of
possibility for its popularity. Why has Thomas Piketty become a “<a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/on-tour-with-rock-star-economist-thomas-piketty.html">rock
star</a>”? In part, Piketty’s text concretizes left-liberal consensus around
contemporary capitalism, and does so in a way amenable to the technocratic,
social-managerial orientations of left-liberalism: with data, lots of it,
stretched over a long enough period to induce a kind of bleak fatalist belief
in capitalism’s sempiternality. Like the political scientists <a href="http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2014/04/ideas-whose-time-has-belatedly-come-or.html">about
whom I last blogged</a>, Piketty’s work in part repackages the commonly known
as the expertly known. But—and here’s the other part, and one that
distinguishes his work from that of those whom I critiqued—he does so in a way
that validates historically common ways of knowing the economic. Every review
has remarked upon the prominence of the cultural within <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital in the Twenty-First Century</i>. The problem has been one of
determining the relationship between the cultural object and the economic
analysis. For Piketty’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303825604579515452952131592">WSJ
<span style="font-style: normal;">reviewer</span></a></i> cited above, the cultural
seems to provide, maximally, a kind of overarching attunement to the phenomena
discussed; minimally, a kind of shorthand for the bundling of norms and facts
presented in the text. For others, Piketty’s fun with Austen, Balzac, and Don
Draper are pedagogically useful, sure, but somewhat ornamental, even
superfluous. The reviewer in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/179337/thomas-piketty-and-millennial-marxists-scourge-inequality?page=0,7">The
Nation</a></i> writes <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background: white; color: #1d1d1d; font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Discussions of Balzac and Jane Austen are
mildly helpful as demonstrations of the attitudes toward capital in the
nineteenth century, but they offer rapidly diminishing returns and do little to
substantiate Piketty’s strange contention that novelists have lost interest in
the details of money, a claim plausible only to someone who has never heard of
Tom Wolfe or Martin Amis. Other references—<i>Mad Men</i>, <i>Django
Unchained</i>, <i>Damages</i> and, repeatedly, <i>Titanic</i>—add
even less.”</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Culture
as attitude, culture as exemplum—ultimately, culture as superfluous.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But
that’s not quite right. For Piketty isn’t simply staging the “attitudes” of
European bourgeoisies to capitalism in the early nineteenth century. Rather, he
is staging the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adequacy</i> of their
representations of it. (In that, he’s riding the rails laid down by a gang of
Marxist literary scholars.) Conversely, I take Piketty’s claim (which struck me
as bizarre at first, too) that novelists don’t talk about money anymore to mark
less an empirical fact than an epistemological disadequation. That is, cultural
objects might represent the economic today, but they cannot <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know</i> it in a referentially meaningful
way. If Tom Wolfe is talking about money, he might as well not be. It’s
intriguing, in this regard, that the contemporary aesthetic objects that Piketty
is drawn toward tend to be historical fictions (<i><span style="background: white; color: #1d1d1d;">Mad Men</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #1d1d1d;">, <i>Django
Unchained</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">, <i>Titanic</i>), as if
art can know economic pasts but can’t get a grip on its present.</span></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">With
his literary “demonstrations,” I am suggesting, Piketty forces readers to
reckon with the constitutive break between the literary and economic
epistemologies and forms of representation. Another way of putting this: The
novel used to be able to know the economic in a referentially adequate way. It
no longer can. What each citation of Austen recalls was a harmonious time in
which literary and economic epistemologies weren’t so different, when literary
and economic genres of writing could blend together, a time before the literary
and the economic were made to part ways. (Defoe would probably be a better
example, but Austen was writing through a point of takeoff. On the general
relationship between literary and economic writing in the Anglosphere, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Genres-Credit-Economy-Eighteenth--Nineteenth-Century/dp/0226675335/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398287851&sr=8-1&keywords=mary+poovey+genres">read
this</a>.) It’s a subdued point of the book, but it’s there: the material
inequalities associated with capitalism’s takeoff had their parallel in an
induced epistemological inequality. Literature became ornamental, literary
works mere “demonstrations” illustrative of more robust economic concepts (a la
Harriet Martineau’s gawdawful <i>Illustrations of Political Economy</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> [1834]), as a gaggle of political
economists reconstituted economic inquiry as an epistemologically and
generically autonomous field, a field ruled by experts. In a certain way, then,
Piketty’s account of the accumulation of inequality is equally an account—vague,
to be sure—of why it takes an economist to tell you that this is the case. Just
as capital maldistributes wealth, so too does it maldistribute knowledge. His
literary “demonstrations” put us in a position to experience the cognitive
disembedding of the economic from the phenomenologies of the everyday,
phenomenologies that can be accessed in literature and film. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of course, questions of epistemology and genres of
representation are <i>not</i> Piketty’s primary concern, but he can’t not touch
upon them. For two reasons. Piketty <i>is</i> concerned to set off a struggle
over method in economics departments, which he sees as too mathematized, too
abstract, too ahistorical—in a phrase, too much of all the things that make it
impenetrable to lay people. At the same time, Piketty’s own handling of his
massive sets of data, his mode of interpreting and his form of representing it,
requires that his readers take a relaxed approach to statistical precision.
Precision and referential adequacy take a back seat to the omnipresent <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">U</b> curve. Limitations on data, as well
as decisions over how to establish and arrange variables, make all figures
figural. No matter how dense the data, economists have to play fast and loose
with figures all the time—which is why, yes, it might matter whether one is
reading Austen or Orwell.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So, if Piketty is a “rock star,” maybe it’s because
there’s something a little punky, a little DIY, a little put-together-on-the-run at work in
his text. And that’s what I want to hold on to from a book I really truly
hated. It’s been depressing to me that people are reading Piketty’s book as if
they’re learning something substantive about the world through economics when,
as I understand it, Piketty’s work makes legible the primitive accumulation of
economic knowledge, the enclosure of a proper sphere of economic knowledge that
cut into spaces of the commonly known. Indeed, the last book on economic
history to inspire an analogous, but lower-key, kind of pop frenzy—Graeber’s <i>Debt</i>—worked
precisely to re-embed economic thinking in the space of the social, to common
economic thinking by turning to the genre of the anecdote, the ethnography.
Alas, it was written off by a certain socialist publication—“We need more grand
histories, but 5,000 years of anecdotes is no substitute for real political
economy,” <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/">as the banner runs</a>—which, alongside many left-lite publications, is
going (to go) gaga for Tommy P. But to posit the non-substitutability of genres
of the ordinary for those of the expert is to inscribe managerialism as a
guiding principle of our radicalism. It’s also to subordinate one’s epistemic
autonomy to experts, thereby foregoing the radical work of developing ways of
knowing in common. The enthusiasm over Piketty, in other words, is
premised on a refusal of epistemic autonomy, of the work of epistemic communization. Let me be clear: I simply
cannot imagine that the US left has learned anything useful or meaningful from
Piketty’s book, so I can only understand the book’s enthused reception in those
quarters as a ritualization of epistemic lack. Let’s call it the socialist’s
Daddy-Mommy-Me: the economist, his data, and the good little boy just so
pleased that ma and pa have validated his sense of the real.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Let’s hold on to the punky Piketty, then, the one
in the midst of an oedipal revolt against the discipline. The one who insists
that “the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to
economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers,” who insists that
“[d]emocracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts.” The literary
appears in <i>Capital in the Twenty-First Century</i> as one enactment of this
epistemic democracy—a lost democracy, to be sure, one that was never really
democratic anyhow, but one that persists as a sign of alternative
epistemological ecologies. To read with the punky Piketty—and <i>against</i>
the feted prof who insists several times that “[i]nequality is not necessarily
bad in itself”—is to continue the work of democratizing economic knowledge. To
see in a novel, in an ethnographic anecdote, or in the performative scene of
submission conjured on payday the knowledges we need to know. And what we know,
in the form of knowledge generated in these encounters, is that economics is
ultimately defective for democracy: to democratize economic knowledge is to
destroy it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-40462958548093239012014-04-17T14:02:00.000-07:002014-04-17T14:02:05.782-07:00Ideas Whose Time Has (Belatedly) Come: Or, Political Science<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/08/rich-people-rule/">Rich
people rule</a>!” Didja know? Of course you did. But, according to Larry
Bartels, political scientists just proved it. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/major-study-finds-that-the-us-is-an-oligarchy-2014-4">Business
Insider</a> </i>has just reported on the same study, one that proves that “economic
elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups
and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” Sorry for
blowing your minds, comrades. But you can’t silence an idea whose time has
come, remember.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I first read Bartels’ piece, I kind of just wrote it
off as just another piece in the extensive pundit-class discourse of Liberal
Eye-Opening. But then I re-read it. The problem, I realized, isn’t simply that
Bartels is telling me what I already know. The piece isn’t useless; indeed, it
has multiple effects, precisely to the extent that it tells me what I assumed
as given. In telling me something I already know, Bartels’ piece is actually
telling me that I never really knew what I thought. At stake in the piece, in
other words, is a redistribution of the epistemic in which the kinds of
knowledge I possess turn out to be non-knowledges. The real thesis of this
piece—which thinks it’s telling us that economic elites have corrupted
democratic governance—is that the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">demos</i>
isn’t equipped to know democracy’s destruction. <br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Let’s begin with the recognition of a simple fact. By
grasping that the rich rule in Anno Domini 2014, it’s taken U.S. poli.sci
departments a real long time to accord truth-value to something that pretty
much every human being knows. Sure, people figure and operationalize this
common knowledge in diverse, antagonistic ways; plenty of people are pretty
okay with class rule. But anyone who has been conscious for an election cycle,
say, or worked at a job—that is, depended on someone else for subsistence,
submitted one’s bodily and cognitive dispositions to the commands of another—or
realized that they’ll never golf with Barry knows that rich people rule. Almost
everyone: political scientists, apparently, constitute the one exception. Luckily,
though, due to a new “<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #2c2c2c;">stunningly documented” study by Bartels’ friends, what
everybody knows now counts as knowledge. Knowledge, friends. Shit you can cite.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By “documented,” of course, we’re talking about a
translation of commonsense into data. To be sure, as Bartels recognizes, any
freshman in any Intro to Theory course—from literary theory to anthropology to
sociology to (maybe?) poli.sci—would know, through Hegel, Marx, or even ole
Adam Smith, that “economic power” (I’ll get to this fine euphemism) is
political power, functionally if not normatively. But the form of knowing set
to work in this theory is not the way poli.sci knows now: “<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #2c2c2c;">Qualitative
studies of the political role of economic elites have mostly
been relegated to the margins of the field.” It’s astonishing: the very
belatedness of positivist methodologies to accede to the level of
what-everyone-ever-already-knows doesn’t impel Bartels to reconsider the
epistemic configuration of his field. Indeed, even as Bartels notes the
belatedness of poli.sci to what-everyone-knows, he asserts the epistemic
superiority of poli-sci’s methods: “political scientists are belatedly turning
more systematic attention to the political impact of wealth, and their
findings should reshape how we think about American democracy.”</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #2c2c2c;">They are
tardy to the party, sure, but quantitative political scientists have brought
the dope dope—a capacity for “rigorous (meaning quantitative) scientific
investigation.” (Hegel could barely count to three before it turned into one
again; Poor Adam, meanwhile, didn’t give a fig for political arithmetic; and
everyone from Engels on knows that Karl was just rubbish with his maths.)</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #2c2c2c;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My problem isn’t with numbers, pie charts, and databases as
such. My problem, rather, is with this celebration of a depleted
epistemological ecology—not because I love epistemological diversity as such,
either, but because I think poli.sci’s ongoing and dead-on impression of an
epistemological wasteland functions as a prophylactic against the immediacy,
urgent, and (as Bartels would admit) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">valid</i>
claims made in other epistemic registers. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #2c2c2c;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Think of it like this: the takeaway of Bartels’ post is that
something like a 1% exists. (It’s actually more like a 10% for the purposes of
the study he cites.) I refer back to Occupy’s figuration for two reasons. One,
I imagine that Bartels would be rather sympathetic to the liberal-progressivist
ends to which this slogan was put, or at least not hostile. Two, it’s a figure
that drew upon pop economic knowledge, that attempted to derive from the latter
the kind of epistemic aura that numbers hold for Serious People. It would have
been utterly natural for Bartels to have referred to this figure, to the social
movement that buoyed it, to the knowledges that sustained it. Instead, he
directs us to “a flurry of commentary” surrounding <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">McCutcheon v. FEC</i>, a case adjudicated well, well after Occupy. If
Occupy was a movement touting an idea whose time had come, Bartels refuses to validate
forms of knowing that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know too soon</i>,
forms of knowing that short circuit the positivist time of coming-to-know with the
punctuality of a deeply plebeian “Shit’s fucked up and bullshit!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #2c2c2c;">But that’s what liberalism is, really: the absorption of the
immediacy of a political sense into the studied, slow time of useless
intellection, the conflation of taking-time and having-a-(truer-)thought. The
bourgeois public sphere, the Parliamentary Blue Book, the parliamentary
labyrinth of US congressional procedure, the ballot box, and, sure,
contemporary political-scientific methods—all of these liberal forms articulate
a slowing of time to a production of thought in the name of optimizing a
decision that will never come. Just think about statistical methodologies, the
kinds of datasets that would be required to prove that, yes, class power is
political power: the study Bartels cites involves 1779 policy outcomes from
over a period of twenty years just to make the minimal suggestion that things
work out, probably, politically speaking, maybe, for rich folk. (Intriguingly,
neither Bartels nor the study incorporate the fact that no one has done such a
study into their understanding of class power. The fact that scholars <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">assume</i>, against empirical reality, a
liberal-inflected “Majoritarian Electoral Democracy” as their primary analytic
framework doesn’t register as an index of the functioning of class rule.
Instead, they code the qualitative effectivity of bourgeois ideology as nothing
more than a poor analytic frame for marshaling quantitative empirics.) How big
of a dataset would be required to suggest that capitalism, class power, and the
liberal-democratic state all have something to do with one another? (Of course,
Bartels doesn’t’ say capitalism or class power—he speaks of a bland “economic
power,” as if plutocrats could be deriving their dough from a super-successful
autonomous workers’ collectivity they’re members of just as easily as from
heavily financialized capitalist exploitation.) </span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a speech act, then, Bartels’ post’s primary effect isn’t
simply to affirm plebeian sense, to say, “You guys were right; class power is a
thing; sorry for our belatedness.” Rather, its primary effect is to assert the
deficiency of plebeian sense <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">even when it
is right</i>. You didn’t know what you know until rigorous poli.sci people knew
it. The effect is to delaminate political knowledge from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">polis</i>, democratic sense from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">demos</i>. We’ll only know that democracy is
fucked when experts mathematize it. Until the datasets come in, chill out—we
don’t know anything yet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I used to giggle at the scientism of early Marxism—Marx and
Engels, Lenin and Luxemburg, Lukacs and Althusser, on and on. But now I’m
beginning to think that this scientism wasn’t supposed to achieve any kind of
scientific positivity, that Marxism’s valorization of the scientific didn’t
intend a valorization of positive knowledges. (Stalin, we might say, wasn’t
part of the plan.) What Marx desired in seizing hold of the term “science” was
to create and defend a space in which plebeian forms of knowing could be
entertained as knowledge—a knowledge that doesn’t require validation from
positive or theoretical science, but rather productive transcription into it.
This is what Marx does in what have become my favorite paragraphs in volume one
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Capital</i>. It’s the “Working Day”
chapter, a few pages in. Marx has just exfoliated the capitalist’s sense of
work-time. And then, dramatically, the worker enters the scene of knowledge
production: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Suddenly, however, there arises the voice of the worker,
which had previously been stifled in the sound and fury of the production
process: ‘The commodity I have sold you differs from the ordinary crowd of
commodities in that its use creates value, a greater value than it costs…’”
(342)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And the worker continues, making fine conceptual
distinctions, offering mathematical examples, and generally talking the
language of political economy. Lest you think Marx is simply ventriloquizing a
worker to ground his theory, he assures us in a footnote, “During the great
strike of the London building workers…their committee published a manifesto
that contained, to some extent, the plea of our worker” (343). This is
knowledge from the streets, as it were, but what Marx is working us toward is a
disposition where we can treat it as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knowledge</i>,
knowledge as such, without reservations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We need to follow Marx in defending the discursive space in
which the plebeian voice “suddenly” appears, to follow Marx in holding onto
knowledge charged by forms of urgency that can’t settle themselves into a
dataset, a Blue Book, a Parliamentary inquiry. To open space where another’s
words can erupt as knowledge is to begin a communization of the epistemic. We
need, I think to begin to trust that what we do on picket lines and in
occupations, at meetings and in workshops, on Twitter and on blogs, is in fact
productive of knowledges we need to have—urgent knowledges, sudden knowledges
that can’t wait for positivist transcription. Knowledges whose time has not yet
come. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-20881225320022310192014-01-25T16:20:00.000-08:002014-01-25T16:22:03.643-08:00Notes on the Coming Progressive Kristallnacht<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">A progressive Kristallnacht
is coming. That’s the earnest warning issued by Tom Perkins—venture capitalist
and historical parallelist extraordinarie—in <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304549504579316913982034286">a
letter</a> to the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>.
In Perkins’ world, Occupy was a dress rehearsal for fascism, and at any minute
dreadlocked smelly stormtroopers are going to get all smashy-smashy on the
property of today’s “Jews”—that is, on the property of what Perkins calls,
following Occupy’s rhetoric, the “1%”. We could say so many things: about the
anti-Semitic conflation of being wealthy with being Jewish as a means of coding
being against the rich as being against Jews; about how Tom is so distanced
from his Bay Area locality—or is just generally an unimaginative bloke—that he
didn’t think to mobilize the fact that anarchists <i>have</i> smashed windows aplenty in his surrounds, but instead hears
the jangling of shattering glass in the public reaction to Google buses; about
the impoverished imaginaries of the world’s elite, who need to deck themselves
out in the borrowed garments of histories past so as to steel themselves
against the impossibility of their having a future; about the fact that <i>WSJ</i> editorial standards seem so minimal
that, shucks, all of us might as well dust off old poems written in high school
and submit them for the journal’s august consideration. (Direct action:
overload the <i>WSJ</i> editorial mailbox
with re-writings of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”!!!!!)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But what if we said that
Perkins, in some bizarre way, is right? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Mightn’t there by a creeping
tendency within liberal progressivism—whatever that is—toward something like
fascism? I live in Chicago, where an authoritarian state buoying itself on a fictive
liberal populism is part of the political ordinary, but this emergent
articulation is evident elsewhere in the wacky world of liberal letters.
Consider Sean Wilentz’s <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2014/01/19/the-liberal-surveillance-state/">recent nonsense</a>, which basically encouraged us to
defend the state’s agglomeration of massive surveillance powers as a
requirement for defending the thin slivers of the welfare state that remain.
(In the interests of asserting the epistemological soundness of Marxist
futurology, I’ll note that I argued that this was going to be the liberal
response <a href="http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2013/06/prism-surplus-sociality-and-crisis-of_3786.html">last
June</a>.) But it’s not just the statist turn—or, if not turn, the statist
standing-in-place—of liberal publics that comes to mind as I think through the
articulation of liberalism and fascism. As venture capitalist and social
theorist Tom Perkins insists, Occupy was and is in some sense functional for
what we might think of, however loosely, as fascism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">My thinking on this got
started with a tweet from a pal: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The thing about
the 99% is that it encompasses most fascists and now well meaning, unthinking
people are super hyped about bad politics.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">— l.e. sunnyside
long (@beingtherewith) <a href="https://twitter.com/beingtherewith/statuses/426890814208241664">January
25, 2014</a></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And she’s right. Most of us
intuited this Septembers ago. I mean, come on, who of us were able to chant “We
are the 99%!” <i>without</i> bile rising in
the throat? Who of us didn’t find the obsession with finance capital, Wall
Street, and what bonuses rich morons receive to miss the point? We could ignore
all this when the occupations existed, when the positivity of the social world
we were forming overwhelmed the problematic negativity of the imaginary that
got most of us on the streets in the first place. But what work does the ideological
negation of the “1%” do when there is not a positive, material, social force
behind this negation, a force for which negation is simply a derived effect of
world-building?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Let’s say that the politico-cultural
life of fascism consists in the articulation of a populism for which the
negation of a fabulated class enemy functions as a means of obfuscating its
internal unmooring from the materiality of a class that would give it actual
consistency. It is <i>only</i> this fabulation that coheres the set of the “99%” nowadays.
Indeed, occupations were so crucial to Occupy because without them—without the
forms of association, socialization, and politicization they enabled—we
actually <i>need</i> the “1%” to make us a
thing. Lacking the material positivity of class formation that Marx and Engels
called “association,” we ground our non-class first in imaginary acts of
negation (the “1%”) and then, creepingly, more and more and more, we attempt to
positivize this negation through a turn toward the state, by finding in the state
a source of transcendence that will cohere us in and out of our incoherence,
even when this transcendence sucks. Think Wilentz. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Association is hard. That is
the entire point of Marx and Engel’s political work. But it’s an end in itself,
an end whose material positivity exceeds the politics of negation we get
trapped in when we structure our political imaginaries through the party, the
state, capital, and so on. In the well-known words of the young Marx:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: Arial;">When communist workmen gather together, their immediate
aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new
need—the need for society—and what appears as a means has become an end. The
practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of
French socialist workers. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer
means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation,
which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For Marx, the desire for
tools with which to negate the transcendent rule of capital (“instruction,
propaganda, etc.”) converts into a plane of immanent sociality where, quite
simply, the workers couldn’t give a fuck about party, state, or capital—they’re
drinking, conversing, associating. It’s at this level of sociality that Marx
pegs his hopes for the future. And us too, I think. Most of the demos, marches,
and protests Occupy put together had as their aim some negation of the
capitalist given, but most of us stuck around for one another. I was always
more trilled that we were shouting together than shouting at anything. And just
think of the nonsense chants, how they expose a pure sociality that is
indifferent to the world that is supposed to be its addressee. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">So, let’s say this: Occupy
began as a movement intending the control, regulation, or (in radical cases)
the dismantling of capital, but its radical core consisted in the structured
intuition that all it needed was to intend itself and materially maintain this
intention in time. Communism is that thing where you actually don’t give a fuck
about the rich, and you realize this world to the extent that you retrain your
attention from the pornography of power toward associating—and maintaining
association—with others. It’s hard, sure: yelling at a bank is way easier than
sincerely working through a general assembly. So is yelling to the state to
protect us from the depredations of finance bros. But the real movement of
communism is a movement away from the state and capital and toward one another.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I don’t really like engaging
with or replicating the overburdened symbolics of fascism, but what Perkins
gives us in his hyperbolic invocation of the Reich is a distorted measure of
our failure to materialize ourselves without recourse to a social poetics of
negation or through the transcendent recoding of the state. The trick, I guess
I’m saying, is to start building a world in which I encounter you without first
having to negate the words of a finance bro, a world in which I simply ignore
the hilarious screeds of a class walking on stilts because we’re elsewhere,
doing other things. This isn’t to ignore the work of negativity that
necessarily inheres within any anarchist/communist movement: the capitalist
state doesn’t let us abandon it so easily. The point, rather, is that we will
only be able to contend against this state to the extent that we don’t care
about it, that we materialize the positivity of our sociality in such an
overwhelming fashion that negating state violence is a (necessary)
afterthought. Movements that begin in ideological negation wind up materially
negated: when the militarized thugs of the proto-fascist state broke up
occupation after occupation, how many 99%ers felt so positively attached to the
world they helped make that they stuck around to defend it? Indeed, the
conditions of possibility for Perkins’ future fascism are identical to the
conditions of possibility for Occupy’s historical defeat: our failure to materialize
our social positivity. Negating “the 1%” <i>can
</i>become an alibi for fascism when the only object materializing the negative
will of “99%” is the state; “the 99%” is <i>nothing</i>
when it fabulates its existence through the negation of the “1%”. What remains
to us, then, as we navigate these troubled seas, as we try tacking between the
Scylla of capital and the Charybdis of statism, is the work of association.
Drinking smoking conversing. Working reading arguing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-73147544578598987192014-01-15T14:14:00.001-08:002014-01-15T14:19:55.775-08:00And Then Theory Wept: Precarity Talk and Miley's Sadness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* Who better to reveal our
generalized inability to find joy in autonomy than Miley Cyrus? I was at a bar
with some friends after a day of MLA and “We Can’t Stop” came on and I was
drunk and relieved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It’s our party we can do what we want / It’s our party we can do what
we want</i>. It was like us! So I had more Jameson and was happy to be away
from work and with old friends and with silly pop. I began gushing about the
Miley of that song as a nouveau phalansterian. “A pre-critical socialist!” I
think I said—but a socialist nonetheless. Bodies creeping into a scene away
from wherever, sweating in mad high contact. Bodies doing whatever, embodying
pure whateverness. Miley the Queen of Quodlibet! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>-----“But it’s a really sad song,” my friend said. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And he’s right. The repetition, the minor key, the
desperate wailing at the end, the generalized sense of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fuck, we <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">can’t</b> stop</i>!—it’s
a really sad song. The best party in the world, the party of pure
whatever-being, the party where want is act and “we run things / things don’t
run we”—this party’s anthem is a dirge that cuts out right before the tears
kick in. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If Miley can’t revel in her autonomy, people, we’re
fucked. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* It’s like so much theory
today is just another weapon in a growing arsenal of less lethal weapons, the <a href="http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2012/02/emotechnics-lachrymators-tears-of.html">emotechnics</a>
and lachrymators set to work by the state. The theme of this year’s MLA was “<a href="http://www.mla.org/pdf/pres_theme_invitation_2014.pdf">Vulnerable Times</a>,”
and a torrent of terms flow from the title like so many tears: abandonment,
precarity, bare life, dispossession… And then theory wept. My problem isn’t
that states of existential depletion, vital neglect, and necropolitical
pulverization aren’t real. They are. Nor is my problem that some thinkers
haven’t thought through the exposure of abandonment to the kinds of lives that
get lived when bareness is what you got, when dispossession augurs an entrance
into an undercommon sociality from which something new might come. They have.
Even the MLA program wanted to see vulnerability “not as weakness or victimhood
but as a space for engagement and resistance emerging from a sense of
fundamental openness, interdependence, and solidarity.” Exposed in and through
the implosion of liberal governance, vulnerability appears as an ontological
condition (“fundamental openness”) that is always already post-liberal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But
what’s the payoff in recognizing that bodies can’t sustain neoliberalism, that
the current iteration of the world effects an unworlding? We already knew that
liberalism cannot be lived; we’re just proliferating new figures for its
unlivability. Given that so much of this precarity talk is premised on
narratives of the state’s devastating withdrawal, its neglect of its
redistributive promise or project, theory’s tears produce an affective
reinvestment in a state we will never have. But more: the functionality of much
precarity talk for statist imaginaries is best evident in the fact that we rarely
think of the state as such as vulnerable or abandonable. We never figure
precarity as the state; we imagine that, somehow, the cold monster will endure
long after it has abandoned you and me and everyone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">So
this is how theory is an emotechnic of the state:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We think we’re weeping for populations
abandoned by the state. We never ask: what if we’re weeping <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as the state</i> abandoned by the
populations it thought it had abandoned? Crying tears that Hobbes’ frontispiece
sovereign might cry if it suddenly found its body depopulated by the bodies
that once filled it? Crying the tears of an old lonely abandoned monster?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* Remember that crying cop,
sad that he had to club kids eager to make a break for it back into the state’s
arms? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* I’m writing this in the
wake of the acquittal of Kelly Thomas’ murderers, the homeless ill man killed
twice or thrice or countless times by the state. I’m writing this out of a
feeling of fecklessness and sadness, an acute consciousness of not having done
anything and not knowing what could be done. I’m writing this because
abandonment is a fact, because vulnerability and precarity are differentially
distributed and embodied. But I’m mostly writing it because, in the syncope of consciousness
separating my recognition of the maldistribution of bodily vulnerability and my
awareness of the disembodied nature of my response to this fact, I will have
already forgotten what our bodies—yours and mine—can do. I’m sad that I’ve
lived this forgetting as a concession to the specularity of merely witnessing
what we all already know. I’m sad that I haven’t tested my bodily competency,
my bodily power, that we haven’t tested our bodily competency, our bodily
power, to do something about this, to fuck shit up, to go somewhere else or
make something new. And I’m sad—though you might laugh at this next sadness,
finding it an inevitable sadness, citing thesis 11 to tell me to get over
it—that that most contemporary theory, the kind of theory that yields “Vulnerable Times” thematics, the theory I read with love everyday, hasn’t
enjoined us to enjoy this power. I’m sad that one of the most important
theoretical texts of our moment is frequently read as an incitement to
participate in sadness rather than as an attempt to measure our capacities to
unbind ourselves from it. I’m sad that theory won’t help my sadness resolve
into a great burst of embodied laughter or turn into a kind of anarchist wake where
we remember the dead but fight like hell for the living—and, yes, of course, always,
the dead. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* I’m sad that theory never
tells us what my comrades do—except that theory, that is, that doesn’t count as
theory, the kind of theory read by rad grads and the odd prof, the kind of
theory that you can’t even really cite, the kind that keeps faith with the possibility
of radical autonomy, the kind that is less concerned with what the state does
to us than what we can do to the state and more importantly with one another,
the kind of theory that tells us that, when this shit happens, “<a href="http://olaasm.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/we-go/">we go</a>”:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">So we go. To the streets. To the occupations. To the
marches – the seemingly banal and the potentially-insurrectionary alike. We go.
To the barricades. Together. And if we have questions or doubts – we’ll figure
it out when we get there. But we have to go. A las barricadas!<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We go because we can,
because we have that power, because we are abandoning as much as abandoned, and
we live and act this doubleplay of refusing and being-refused together, in the
joyous collective autonomy we might share after and through and within the
bonecrunch of abject heteronomy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* Nothing heroic. No Vince
Lombardi speeches. That’s not what I want. Just a recognition that we still
don’t know what our bodies can do, that our exposure to violence or our dispossession or bareness doesn’t
exhaust or even begin to describe our potential, that we can run, walk, and
wheel from a world that crushes (our very faith in) our collective autonomy
because, well, we still got it, it’s still there. At this point, there’s more
revolutionary value in reading descriptions of people getting up from chairs
than in continuing to write power’s autobiography. Getting up from chairs:
philosophy’s oldest standup routine. Kant, the third antinomy: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">When, for example, I, completely of my own free will,
and independently of the necessarily determinative influence of natural causes,
rise from my chair, there commences with this event, including its material
consequences in infinitum, an absolutely new series…<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I’m not invested in a
metaphysics of the will or whatever. I’m just laughing with Kant, at Kant,
through Kant, at the amazing fact that some of us get up from chairs, at the
amazing fact that freedom is right there—a freedom that, if not a “first
beginning,” is nonetheless absolute, part of an “absolutely new series.” We run
things / things don’t run we.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* So Kant goes. No doubt
through Königsberg on one of his clockwork walks. But how might we rethink the
current scene of social theory if we put Kant in his chair in the space of our
abandoned present, and followed him from the spontaneity of a freedom that
can’t be exhausted to the demo or occupation? Kant <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a las barricadas</i>? What if we learned, with Kant, to take a kind of
pleasure in the inherence of freedom in the ordinariness of our variegated and
differentiated bodies’ praxis? I’m engaging the unfortunately ableist
metaphorics of getting up from a chair not to promote a paradigm of action but
to generate a new attunement of thought, one that gets up and over our
contemporary inability to find joy in our autonomy.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">While the MLA vulnerability theme was playing out, a <a href="http://mlasubconference.org/">subconference</a> of vulnerable people gathered autonomously to share and develop technologies of autonomy. I couldn't make any of it, but I heard it was a brilliant blast. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* So, the minimal demand:
Not a theory that reflects reality, that informs us of the shittiness of our
present, that calculates the infinite modes by which power decimates us. We all know how shitty it is, how wasted and depleted. We want a
theory that works to empower us to remake the real, that acts in the present as
a force of and for affective recalibration, a theory that puts us into joyous
contact with the bodily fact of inexhaustible—and therefore endlessly
shareable—autonomy. A theory that puts us on the go. To the occupation, the
demo, the barricades. To Miley’s party to tell her that it doesn’t have to be
so fucking sad. To the MLA to tell them we get enough tear gas, thank you much,
and we want a theory that joys in autonomy, the glimmers of it that
remain—which might mean, sure, that for the present we just talk about vacating chairs.
To the state to tell them that we’re going away for a while, probably forever,
with one another. We will carry our wounded with us; sometimes they’ll carry
us. We’ll pool our bodily resources and go along, laughing and dancing. We’ll
let the state do the crying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-25078890562085076632013-11-07T18:12:00.000-08:002013-11-07T18:18:07.183-08:00Going My Way? Anarchist Inclinations and Lorde<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">(I’m writing this in the
wake of and as a way of thinking through a Twitter spat between a well-known
blogger/postdoc and a very well known anthropologist who practices anarchism.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It begins with a question,
one rarely asked and so rarely responded to. Neither articulated nor answered,
the question persists as an inchoate feeling for and vague orientation toward
another. If we were to give voice to this question, to make it explicit, we
would thematize the mystery of this orientation, this feeling-for-another that
puts us in hesitant proximity with one another. The question might be phrased
as “Going my way?” What this question inaugurates through its inarticulation is
the astonishingly robust and ridiculously fragile collectivity that we are,
whoever we are. In not asking this question explicitly, we refuse to ask it
once and once only, we refuse to thematize a foundational orientation that
would determine, once and for all, who we are. We’re not a party, no arche or
nomos secures to us our identity as ourselves, and in refusing to ground our
collectivity through an inaugural determination of who we are and what we want,
we commit ourselves to the tense and uncertain work of feeling toward and with
one another. We are nothing but the uncertain feeling that we’re oriented
toward one another in our orientations toward something else. That we’re
inclined toward one another in the multiplicity of our inclinations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I’ve been thinking a lot
about inclination recently. My thinking got started, believe it or not, with
Lorde—or, rather, with a <a href="http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-different-kind-of-buzz-harmony-white.html">critique</a>
of Lorde that was making its rounds on the internet. It was a critique of the
function of racial signifiers in Lorde’s “Royals,” concluding with a claim
about Lorde’s functionality for a white supremacist patriarchal world. I didn’t
have any problem with the specifics of the reading; it’s correct, as far as it
goes. But I had the nagging suspicion that the critique was true to the extent
that it was false, that the adoption of a hermeneutic of suspicion vis-à-vis
Lorde was somehow inadequate. This, because I felt like the Lorde of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pure Heroine</i> is, in some way, inclining
toward me, toward us—that the speaker of the album is, in some way, a
comrade-in-formation. Really truly. There’s too much class hatred and refusal
in the lyrics that I can’t not. Silly stupid utopian perhaps. Culture industry
people are free to laugh at me. But at stake for me here is the need to rethink
the modes by which we orient ourselves to our cultural objects—and, in turn, to
one another. (Let me keep talking about Lorde, but with the understanding that inquiry
into cultural relations here functions as a propaedeutic for a consideration of
political relations.) My worry is that we’re increasingly conflating the
necessity of critique with the production of allergies, that critique has given
way to simple criticism, that our critical performances are ultimately
functional for liberalism’s pulverization of the political. The point here
isn’t that Lorde’s lyrics in “Royals,” say, aren’t fucked up; they are, and
should be treated as such. But to what end? What’s at stake in this critique?
It’s striking to me that, while honest-to-Jesus political white supremacist
movements are treated with a <a href="http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2013/03/whiteness-supreme-towson-university-and.html">smirk</a>,
Lorde provokes outrage. It’s easy to ignore white supremacist movements or
mock them away for the simple reason that we can’t imagine a world in which we
would enter a political relation with them—that is, a political relation
constituted by amity. (I would argue that liberals can’t really imagine a
political relation of enmity with white supremacists either, and thus the
predominance of irony in liberal approaches to these formations.) Simply put,
we don’t share a world with white supremacists. For me, Lorde poses a different
political and interpretive challenge, insofar as I <i>can</i> imagine
sharing a world with her. (CLR JAMES READING GROUP WITH LORDE!) This
possibility of world-sharing and world-forming, of politics, requires the
adoption of an interpretive-critical mode that can simultaneously keep in view
what I take to be the sincerity of her refusal of the given and the violence of
the idiom through which she codes this refusal. We need, I think, a critical
practice primed by the feeling of co-inclination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">And not just so we can read
Lorde differently. Our impulse to critique, and our conversion of critique into mere criticism, is fucking us up.
Sometimes I feel like we’ve imported modes of cultural critique subtended by a
hermeneutics of suspicion into our relations with one another with the effect
that we listen to one another to hear why we shouldn’t listen to one another. When
I was thinking about the response to Lorde, I had this dream that we could
shift the imagined scenography of cultural critique—that we could treat her
less as an analysand rehashing symptomatic dreams on a Freudo-Marxian couch and
more as a well-meaning subject who has found her way into a meeting of a
radical collective but whose lack of an adequate idiom led her to mobilize a
messed up metaphorics. What do we do—ideally—in these situations? As I
understand the discourse ethics of such collectivities, the aim isn’t to reveal
the fucked-up-ness of the person as an end in itself or in order to boot the
person out, but to engage a practice of critique and correction with the
assumption that there’s a commitment to the maintenance and flourishing of the
relationship. Good intentions for bad actions don’t excuse anything, but
remaining mindful of the former allows for the composition of a scene in which
the latter can be refused and then repaired. It’s only our willingness to
foster such scenes that distinguishes friends from enemies: we repair the
fucked-up-ness of our friends, whereas we resist it in our enemies. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The decision to repair
instead of reject, to treat as flawed friend rather than infallibly flawed
enemy, to (re)produce a fraying relation instead of developing an allergy, is
ultimately organized by fictions of intention, sincerity, possibility, and so
on. We feel that we’re inclined toward one another, that we’re going the same
way, and this basic affect/orientation makes non-allergic critique both
possible and necessary. We imagine we’re going the same way even if we
sometimes decline from one another or swerve away into terrible things. We
survive through these fictions. We live on them and through them for the simple
reason that we are all too wounded by this world to not carry fucked-up-ness
with us in ways we can’t even know without the rigorous, critical, sustaining,
and enriching help of our revolutionary friends. If you read this blog, you’ve
probably experienced the extraordinary act of love that is getting called out
by a comrade. I can recall vividly each time I’ve been so called out, and I’m
deeply grateful for all of them—even if thinking about what precipitated them
makes me shudder in embarrassment. We don’t need to worry that this fiction
makes us stupid, less-than-critical; there are obviously firm limits to the
fiction of co-inclination. I read with Lorde, for instance, whereas I wouldn’t
read with Miley Cyrus. In terms of real people doing real things, there
probably wasn’t an Occupy encampment in the U.S. that didn’t have one figure
(almost certainly a white guy) so resistant to others’ labor of critique and
repair that the fiction of co-inclination dropped and this figure
converted into an enemy. We need to trust our feelings, to prioritize in
practice the weird orientations toward others that we can’t fully explain or
thematize. It’s this feeling of co-inclination that prevents every critique
from becoming a collective crisis, that allows critique to become a means of
collectivity formation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We, whoever we are, are constituted
by felt fictions of co-inclination. Without these felt fictions, we are
probably little more than the gaggle of isolated and auto-isolating idiots that Yankee Leninists
take us to be when we say things like “Check your privilege” or “That’s fucked
up.” Critique can only be the antonym of collective corrosion when we recall
that we’re going to get in one another’s way as we go on our way, together,
maybe. Indeed, critique is a mode of collective augmentation when its animated
by a commitment, however vague, to maintaining the world that we co-produce,
that we’re on the way toward. So, let’s rewrite the dictum of Kant, the one he
put in the emperor’s mouth, the one that serves as a mantra for liberals and
Leninists alike, the one that goes, “Argue as much as you like about whatever
you like, but obey!” Let’s rewrite it as, “Argue as much as you like about
whatever you like, but incline!” Critique and critique hard. But never suppress
the felt possibility that we, whoever we are, are going one another’s way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-40802323432974773442013-10-01T19:31:00.002-07:002013-10-01T19:31:52.383-07:00A Brief Note on Why We’re Not in the Streets<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The government “shut down,”
and where are we? Not in the streets. My Twitter and Facebook feed are filled
with people puzzling over this fact. We know the effects of the shutdown could
be devastating for precarious populations—the poor, the food insecure, the
sick. We know that the worst effects of the shutdown will be absorbed by raced,
gendered, and classed subjects. We know that we’re angry. And we know that we’re
not in the streets. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We’re being scolded for not
being in the streets. We’re being told that Millennials aren’t serving their
world-historical function of maintaining the liberal-capitalist state. We’re <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/01/2710041/where-are-the-anti-shutdown-protests/">informed</a>
that we “should be vigorously protesting as the House GOP holds the state and
the economy hostage.” We’re even offered a script: “It’s our government, they
ought to declare.” We’re <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/01/2710041/where-are-the-anti-shutdown-protests/">told</a>
that we are making “it harder for the progressives who do hold public office to
do their jobs.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But what if our puzzled
self-descriptions index a political consciousness that all these pious
prescriptions can’t want to think? What if we know something, we who don’t go
out into the streets, what if we know something that we ourselves almost can’t
let ourselves know, a knowledge that we can only become conscious of in the
form of a half-shocked self-assessment: “We’re <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> in the streets?!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What if we know that we
Millennials were born into an already abandoned world? What if we only know the
welfare state of yesteryear as a myth? What if we can only laugh when someone
encourages us to declare, “it’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i>
government”? What if we only know a world of de-pegged dollars, of flexible
production, of fast-moving finance? What if we only know a world in which the
state at every turn functions to stack the world against us? What if we only
know a world in which the state’s primary mode of being is as an agency
dedicated to the proposition that black and brown people around the world
should be incarcerated or killed? What if we only know a world in which our
most “progressive” president was the one who gave us the horrible, racist Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act? What if we only know a
world in which liberals justify the maintenance of the state by rhetorically
gesturing to the very raced and gendered populations that the state only cares
to fuck over? What if we know that the devastating abandonment to which
precarious populations are now subject as a result of the “shutdown” is simply
the agonizing materialization of an already established fact?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What if we’re not cruel
optimists because we were never optimistic in the first place. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We want to be in the
streets. We showed that. We want nothing more. We want to be in the streets.
Dancing, laughing, arguing. Feeding one another, caring for one another,
defending one another against the organs of the state that never shut
down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shattering windows, tearing
down fences, making the world our commons. We want to build worlds where the
hungry can eat, where the sick can repair. Where black skin isn’t a marker of disposability
and where bodies can embody as they like. Where the forms of ableism at times implied
in the political shorthand of “the streets” are annulled. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For us, the streets are an
impossible actuality. The streets are a place where the fantasy of contact and
care becomes concrete. A place where we realize that we are abandoned to one
another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where we hold on and hold
together and, in so doing, get in touch with something new. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Why aren’t we in the
streets? We’re already there, already in them, in and through our very
withdrawal from them. We’re in them in our recognition that the state has always
already abandoned us, that it has created a world in which speech cannot become
act and our presence doesn’t matter. We’re in them in our decision to abandon
the state in turn, in our refusal to participate in the statist scenography
that congregates a crowd in order to re-ground itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We know this—vaguely,
hazily, inchoately. The question, then, is not, “Why aren’t we in the streets?”
It is, rather, “What will happen when we realize we’re already there?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">And we know this, too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-86702866205780649902013-09-06T13:01:00.001-07:002013-09-06T13:03:29.956-07:00Fake Empire; Or, Imperial Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The debate over possible
U.S. intervention in Syria has brought to the fore a diverse set of U.S. anti-imperialist
idioms. The right-wing idiom, as I understand it, is irreducibly linked to
questions of expense: the expenditure of money, the expenditure of blood. The
center-left idiom mobilizes considerations of expense, but these occupy a
subordinate position in the general economy of its critique.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the right worries over the loss of U.S.
life and U.S. dollars, the center-left worries over the very construction of
nonwhite life as losable and expendable, as well as the implication that
non-NATO states’ enjoy but a tenuous sovereignty, one revocable at will by U.S.
imperialists. What interests me here is that it is the nation-state that
underwrites both the epistemology and political normativity of each idiom of
critique. For both right and center-left, empire-building appears as a
deviation from the natured (if not natural) course of being a nation—even if we
know that hegemonic nations cannot not perform this deviation. But what if
instead of casting empire as a (however inevitable) deviation from the script
of the nation-state system, we understood empire in all its facticity, as
something irreducible <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">here</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">there</i> in the world-system? To adopt this
stance is already to begin asking why it is that empire can only appear as
deviation. I want to suggest that the appearance of empire as deviation is an
artifact of the deviousness of empire itself, a deviousness that corrupts our
sense of the ontology of empire, a deviousness that constricts our
understanding of the repertoires of power through which empire functions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For, like, ever, empire has
been the dominant state-form of the world-system. But in the mid-nineteenth
century it became devious, was coded as deviant, and went into hiding. A wild
claim, I know: the mid-nineteenth century witnessed extraordinary
intensifications of empire-building on the part of both the U.S. and Great
Britain. But the idiom of empire underwent a decisive shift, particularly in
the realm of the emergent social sciences. This shift was long in the making,
and if I had to mark a turning point—and, in my book, I do—I’d locate this
point at 1776. Not simply because this was the year in which the 13 north
American colonies declared independence, but because in this year Smith
published his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inquiry into the Nature and
the Causes of the Wealth of Nations</i>. Smith was a keen observer of events in
the colonies—he delayed publication of his tome so as to incorporate the latest
news from north America—and his position, presented both in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wealth of Nations</i> and in a minute he
wrote for the Powers that Were, was an indictment of empire. Basically, the
juice wasn’t worth the squeeze: the extractive mechanisms of mercantilist
policies had negative effects on national economic growth, the costs of war and
defense were too high, the effects of empire on colonists in the Americas and
the colonized in both Indies were devastating, and so on. Smith did not dream
that Britain would, in any real world sense, unilaterally institute a world of
free trade or (because “free trade” necessarily entailed the dismantling of
mercantilist structures, the putative raison d’être of empire) free nations.
But this dream would become reality in the epistemic structure of emergent social-scientific thought from Smith
on. Smithian political economy was not necessarily <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">normatively </i>against empire; Torrens, a somewhat heterodox Smithian,
was broadly for empire, whatever that might mean. But, at a deeper epistemological
level, empire was being recast as a form of polity that inherently lacked the
substantiality or reality of the nation-state: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It was
because the colonies were supposed to be provinces of the British empire that
this expense was laid out upon them. But countries which contribute neither
revenue nor military force towards the support of the empire cannot be
considered as provinces. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">They may
perhaps be considered as appendages, as a sort of splendid and showy equipage
of the empire</b>. But if the empire can no longer support the expense of
keeping up this equipage, it ought certainly to lay it down. (my emphasis; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wealth of Nations</i>, Book V, ch. 3)</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All empire a fake empire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By the mid-nineteenth
century, Smith’s coding of empire as removable equipage had become commonsense
among political economists, the metropole’s literati, and increasingly the broader
populace. A whole set of middlebrow publications pumped out articles decrying
the expense of sovereignty and the flawed economy of mercantilist policies—the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edinburgh Review</i>, say, whose economics
writing was under the control for a time of J.R. McCulloch, the dumbest person
to ever get to be publicly dumb, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Economist</i>, a publication noteworthy for maintaining the same stupid truisms
for 170 years. McCulloch's <i>Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire </i>(1847) blithely slices off all of what we think of as the "empire" today from his two volume account of the polity. It was also the era of the Anti-Corn Law League, of Cobden and
Bright running through provincial towns with the message of “Free trade or
bust!” What is important here is the fact that, even as social scientists,
their Gradgrindian popularizers, and free-trade activists were advocating
reforms with potentially massive effects on imperial subjects in the colonies,
the default unit of analysis through which these imperial-scale reforms were
discussed was the nation-state. There were no Little Englanders quite as loud
as the globalizers of the mid-Victorian era: indeed, they called themselves
“anti-imperialists.” This anti-imperial normativity had cognitively dissonant
effects. My favorite: Earl Grey, in his two-volume apology for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s
Administration</i> (1853), is forced into a bizarre position of having to
explain how, as a committed free-trader, his office of Colonial Secretary
should even have existed at all. Empire had become so deviant that the head
imperial administrator could only discuss his occupation in a spirit of bad
faith—or through a racist rationale of extending humanity to the black masses of the world, one that codes empire as gratuitous gift. My point here is that the anti-imperialism that underwrote social-scientific epistemologies was forged without reference to the actual political desires of imperial subjects. That's because empire had been re-coded as a deviant socio-politico-economic object—not as a tense and taut reality <i>within which </i>imperial subjects in the colonial periphery might hope to co-decide on their own political futures.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In my own area of expertise, the British West Indies, the effects of the epistemic shift to anti-imperialism and the institutional shift to an anti-imperial free-trade empire were
dramatic. In 1834/1838, Britain had built an emancipatory state, intending both
to free enslaved humans in the colonies and, according to a particular
modality, to incorporate ex-slaves into the empire as rights-bearing subjects;
in 1846, Britain liberalized its sugar markets and instituted free trade with
the massive slave economies of Brazil and Cuba, effectively tanking the
economies of the colonies it had just emancipated. White and black creoles
hated the turn to liberal globalization: they wrote novels and poems about it,
they wrote scathing pamphlets and articles, and one Trinidadian mulatto even
tried founding a socialist colony in Venezuela in response. But their concerns
weren’t simply about economic effects. Rather, they were concerned that
Britain’s understanding of empire through the watered-down, <i>Economist</i>-esque<i> </i>optic of political economy corroded the idea of empire as a
polity—one in and for which they lived and labored, one that they had helped to
build, one in which they considered themselves citizen-subjects. (Today, <i>The Economist</i> doesn't even remember that it once struggled to boot the West Indies out of the oikos of empire, and that this struggle was foundational to its identity. Four days ago, <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/economist-explains-itself-0">this</a> on their website: "The Economist was founded in
1843 by James Wilson, a British businessman who objected to heavy import duties
on foreign corn. Mr Wilson and his friends in the Anti-Corn Law League were
classical liberals in the tradition of Adam Smith..." In the first issue, in fact, a critique of imperial structures supporting the West Indies preceded corn law talk. When Mr Wilson stood for Parliament, he was victorious against a quasi-creole, Matthew Higgins, who spent the better part of the '40s polemicizing against Mr Wilson's liberal ilk.) In a very real
way, it was among colonial subjects that one can find explicitly pro-empire
people in the era of liberal globalization (roughly, 1776-1888). Not because
they couldn’t live autonomous lives, not because they did not desire to enjoy freedom,
but because empire was the state-form through and in which autonomy and freedom
materialized and made sense. In a world not yet entirely structured by the
institutional form of the nation-state, why not stake a claim to empire? The index of
nineteenth-century social science’s success in coding empire as deviant is the
extent to which pro-imperial politics from subaltern subjects in the colonies
still makes us squeamish. We want them to have wanted autonomy in
nation-statist form, and so much of the scholarship I work with looks back on
this period of creole history simply to find the roots of an emergent
nationalism. The problem, though, is that so many of the good mid-Victorian
British liberals wanted that too; even the arch conservative Disraeli could
describe the colonies (the Canadas, in particular) as “millstones” about Britain’s
collective neck, fit only to be cast off. Here, the nation-state was the form
to which imperial subjects would devolve when empire flung them away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The coding of empire as
deviant was functional for an irreducibly imperial Britain. It enabled
it to dismantle systems of support sustaining the economies of those in the
peripheral zones of imperial formations past. It enabled Britain to
proleptically code new sites of imperial incursion—which piled up throughout
the anti-imperial era—as sites of imperial abandonment: we’re here just as long
as it takes for us to get what we want, and, like, to civilize you too. It
enabled Britain to avoid or neglect the claims made by subjects in the colonial
world who felt entitled to a seat at the imperial table as co-deciders in the empire's future. When empire reappeared
as a viable state-form with the close of the free-trade era and the dawn of
neo-mercantilism, social-scientific epistemologies barely changed. There were some dissenters (like Sealy, maybe), but on the whole the nation-state continued to reign as the social sciences' durable, substantive, real object, its assumed reality, its a priori cognitive frame; empire continued to be posed as an aberration, even if it was an aberration coextensive with history itself. We still
tend to see the 30 Years War of the 20th century as a war caused by imperialism, not as a war between empires. Empire
was epistemically derealized even as it realized itself across the globe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We live with this
derealization today. Indeed, many of our critiques of a possible U.S.
intervention into Syria rely upon this derealization. For many of us, empire
reveals itself in the deviant excess of a positive act of power—a cruise
missile, a bomb, boots on the ground. For others, it equally reveals itself in
the architecture of the global economy—the WTO, the IMF, and so on. But
imperial sovereignty engages other forms and tactics of power, too. Today, the
mode of abandoning sites of incursion precedes the very act of incursion:
empire forms an exit strategy before it even enters, as Randy Martin points out.
Imperialism does not simply destroy forms of life; it also produces them while
always already unbinding itself from them. I’m trying to locate but can’t find
an article of Iraqis who lived near U.S. bases upon the beginning of the U.S.
withdrawal. The affective ranges are complicated, but they map this dynamic of
power. We didn’t fucking want you here, one Iraqi boy essentially says, but now
that you’re here, now that you’ve produced a form of life to which I’m bound
and in which my livelihood is bound up, what gives you the right to leave?
Empire is the production of a state-form in which the complexity of that
question cannot get any traction, in which its articulation has no
institutional effects, in which the norms and epistemes underwriting U.S.
culture can only transform that question into an alibi for empire at worst or
as collaborationist bargaining at best. It is as much a form of inaction as
action, of abandonment as incorporation, of neglect as making the world
hyper-intelligible. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My point, basically, is that
no matter what Obama does, empire is real. It is a fact, one that saturates
imperial inaction as much as action, one that structures imperial intervention
as much as non-intervention. We cannot possibly elaborate a radical political
position vis-à-vis Syria if we do not see that any decision is already bound up
within an imperial calculus, bound up within a world-system in which empire is
a durable, structured, and decidedly not deviant fact. We need to get that
bombing or not-bombing are both positively imperial acts. This might make
U.S. passport holders pessimistic, hopeless even, and in certain ways it
should: Imperial life cannot be lived rightly. My point isn’t to create an
apologia for bombing—I’m against it wholeheartedly, whatever my good intentions
or big heart mean here. Nor is my point to dissolve the real violence of empire
into some kind of night where all the imperial cows are grey (which is how
works like Burbank and Cooper’s on the historical facticity of empire are being
perversely taken up). My point, rather, is that to code as deviant one response
to the U.S.’s perennial question—to bomb or not to bomb?—is to disavow the
falsity of imperial reality itself. It is at the moment of impossible choice—one
U.S. citizens are all now making, at least in their heads—that the unbearable
falsity of reality reveals itself. But we can only attune ourselves to this
impossibility, feel this unbearability, and let the unliveability of the real charge us to realize new worlds if we are willing to ascribe to
empire the substantive, non-deviant reality that it less-than-obviously possesses.</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-13349463624556059392013-07-17T06:57:00.001-07:002013-07-17T07:01:24.449-07:00The Good Worker, Property Destruction, and Trayvon Martin<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even before the city street
fully absorbs the resonant sounding of shattering glass, the press—mainstream
media or citizen journos, it doesn’t matter which—introduces us to a stock
figure whose words are nonetheless accorded a special status. You’ve met him or
her before. We’re now all old friends with The Worker Who Doesn’t Like Property
Damage. The prolie who picks up the shards after the anarchists have had their smashy-smashy
fun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The employee who tells us he is
sympathetic to the anger, but there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">must</i>
be another way. Days after Trayvon Martin suffered his second death—the
juridico-political death that retroactively strips him of property in himself,
the juridico-political death that came after but always came before, the
juridico-political death that laid down the path that Zimmerman would
follow—media outlets have dusted off the Good Worker and set her to work to
chastise those whose outrage at Martin’s second death has taken the form of
smashed windows, burning dumpsters, courthouse graffiti admonishing us to kill
all the pigs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Good Worker knows that
property damage is no way to protest the fact that Martin had no property in
himself. The Good Worker knows that violence dishonors Martin’s memory. Of
course, everyone already knows that; this is the USA, after all. But the Good
Worker knows something special, something more. She possesses a particular
knowledge derived from a quotidian detail of her life. She is the one who has
to sweep up the glass. He is the one who has to wash off the paint. After the
party of anarchy, the Good Worker appears on the scene and, with a sigh,
dispenses his special knowledge: the infantile leftism of the anarchists and
the outraged hurts no one but those whom they claim to defend. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Through the Good Worker’s
resigned affect—“I’m the one who has to clean up”—liberals convert dependence
on capital into an alibi for capitalism, transform the worker’s binding to the
propertied as property’s normative basis. Relations between capital and labor
never seem so free from compulsion as when the Good Worker laments the extra
work imposed upon her by…other workers, maybe, but more likely dropouts and
nogoodniks. The discordant symphony of shattering glass resolves itself in
Careyite harmonies. One is encouraged to imagine that the Good Worker’s Good
Boss never demands a little overtime, never subjects her to work that go beyond
the parameters of the job. But that is precisely what is happening, and not
just because he is sweeping up a window: the very articulation of the lament is
itself a form of surplus extraction. After all, the political geography of
smashy-smashy and political economy of U.S. cities ensures that the Good
Worker’s skills will tend toward the communicative, the affective. He doesn’t
work in a factory, but in a shoe shop, a restaurant, a boutique cheese store. And
she possesses the corresponding skills: she can read inchoate desires and
conduct them toward an object, respond to pressing demands, defuse awkward
situations. After the windows come smashing down, the general capital exploits
these affective competencies. It shoves a microphone, recorder, or someone with
a Twitter account in his face and asks him to work a little bit longer, to
piece the shattered norms of capitalist society back together with his words. And
she does, bearing tidings that an assault on property is an assault on workers,
because workers have nothing but the property of others. To harm property is to
harm ourselves. The Good Worker’s stoic acceptance of her lot is converted into
a quasi-proprietorial care that simulates a property in something that could
never be hers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This equation has been
literalized in the case of the Oakland protests over the juridical fact that
Martin had no property in himself. In an article entitled “<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-cleans-up-after-Zimmerman-protests-4667042.php">Waiter
attacked, freeway blocked in 3<sup>rd</sup> Oakland protest</a>,” the reader is
informed, “<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As the night wore on, violence grew. About 11
p.m., a masked protester hit a waiter at Flora Restaurant and Bar on Telegraph
Avenue in the face with a hammer as he tried to protect the restaurant, whose
windows were broken two nights ago.” That this happened is undeniable,
terrible, and has been condemned by pretty much everyone (minus some with what
I think are fantasies of an agent provocateur). I can’t think of any anarchist
who would approve non-defensive violence, particularly against a worker, during
a demo; we’d gladly leave a window untouched so as to not harm a human. As the
masked protestor’s action strikes us all as aberrant and abhorrent, what
intrigues me is the description and naturalization of the waiter’s (named Drew
Cribley) act. The causal determination of the worker’s intention is
established—windows had been broken before. The deeper emplotting of the event
comes at the end of the sentence, and retroactively accords his action—tensed
with “as he tried…”—a drawn out, durational quality where one might only read
temporal simultaneity or, indeed, spontaneity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yet, <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Waiter-hit-by-hammer-in-Oakland-doing-OK-4668961.php">as
another article reveals</a>, the waiter’s defense of the restaurant was indeed
spontaneous: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Cribley said his black-masked
attacker passed him on the sidewalk, then started pounding on windows with a
hammer when Cribley turned and told him to stop.</span> "I kind of instinctively
pushed him away," Cribley said. "That's when he turned back at me and
cracked me in the cheekbone."[…] "Looking back on it, it was a
really stupid thing if you thought I was going to interfere," he said.</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Strikingly, Cribley didn’t think he was going to
interfere, he didn’t intend to, not consciously, but a “kind of instinct[]”
drove him to “turn…and [tell] him to stop.” It is as if the thump of the hammer
on the window sounded out like Althusser’s policeman’s hail: Cribley can’t not
turn, even if he doesn’t know what he’s turning toward, turning for. With its
direct access to the habits of head and heart of liberal capitalism, the
newspaper reveals why. Cribley turned to “protect the restaurant”—not himself,
not a window, but the corporate/fictive entity of the restaurant. According to
the paper, he wasn’t protecting an object so much as the idea of property
itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It seems perfectly natural, even laudable, that a
worker’s body would absorb the blow intended for a capitalist’s window. Indeed,
the article establishes a striking fungibility between (capitalists’) objects
and (workers’) bodies. Both are, in effect, absorbed into the fictive person of
the firm and, indeed, are little more than the business’ precipitates, the
accidental bearers of capital’s personhood. (The assault on Cribley doesn’t
even make it into the lede; it is only reported after destruction of other
property is detailed.) After the windows come smashing down, the press
impresses the Good Worker to restore the commensurability of bodies and
objects, people and things. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It was this form of commensuration that killed
Trayvon Martin, and killed him twice. The trial of Zimmerman briefly extended
to Martin something that could never be his—a proper claim to himself, a
juridico-political identity that did not position him as some bizarre thing
midway between object and person. If the court’s decision confirmed Martin’s status
as a being that could be killed but not murdered, the discourse surrounding
property destruction in Oakland confirms neoliberal capitalism’s commitment to
reproducing and repairing that order. Through the Good Worker, it first indicts
those who actively refuse this commensuration with the charge of exposing its
ugliness, for directing conversation from Trayvon Martin to smashed windows (as
if anarchists are to blame that the media cannot control its vulgarity, as if
anarchists are to blame that the media can’t not stop a conversation about Martin
because a violated property hails). It then tells us that Martin would not
approve of this violence, that violence against property is no way to honor
Martin. Indeed, it posthumously transforms Martin into the Good Worker, someone
who knows that to harm property is to harm ourselves. Someone who knows that
because we have no property, because the property of others has subsumed any
claim to property in ourselves, we have to identify ourselves with it. Someone
who knows that our being can be exchanged with objects and things and that,
indeed, we should be prepared to “protect” windows—even if we risk extreme
bodily harm in so doing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Feigning outrage, the media is hard at work
restoring the logic of racial, neoliberal capitalism that killed Trayvon Martin
twice. But there’s grumbling in the ranks: the Good Worker isn’t complying. The
follow up article on Cribley concludes with the paper asking him to play his
appointed role. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Cribley said he sympathized
with protesters and their right to voice outrage, yet feared the violence would
overshadow their goals.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> <span style="background: white; color: black;">"It sucks for the people who are really trying to be
heard because it starts to take away from their message," he said.
"People around the country look at Oakland and feel like there's a bunch
of vandalism and violence rather than intelligent people with an actual cause
they believe in. Instead of talking about that, you're talking about the guy
who got hit in the face with a hammer."</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></blockquote>
</div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Note the striking disparity between the paper’s
gloss and Cribley’s words. Cribley’s final quote is introduced as if what
follows is pure Good-Workerism. He’s sympathetic to the protestors, sure, but,
like, he wonders: this couldn’t be the right way. But, as his words actually
reveal—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">his</i> words, what he thinks when
his personality is not subsumed into the indirect discourse of capital’s
mouthpiece—he does <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> disavow
property destruction. He does not oppose “vandalism and violence” to “an actual
cause.” Rather, “people” do, people who “feel” a certain way about Oakland
because the reporter, instead of talking about the cause of the demonstrators,
is busy “talking about the guy who got hit in the face with a hammer.” Cribley
is basically asking the reporter, the you of his address, to write about
something else, to write about the actual cause of the violence, the actual
meanings it conveys. Cribley refuses to be the Good Worker, to simulate
investment in an order of property, of proper being, that left him with a
hammer to the head, that left a black boy twice dead in Florida.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But the propertied order has the last word:
“Cribley said he'll return to work Thursday.” And the windows will be
repaired by then, too.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-48956045080206754572013-07-04T06:11:00.002-07:002013-07-04T06:11:30.603-07:00Antebellism II: Rove, Ahab, and the War on Terror<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In a previous post, I tried
coming to grips with <a href="http://clrjames.blogspot.in/2013/02/antebellism-neoliberal-compromise-of.html">antebellism</a>,
a form of pop political sense-making that has dominated U.S. public discourse
for the duration of Obama’s administration. Locating the origins of antebellism
in the doubled movement of neoliberalism and globalization, I stressed that
antebellist imaginaries are a compensatory mechanism that enable populations to
relate to apparatuses of governance as democratic forms of politics.
Antebellism recodes the withdrawal of the political into neoliberal
administration as the antagonistic intensification of the political—an
antagonism that opens onto a civil war that will never arrive. The problem with
my reading is that its focus on questions of imagined relations to neoliberal
governance leads it to privilege a nation-centered unit of analysis; I
downplayed how Yankee globality affected and induced the antebellist imaginary.
Neoliberalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of
antebellism; after all, we’ve lived with and through the former without the aid
of the latter for some time. As I noted, Bruce Holsinger argues that U.S.
culture during the Bush-Cheney years developed a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Neomedievalism-Neoconservatism-Terror-Bruce-Holsinger/dp/0976147599">neomedievalist</a>
imaginary to make sense of the U.S. global military adventurism. While this
neomedievalist imaginary of course persists—culture is the graveyard of
symbolics past—I want to suggest that it has been absorbed by antebellism, and
that this absorption indexes an exhausted, post-Bush withdrawal from globality.
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Inasmuch as a diffuse
discourse can be invented or pinned down to a punctual scene of origins, Karl
Rove invented antebellism. Days after Obama was sworn in as the 44<sup>th</sup>
President, <a href="http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/rove-announces-he-has-no-intention-o">Rove
appeared on Fox News’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Reilly Factor</i></a>
to defend himself from John Conyers, the Democratic chairman of the House
Judiciary Committee. Conyers had subpoenaed Rove to give testimony for the
possible “politicization” of the Bush Justice Department. During his interview,
Rove fumbles for an analogy that would adequately render the illegitimacy of
Conyers’ subpoena. Rove first considers calling Conyers’ investigation a “witch
hunt,” only to decide that the label is not quite right, because “I don’t think
of myself as a witch.” While Rove is uncomfortable analogizing his situation to
that confronting a witch (and note, incidentally, that Rove assumes that to be
subject to a witch hunt one must have been a witch, as if only guilty subjects
will have been hunted and prosecuted), he is perfectly comfortable comparing
himself to a whale. Drawing upon the U.S. literary canon, Rove likens himself
to the sublime and eponymous object of Melville’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby-Dick</i> (1851): “He’s sort of like Captain Ahab and I’m the
whale.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The analogy is ridiculous.
Rove is himself uncertain of its value; the analogy only “sort of” makes sense.
For one, who finishes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby-Dick</i> and
thinks, “Yo, that whale <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gets</i> me”?
Moreover, Rove’s strange identification with that which resists
identification’s imperium, the “inscrutable thing” of the whale, is a crazy
symbolic inversion, the product of a wonderful disavowal. After all, was not
Rove himself one of the many Ahabs steering Bush’s crisis-ridden <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pequod?</i> Isn’t Rove’s paranoia, his
investment in the dramatics of a possible persecution, a continuation of the
Ahabian paranoia constitutive of the xenophobic populism of Bush’s Terror Era?
Was it not Rove who, like Ahab, garnered widespread popular support for a
globe-scaling mission (the “war on terror”) that lacked a coherent aim or
endpoint? And did not Rove, like the crazy captain’s biblical namesake, precipitate
a war through the fabrication of a casus belli?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Yet, if Rove’s analogy is
preposterous, it was also prescient. After all, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby-Dick</i> is not simply the narrative of a crazy Quaker seeking
revenge against a whale with a taste for human limbs. It is fundamentally an
allegory (<a href="http://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CDIQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.academia.edu%2F1038603%2FThe_Limbs_of_Empire_Ahab_Santa_Anna_and_Moby-Dick&ei=UHPVUez9Ns_yrQfproHIAg&usg=AFQjCNFePlHgK-24nxeJzwiNdht-rwmAKg&bvm=bv.48705608,d.bmk">and
more than an allegory</a>) of political transition, transformation, and crisis.
Scholars have long understood <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby-Dick</i>
as allegorizing the sectional crises of the antebellum U.S., a crisis that
could only resolve itself in the splintering of the U.S. ship of state. And
thus the prescience of Rove’s analogy. Rove’s reference to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby-Dick</i> anticipated not so much an actual crisis as a the
emergence of a discourse that wraps itself in the symbology of national
scission, the emergence of a national commonsense that draws upon antebellum
history to develop an allegory of impending crisis. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There’s a key difference,
however, between Melville’s allegory of the antebellum and the antebellist
allegory that Rove’s reference establishes. Melville’s book is a massive piece
of (what Marx would call) Yankee universality: it ranges to-and-fro across the
globe in order to gather symbolic resources through which to think the national.
Antebellism works differently: it looks back to history to nationalize the
global, to domesticate it, even to forget it. Consider the figure Rove chose
alongside the wealth of alternative figures that were popular during the Bush
era, figures that compose the discursive resources of neomedievalism. No one
would have been surprised if Rove called Conyers a jihadi, if he said that the
Dem representative was on a crusade—but he didn’t. He instead drew a figure
from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby</i>-fucking-<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dick</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i> U.S.-American novel.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Antebellism’s displacement
of neomedievalist rhetoric tracks the absorption of the global framing required
to map the Bush-era U.S. by the national-domestic. We can see this absorption
of globality into nationality, of neomedievalism into antebellism, in the plot
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homeland</i>. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homeland</i> domesticates the figure of the terrorist, making a U.S.
Marine (and then congressperson—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homeland </i>plots
like a Tom Clancy novel) the scariest jihadi around. More importantly, it aligns
the scene of his operations with the cartography of the Civil War: Brody picks
up his suicide vest in Gettysburg, treating the viewer with a supplementary
spiel about honor or something. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homeland</i>
fights the War on Terror on the Civil War’s battlefield and, in so doing,
transforms the set of references required for making sense of the former.
Bush’s rampage against the world appears as an internecine struggle, a domestic
squabble. If the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pequod</i>’s voyage of
revenge allows Melville to think the national through the global, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homeland</i> simply asserts that the global
never happened, not really. It transmutes Bush’s<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>global military adventurism into a national fight pitting brother
against brother, North against South, Red state versus Blue state, Brody
against the bro who slept with his wife. The War on Terror tore our country
apart!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The problem, of course, is
that the War of Terror actually tore other countries, other lives, other bodies
apart—countries that continue to mourn, lives that remain shattered, bodies
that are marked by Ahabian violence. The antebellist absorption of globality,
however, allows Yankees to ignore the persistence of this violence, both in
terms of its aftereffects and of its continuation. Soldiers like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homeland</i>’s Brody might be coming home, they
might all come home, but the drones will remain. Military telekinetics relieve
the public of the burden of bodies and, indeed, of the burden of thinking
globality itself. (A Yankee peculiarity: the inability to think globality save
through gunboats.) And that’s what antebellism does: it relieves an exhausted
population of the affective weight of our neoliberal overlords’ Ahabian quest
by means of an Ahabian allegory, it liquidates the recent past by drawing upon
another history. And it liquidates this past even before it is past, as this
past unfolds as our present and, indeed, our future.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Antebellism stylizes the neoliberal ordinary by
conducting affect toward a political future that will never come <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> by sapping investment in a past that
we can’t leave behind. Like Ahab’s crew, we invest in this allegory, certain
that the capitalist ordinary has more to offer than capitalist accumulation,
certain that we coast through the world, harpoons a-ready, for reasons
explicable and intelligible from the intimate, domestic perspective afforded by
a missing leg, an isolated ship, or a provincial nation. False memories of a
civil war past replace flawed impressions of a global war present ensuring
that, when the whale finally sinks the ship, Yankees will be as shocked as
Ishmael was.</span>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-41681730680491194572013-06-20T10:21:00.001-07:002013-06-20T10:21:07.935-07:00Prism, Surplus Sociality, and the Crisis of Semio-Capital<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The recent revelations regarding the intensity
and extension of state surveillance are scandalous, but I’ve been consoling
myself with one fact: the state isn’t exactly a brain trust. A cursory look at
the texts produced by the FBI and DHS in their surveillance of Occupy, for
instance, reveals that intelligence gatherers so frequently have no fucking
clue what they are looking at. Of course, the state needn’t be smart to make
its sense of reality right. Indeed, the scandal of sovereignty isn’t that the
state might know too much (or, in yesteryear, too little), but that the power
of sovereignty is realized in the capacity of the state to absolve itself from
epistemological or normative bindings. States do not need to be right to do
shit, and states of stupidity are frequently weaponized. So, in stressing the
stupidity of the state, I’m not at all suggesting that an augmentation of state
power like Prism is somehow irrelevant. I do want to stress, though, that in
our critiques of Prism we would do well to avoid conflating the state’s
gathering of intelligence with the state’s becoming intelligent, of conflating
its aggregating big data with its becoming an attuned and sovereign close
reader. Such a conflation, I’m going to suggest, abets a neoliberal reconstitution
of the modality by which citizens appear before the state (and helps explains
the detestable contortions over Prism by people like David Brooks and David
Simon). To get there, I want to trace out the incredibly fragile structure of
state and capitalist power that organizes contemporary logics of governance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">States emerge, grow, and maintain themselves by
capturing flows of capital, and this means that the material and formal
constitutions of states to some degree derive from the modalities of capitalist
production that they encounter. As many have argued (from autonomist oriented
people like Marazzi, Bifo, Hardt & Negri, to vanguardists like Dean), today
the production of information, affects, and social communicability is the
paradigmatic form of capitalist production. Capital has become semio-capital
(Bifo’s term), and the semiotization of capital means that producing or
capturing value entails the production or capture of information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This production is not localized to
individual firms; rather, it takes place across the broad fabric of the social.
As you’re doing cheeky things on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, you’re also
producing value for capitalists. (“Remember when we used to make things?”
laments the television character of one cop-loving Prism apologist.) One effect
of the transformation in the value-form marked by semio-capital is that value
is increasingly and directly functional for the enhancement of state power.
Capitalist and statist modalities of securitizing the social blur together: each
needs to produce or capture the information produced by social subjects. The
predominance of for-profit, private security firms in the current fabric of
Yankee intelligence gathering in part indexes the fact that the contemporary
form of semiotic value has created the possibility of a tendential identity
between capitalist and state power. There is little substantive difference
between, say, Google’s data collection and the NSA’s (meta)data
(meta)collection. The former intends profit, the latter security, but the
modality of achieving both is roughly identical. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">But one hiccup: semio-capital has been in
crisis since day one. The eyes of info-capitalists are bigger than their
stomachs. They know that the sociality unleashed—or simply re-presented—by the semiotization
of capital possesses a value of nearly unlimited extent. Every capitalist knows
that the information contained on the Internet has value. And it does. But
semio-capital is just godawful at monetizing and profiting from this
value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This disparity becomes legible in
the disproportion between stock values for semio-capitalist firms and their
actual revenues. Such disproportions are not simply the effect of a mistaken
valuation. Rather, the disproportion indexes, in a language that capital understands,
the exorbitancy of sociality to the value-codings of capital. The potential
value that Facebook or Google commands will always exceed its capacity to
realize that profit. Capitalism’s attempt to monetize sociality as such had as
a consequence the uneasy recognition that the social possesses an infinite
value—or, functionally, no value. Through semio-capitalism, capital confronts a
surplus of sociality that it cannot contort into realizable surplus value.
Semio-capital inhabits a perpetual realization crisis, routinely confronting
the impossibility of transforming product into profit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The rise of private semio-intelligence firms,
then, should be understood as an attempt of collective semio-capital to manage the
realization crises that it cannot not encounter. It’s not an accidental scandal
that private intelligence firms are so bound up with the state; it is an effect
of the immanent logic of capital. I don’t have the data (or the competencies
required to produce it), but I’m willing to bet that the rate of profit for
private intelligence firms generally exceeds that of other firms invested in
semio-capitalist production. The value-form of semio-capital will always
shatter against the infinite surplus of sociality it attempts to capture;
collective semio-capital thus looks to the state to cohere and realize this
value. Infinitely valuable and so entirely worthless, sociality as such becomes
capitalist value through its functionality for statist command. Because it
wants to rule the social directly but cannot achieve this aim through the
value-form of capital, semio-capital necessarily becomes state-capital. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Let’s be clear about what all of this means: to
the extent that the state fosters the growth of semio-capital, the state
immediately enhances its own power. This is the dialectical flipside of the
apparent waning of the presence of the state—the dismantling of social
protections, the increasing privatization of state functions, the diminishing
capacity of citizens to interact meaningfully or effectively with apparatuses
of power… By fostering the growth of immaterial and infomatic modes of
production, neoliberal policy becomes a tool for the augmentation (not dismantling)
of the state. Indeed, the very modality by which the state approaches the
social has transformed. The state and civil society no longer engage in a
virtuous dialogue mediated by a public sphere. The state doesn’t locate the
truth of the social in missives that are addressed to it—a petition, a
newspaper article, even a vote. Semio-capital has created a condition in which
mediated forms of state/social engagement have been absorbed by the immediate
presence of the social to the state. The state can listen in on civil-social
auto-representations that in no way intend acceding to the rationality of the
public or political sphere. Once (according to bourgeois ideals) an
interlocutor, the state has become a silent reader, a mere listener, one
frustratingly proximate and distant, one intimate but terribly remote.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Neoliberal semio-capital has thus produced a
new phenomenology of being a phenomenon: the citizen will never know if her
words have gained power’s ear, if she has in fact achieved political
phenomenality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The state listens,
listens to everything, but we will never know what it hears, if it has heard,
if it can hear. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The scandal of Prism consists, then, not simply
in what the state might know about its citizens, but that becoming (meta)data
is all that remains of citizenship. A journalistic cohort of White Liberal
Dudes have intuited this fact, and I think this accounts for the contortions
they’ve undertaken to defend Prism (and engage in absolutely horrid, shitty,
stupid psych profiles of Snowden). In scrutinizing the politico-ethical
propriety or technological means of intelligence gatherings, liberals have
always assumed that the state is (or could be) intelligent—that, at the end of
the day, the data that they are will have been an object of state
intentionality, that they will have appeared before the sovereign’s caring
(albeit suspicious) gaze. The “Obama’s Reading Your Email” tumblr communicates
a white liberal fantasy of immediate appearance before the font of power. The
state’s current kind of caring is creepy, but hey, at least it’s care. Obama
might be reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my</i> email! As neoliberalism
destroys the state’s accountability for social upkeep, the best liberals can
hope for is that the state will continue to take account of the social, in
however slim and de-semanticized a fashion. The fear that the state might
overreach, that it might come to know you all too intimately, becomes an
apology for neoliberalism insofar as it maintains the bygone fantasy of
citizenship: that power intends to capture one in its firm embrace, that one
can enter into a positive relation with instituted power—even if you don’t know
it has happened.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">We need to recognize that there is no guiding
intellect gathering the social together, no intelligence that donates sense to
metadata, no intentionality that coheres the the sociality we semiotize through
communicative media. We aren’t achieving political phenomenality before a Dad
in Chief or a Big Brother. The value-form of capital cannot even adequately
realize the sociality we live. It can at best pass us off as a mass of data for
the intellectual mediocrities staffing the NSA and Booz Allen to work over. But
that’s it. That’s what remains of the connection between the state and its
citizens. The connection between the transcendence of the state and the
immanent plane of the social has never been slimmer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Liberalism begins with the fear (which will
always imply the desire) that Obama is reading our emails. Anarchism begins with
the knowledge that he isn’t, even when he tries. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-87512168109590438952013-06-20T10:19:00.003-07:002013-06-20T10:19:36.593-07:00Prism, Surplus Sociality, and the Crisis of Semio-Capital<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The recent revelations regarding the intensity
and extension of state surveillance are scandalous, but I’ve been consoling
myself with one fact: the state isn’t exactly a brain trust. A cursory look at
the texts produced by the FBI and DHS in their surveillance of Occupy, for
instance, reveals that intelligence gatherers so frequently have no fucking
clue what they are looking at. Of course, the state needn’t be smart to make
its sense of reality right. Indeed, the scandal of sovereignty isn’t that the
state might know too much (or, in yesteryear, too little), but that the power
of sovereignty is realized in the capacity of the state to absolve itself from
epistemological or normative bindings. States do not need to be right to do
shit, and states of stupidity are frequently weaponized. So, in stressing the
stupidity of the state, I’m not at all suggesting that an augmentation of state
power like Prism is somehow irrelevant. I do want to stress, though, that in
our critiques of Prism we would do well to avoid conflating the state’s
gathering of intelligence with the state’s becoming intelligent, of conflating
its aggregating big data with its becoming an attuned and sovereign close
reader. Such a conflation, I’m going to suggest, abets a neoliberal reconstitution
of the modality by which citizens appear before the state (and helps explains
the detestable contortions over Prism by people like David Brooks and David
Simon). To get there, I want to trace out the incredibly fragile structure of
state and capitalist power that organizes contemporary logics of governance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">States emerge, grow, and maintain themselves by
capturing flows of capital, and this means that the material and formal
constitutions of states to some degree derive from the modalities of capitalist
production that they encounter. As many have argued (from autonomist oriented
people like Marazzi, Bifo, Hardt & Negri, to vanguardists like Dean), today
the production of information, affects, and social communicability is the
paradigmatic form of capitalist production. Capital has become semio-capital
(Bifo’s term), and the semiotization of capital means that producing or
capturing value entails the production or capture of information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This production is not localized to
individual firms; rather, it takes place across the broad fabric of the social.
As you’re doing cheeky things on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, you’re also
producing value for capitalists. (“Remember when we used to make things?”
laments the television character of one cop-loving Prism apologist.) One effect
of the transformation in the value-form marked by semio-capital is that value
is increasingly and directly functional for the enhancement of state power.
Capitalist and statist modalities of securitizing the social blur together: each
needs to produce or capture the information produced by social subjects. The
predominance of for-profit, private security firms in the current fabric of
Yankee intelligence gathering in part indexes the fact that the contemporary
form of semiotic value has created the possibility of a tendential identity
between capitalist and state power. There is little substantive difference
between, say, Google’s data collection and the NSA’s (meta)data
(meta)collection. The former intends profit, the latter security, but the
modality of achieving both is roughly identical. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">But one hiccup: semio-capital has been in
crisis since day one. The eyes of info-capitalists are bigger than their
stomachs. They know that the sociality unleashed—or simply re-presented—by the semiotization
of capital possesses a value of nearly unlimited extent. Every capitalist knows
that the information contained on the Internet has value. And it does. But
semio-capital is just godawful at monetizing and profiting from this
value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This disparity becomes legible in
the disproportion between stock values for semio-capitalist firms and their
actual revenues. Such disproportions are not simply the effect of a mistaken
valuation. Rather, the disproportion indexes, in a language that capital understands,
the exorbitancy of sociality to the value-codings of capital. The potential
value that Facebook or Google commands will always exceed its capacity to
realize that profit. Capitalism’s attempt to monetize sociality as such had as
a consequence the uneasy recognition that the social possesses an infinite
value—or, functionally, no value. Through semio-capitalism, capital confronts a
surplus of sociality that it cannot contort into realizable surplus value.
Semio-capital inhabits a perpetual realization crisis, routinely confronting
the impossibility of transforming product into profit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The rise of private semio-intelligence firms,
then, should be understood as an attempt of collective semio-capital to manage the
realization crises that it cannot not encounter. It’s not an accidental scandal
that private intelligence firms are so bound up with the state; it is an effect
of the immanent logic of capital. I don’t have the data (or the competencies
required to produce it), but I’m willing to bet that the rate of profit for
private intelligence firms generally exceeds that of other firms invested in
semio-capitalist production. The value-form of semio-capital will always
shatter against the infinite surplus of sociality it attempts to capture;
collective semio-capital thus looks to the state to cohere and realize this
value. Infinitely valuable and so entirely worthless, sociality as such becomes
capitalist value through its functionality for statist command. Because it
wants to rule the social directly but cannot achieve this aim through the
value-form of capital, semio-capital necessarily becomes state-capital. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Let’s be clear about what all of this means: to
the extent that the state fosters the growth of semio-capital, the state
immediately enhances its own power. This is the dialectical flipside of the
apparent waning of the presence of the state—the dismantling of social
protections, the increasing privatization of state functions, the diminishing
capacity of citizens to interact meaningfully or effectively with apparatuses
of power… By fostering the growth of immaterial and infomatic modes of
production, neoliberal policy becomes a tool for the augmentation (not dismantling)
of the state. Indeed, the very modality by which the state approaches the
social has transformed. The state and civil society no longer engage in a
virtuous dialogue mediated by a public sphere. The state doesn’t locate the
truth of the social in missives that are addressed to it—a petition, a
newspaper article, even a vote. Semio-capital has created a condition in which
mediated forms of state/social engagement have been absorbed by the immediate
presence of the social to the state. The state can listen in on civil-social
auto-representations that in no way intend acceding to the rationality of the
public or political sphere. Once (according to bourgeois ideals) an
interlocutor, the state has become a silent reader, a mere listener, one
frustratingly proximate and distant, one intimate but terribly remote.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Neoliberal semio-capital has thus produced a
new phenomenology of being a phenomenon: the citizen will never know if her
words have gained power’s ear, if she has in fact achieved political
phenomenality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The state listens,
listens to everything, but we will never know what it hears, if it has heard,
if it can hear. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The scandal of Prism consists, then, not simply
in what the state might know about its citizens, but that becoming (meta)data
is all that remains of citizenship. A journalistic cohort of White Liberal
Dudes have intuited this fact, and I think this accounts for the contortions
they’ve undertaken to defend Prism (and engage in absolutely horrid, shitty,
stupid psych profiles of Snowden). In scrutinizing the politico-ethical
propriety or technological means of intelligence gatherings, liberals have
always assumed that the state is (or could be) intelligent—that, at the end of
the day, the data that they are will have been an object of state
intentionality, that they will have appeared before the sovereign’s caring
(albeit suspicious) gaze. The “Obama’s Reading Your Email” tumblr communicates
a white liberal fantasy of immediate appearance before the font of power. The
state’s current kind of caring is creepy, but hey, at least it’s care. Obama
might be reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my</i> email! As neoliberalism
destroys the state’s accountability for social upkeep, the best liberals can
hope for is that the state will continue to take account of the social, in
however slim and de-semanticized a fashion. The fear that the state might
overreach, that it might come to know you all too intimately, becomes an
apology for neoliberalism insofar as it maintains the bygone fantasy of
citizenship: that power intends to capture one in its firm embrace, that one
can enter into a positive relation with instituted power—even if you don’t know
it has happened.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">We need to recognize that there is no guiding
intellect gathering the social together, no intelligence that donates sense to
metadata, no intentionality that coheres the the sociality we semiotize through
communicative media. We aren’t achieving political phenomenality before a Dad
in Chief or a Big Brother. The value-form of capital cannot even adequately
realize the sociality we live. It can at best pass us off as a mass of data for
the intellectual mediocrities staffing the NSA and Booz Allen to work over. But
that’s it. That’s what remains of the connection between the state and its
citizens. The connection between the transcendence of the state and the
immanent plane of the social has never been slimmer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Liberalism begins with the fear (which will
always imply the desire) that Obama is reading our emails. Anarchism begins with
the knowledge that he isn’t, even when he tries. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-54152120401544199542013-06-20T10:19:00.001-07:002013-06-20T10:19:23.756-07:00Prism, Surplus Sociality, and the Crisis of Semio-Capital<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The recent revelations regarding the intensity
and extension of state surveillance are scandalous, but I’ve been consoling
myself with one fact: the state isn’t exactly a brain trust. A cursory look at
the texts produced by the FBI and DHS in their surveillance of Occupy, for
instance, reveals that intelligence gatherers so frequently have no fucking
clue what they are looking at. Of course, the state needn’t be smart to make
its sense of reality right. Indeed, the scandal of sovereignty isn’t that the
state might know too much (or, in yesteryear, too little), but that the power
of sovereignty is realized in the capacity of the state to absolve itself from
epistemological or normative bindings. States do not need to be right to do
shit, and states of stupidity are frequently weaponized. So, in stressing the
stupidity of the state, I’m not at all suggesting that an augmentation of state
power like Prism is somehow irrelevant. I do want to stress, though, that in
our critiques of Prism we would do well to avoid conflating the state’s
gathering of intelligence with the state’s becoming intelligent, of conflating
its aggregating big data with its becoming an attuned and sovereign close
reader. Such a conflation, I’m going to suggest, abets a neoliberal reconstitution
of the modality by which citizens appear before the state (and helps explains
the detestable contortions over Prism by people like David Brooks and David
Simon). To get there, I want to trace out the incredibly fragile structure of
state and capitalist power that organizes contemporary logics of governance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">States emerge, grow, and maintain themselves by
capturing flows of capital, and this means that the material and formal
constitutions of states to some degree derive from the modalities of capitalist
production that they encounter. As many have argued (from autonomist oriented
people like Marazzi, Bifo, Hardt & Negri, to vanguardists like Dean), today
the production of information, affects, and social communicability is the
paradigmatic form of capitalist production. Capital has become semio-capital
(Bifo’s term), and the semiotization of capital means that producing or
capturing value entails the production or capture of information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This production is not localized to
individual firms; rather, it takes place across the broad fabric of the social.
As you’re doing cheeky things on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, you’re also
producing value for capitalists. (“Remember when we used to make things?”
laments the television character of one cop-loving Prism apologist.) One effect
of the transformation in the value-form marked by semio-capital is that value
is increasingly and directly functional for the enhancement of state power.
Capitalist and statist modalities of securitizing the social blur together: each
needs to produce or capture the information produced by social subjects. The
predominance of for-profit, private security firms in the current fabric of
Yankee intelligence gathering in part indexes the fact that the contemporary
form of semiotic value has created the possibility of a tendential identity
between capitalist and state power. There is little substantive difference
between, say, Google’s data collection and the NSA’s (meta)data
(meta)collection. The former intends profit, the latter security, but the
modality of achieving both is roughly identical. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">But one hiccup: semio-capital has been in
crisis since day one. The eyes of info-capitalists are bigger than their
stomachs. They know that the sociality unleashed—or simply re-presented—by the semiotization
of capital possesses a value of nearly unlimited extent. Every capitalist knows
that the information contained on the Internet has value. And it does. But
semio-capital is just godawful at monetizing and profiting from this
value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This disparity becomes legible in
the disproportion between stock values for semio-capitalist firms and their
actual revenues. Such disproportions are not simply the effect of a mistaken
valuation. Rather, the disproportion indexes, in a language that capital understands,
the exorbitancy of sociality to the value-codings of capital. The potential
value that Facebook or Google commands will always exceed its capacity to
realize that profit. Capitalism’s attempt to monetize sociality as such had as
a consequence the uneasy recognition that the social possesses an infinite
value—or, functionally, no value. Through semio-capitalism, capital confronts a
surplus of sociality that it cannot contort into realizable surplus value.
Semio-capital inhabits a perpetual realization crisis, routinely confronting
the impossibility of transforming product into profit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The rise of private semio-intelligence firms,
then, should be understood as an attempt of collective semio-capital to manage the
realization crises that it cannot not encounter. It’s not an accidental scandal
that private intelligence firms are so bound up with the state; it is an effect
of the immanent logic of capital. I don’t have the data (or the competencies
required to produce it), but I’m willing to bet that the rate of profit for
private intelligence firms generally exceeds that of other firms invested in
semio-capitalist production. The value-form of semio-capital will always
shatter against the infinite surplus of sociality it attempts to capture;
collective semio-capital thus looks to the state to cohere and realize this
value. Infinitely valuable and so entirely worthless, sociality as such becomes
capitalist value through its functionality for statist command. Because it
wants to rule the social directly but cannot achieve this aim through the
value-form of capital, semio-capital necessarily becomes state-capital. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Let’s be clear about what all of this means: to
the extent that the state fosters the growth of semio-capital, the state
immediately enhances its own power. This is the dialectical flipside of the
apparent waning of the presence of the state—the dismantling of social
protections, the increasing privatization of state functions, the diminishing
capacity of citizens to interact meaningfully or effectively with apparatuses
of power… By fostering the growth of immaterial and infomatic modes of
production, neoliberal policy becomes a tool for the augmentation (not dismantling)
of the state. Indeed, the very modality by which the state approaches the
social has transformed. The state and civil society no longer engage in a
virtuous dialogue mediated by a public sphere. The state doesn’t locate the
truth of the social in missives that are addressed to it—a petition, a
newspaper article, even a vote. Semio-capital has created a condition in which
mediated forms of state/social engagement have been absorbed by the immediate
presence of the social to the state. The state can listen in on civil-social
auto-representations that in no way intend acceding to the rationality of the
public or political sphere. Once (according to bourgeois ideals) an
interlocutor, the state has become a silent reader, a mere listener, one
frustratingly proximate and distant, one intimate but terribly remote.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Neoliberal semio-capital has thus produced a
new phenomenology of being a phenomenon: the citizen will never know if her
words have gained power’s ear, if she has in fact achieved political
phenomenality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The state listens,
listens to everything, but we will never know what it hears, if it has heard,
if it can hear. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The scandal of Prism consists, then, not simply
in what the state might know about its citizens, but that becoming (meta)data
is all that remains of citizenship. A journalistic cohort of White Liberal
Dudes have intuited this fact, and I think this accounts for the contortions
they’ve undertaken to defend Prism (and engage in absolutely horrid, shitty,
stupid psych profiles of Snowden). In scrutinizing the politico-ethical
propriety or technological means of intelligence gatherings, liberals have
always assumed that the state is (or could be) intelligent—that, at the end of
the day, the data that they are will have been an object of state
intentionality, that they will have appeared before the sovereign’s caring
(albeit suspicious) gaze. The “Obama’s Reading Your Email” tumblr communicates
a white liberal fantasy of immediate appearance before the font of power. The
state’s current kind of caring is creepy, but hey, at least it’s care. Obama
might be reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my</i> email! As neoliberalism
destroys the state’s accountability for social upkeep, the best liberals can
hope for is that the state will continue to take account of the social, in
however slim and de-semanticized a fashion. The fear that the state might
overreach, that it might come to know you all too intimately, becomes an
apology for neoliberalism insofar as it maintains the bygone fantasy of
citizenship: that power intends to capture one in its firm embrace, that one
can enter into a positive relation with instituted power—even if you don’t know
it has happened.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">We need to recognize that there is no guiding
intellect gathering the social together, no intelligence that donates sense to
metadata, no intentionality that coheres the the sociality we semiotize through
communicative media. We aren’t achieving political phenomenality before a Dad
in Chief or a Big Brother. The value-form of capital cannot even adequately
realize the sociality we live. It can at best pass us off as a mass of data for
the intellectual mediocrities staffing the NSA and Booz Allen to work over. But
that’s it. That’s what remains of the connection between the state and its
citizens. The connection between the transcendence of the state and the
immanent plane of the social has never been slimmer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Liberalism begins with the fear (which will
always imply the desire) that Obama is reading our emails. Anarchism begins with
the knowledge that he isn’t, even when he tries. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2348759845521863175.post-44891161238200968372013-05-25T13:57:00.000-07:002013-05-28T19:56:10.222-07:00Party in the USA: The New Newest Left & the Organization of Sadness<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">[My response to Jodi Dean's <a href="http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2013/05/party-in-the-us-optimism-of-the-will.html">critique</a> is below the original post.]</span><i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></i><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-family: Arial;">How sad one must be to resurrect the Party. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In <i><a href="http://archive.org/details/struggleforprole00cannrich">The
Struggle<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span>for a Proletarian Party</a></i>,
mid-century Trotskyist J.P. Cannon includes a letter to a comrade entitled
“Concerning Johnson.” As Cannon relates to his comrade, Johnson is utterly
unruly, demonstrating a marked indifference to party organizing both in terms
of personal discipline and politico-philosophical ethos. Remarkably, Cannon
relates, “Johnson, the disorganizer, is going to lead a discussion of the Los
Angeles comrades on the organization question. This impudence can only be based
on the assumption that any kind of quackery can prosper in Southern
California.” Cannon takes heart that he “know[s] another California—the
California of a group of resolute Trotskyists who have shown in practice that
they know how to organize a party and do serious work in the mass movement.” Cannon’s
California knows how to Party. Alas, if only Johnson would refrain from
spreading his disorganizing philosophy to such comrades and instead “go to
school to them…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The “Johnson” in question is
none other than C.L.R. James, who would continue to (dis)organize Trotskyist
groups for another 7 years before ultimately breaking wholesale with the
organizational principle of the Party. I return to this report on James’ incorrigibility
in the wake of recent calls from various left formations to stop partying and
start Partying. I hope that James’ example and words might carry some weight.
After all, one of the primary calls for a New Newest Left has come from <i>Jacobin</i>, whose masthead’s graphic of
Toussaint L’Ouverture obviously alludes to James’ <i>Black Jacobins</i>. I’ve always held out hopes for <i>Jacobin</i> on the basis of that citation, but I’m starting to realize
that the image of Toussaint represents a massive misreading of James’
masterwork—a misreading with rather sinister implications. <i>The Black Jacobins</i> is, after all, a study in
revolutionary-organizational tragedy, a look into the way in which a people
throws up a revolutionary leader who then becomes increasingly distant from his
organic base. This tragic theme is particularly clear after the 1963
edits—revisions and additions made well after James broke practically and
philosophically with the Party-form. I always read <i>Jacobin</i>’s Toussaint graphic as a kind of catachresis for the social
mass that created and buoyed Toussaint, but now I’m realizing that, well, <i>Jacobin</i> is just totally into Toussaint
as Revolutionary Leader, Organizer Extraordinaire. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial;">Jacobin </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">is
not alone. Alongside the recent “<a href="http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/fellow-travelers/">Fellow Travelers</a>”
editorial in <i>Jacobin</i>, the well circulated
<a href="http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/">#Accelerate
manifesto</a> also demands that leftists learn how to Party. The two documents
are quite different in terms of their general philosophical
moorings—#Accelerate is technophilic, Deleuzean, Landean; “Fellow Travelers” is
just kind of humanist, less concerned with establishing an ontology of the
present—so their general convergences are all the more remarkable. In Cannonite
phrases, each text chastises today’s left for not being “serious” enough, for
onanistically obsessing over such small things as horizontal organizing and
direct action instead of getting down to the real business of reproducing a New
Newest Left. Curiously, each call-to-Party organizes itself through a reference
to a left auto-erotics. <i>Jacobin</i>’s<i> </i>Bhaskar Sunkara compares today’s left—“enthusiasts
of sectarian minutia, reenactors of old battles, collectors of decontextualized
quotes”—to a dude “jacking off” on the subway. (It’s hard to credit <i>Jacobin</i>’s desire to get away from
sectarian minutia and the reenactment of old battles when such a program is
stated in the same issue in which they published <a href="http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2013/04/not-even-marxist-on-vivek-chibbers.html">Vivek
Chibber’s trolling nonsense</a>.) Meanwhile, #Accelerate has some sharp words
for those radicals who, “hold[ing] to a <i>folk
politics</i> of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism” end up
“privileg[ing] self-esteem rather than effective action.” Adopting the idiom of
the Italian Marxists, they chastise radicals for being too into “affective
self-valorisation.” The New Newest Left doesn’t want to stroke its own ego or
its own cock; it wants to get down to the hard fucking business of forming a
unified organization. I mean, we’re talking about going vertical, getting hard,
getting all phallic. Those of us who don’t want to Party just have disorganized,
infantile libidos. We need to grow up, to take ourselves more seriously. “The
problem with the Left,” according to Sunkara, “isn’t that it’s too austere and
serious; it’s that it doesn’t take itself seriously enough to make the changes
necessary for political practice.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The metaphorics are kind of
silly, kind of confused. I mean, can one think of something more auto-erotic, more
narcissistically invested, than some dude offering up yet another contribution
to the archive of revolutionary Party invitations? Indeed, these masturbatory
metaphorics are mobilized as a mechanism of disavowal, for “Fellow Travelers” is
all about self-touching. For Sunkara, the U.S. left already possesses an
“internal culture”; “we” already know who our “fellow travelers” are. The aim
of the article is thus to produce (imaginatively, then institutionally) an
organized scene of auto-affection in which the left can get a grip on itself,
hold itself together in the single corporate body of the “non-sectarian”
socialist Party. “The strength of the Left,” after all, “is in organization,”
and what we need is “a larger, more centralized organization,” one that would
be “non-sectarian” in spirit and equipped with a “well-run administrative
apparatus” decked out with paid staffers. (Every radical’s wet dream: someone
to do photo copies.) Sunkara isn’t opposed to left auto-erotics at all; we just
need to learn how and when to best touch ourselves. (Preferably not on subways,
preferably while reading <i>Jacobin</i>.)
#Accelerate suggests that the best way to stop with all this gratuitous
self-love—which remains, as always, self-abuse—is for revolutionaries to get
hitched: “The command of The Plan must be married to the improvised order of
The Network.” Lenin and Mark Zuckerberg, I now pronounce you man and wife.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">So many problems. First off,
it’s hard for me to see left unification—either ideologically or
organizationally—as an unqualified good. As I see it, the splintering of the
left over concerns regarding race and gender, for instance, was extraordinarily
productive for furthering leftist politics. It’s the lessons I’ve learned from anarcha-
and Marxist-feminisms, for instance, that cause me to cringe at the flip way
with which Sunkara can presence a subway masturbator’s phallic aggression and
then recommend “not…star[ing]” at it at the conclusion of his piece. Radical
feminists splintered from “non-sectarian” parties precisely because they were
asked to avert their gazes from the crazy masculinism of left
organizations—and, indeed, the social more broadly. Moreover, dissensus is the
stuff of the political, and I can’t imagine joining a group who thinks it an
act of revolutionary generosity to “allow…open factions.” A “non-sectarian”
party that desires to “foster a pluralistic culture [… of] comradely debate and
open disagreement” is simply a party that has absorbed liberal multiculti as an
organizational principle. We can debate and act together without consolidating
ourselves into a “larger body.” We’re doing it now. There are far more flexible
forms of putting groups in contact while maintaining autonomy than that of a
centralized organization (which is the placeholder term for Party in the piece,
a word that Sunkara knows to be chary of saying).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I also don’t get the desire
for centralization. <i>Jacobin</i> claims
that the strength of the left consists in organization but, in that case, it’s
unclear why the strengthening of leftist organizations should entail a step
back to (pre-)Fordist modalities of political organization in a post-Fordist capitalist
landscape. Even MBAs know that flexible decentralization—for them in terms of
labor processes, not in terms of the channeling of profit, of course—unleashes
greater productive potentials than hierarchical forms of centralization, and I
like thinking that my comrades have at least achieved the level of savvy of a
Wharton undergrad. But then, reading #Accelerate, you realize that the authors
have the same exact desire as a student at a B-school: they want to manage
social capital more efficiently, they want a “Promethean politics of maximal
mastery over society and its environment,” and they earnestly request “funding,
whether from governments, institutions, think tanks, unions, or individual
benefactors” to get their Accelerationist startup off the ground. Of course,
#Accelerate claims that they don’t want centralization, they want “an ecology
of organizations.” Fair enough, I guess. But even if I could look beyond the
metaphorics of Prometheus and the Plan, it’s hard to get over the relentless
pounding that horizontal modes of organizing take—a pounding that is the effect
of the authors incomprehension that horizontalism does in fact produces a
robust economy of organizations and that, moreover, horizontal processes can
equip themselves with all the organizational bells and whistles they ascribe to
the coming Accelerationist Party. These include “secrecy, verticality, and
exclusion.” Only a crazy straw-manning of horizontals, or a profound lack of
familiarity with anarchist practice, or a less-than-covert desire for a
centralized Party, can lead one to ignore the fact that lots of horizontal
formations make temporary use of <i>all</i>
of these organizational protocols. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">And then there’s the
question of the space of the political. Put simply, #Accelerate is tired of the
localization of the political. Capital, after all, is global, abstract, and
mobile, but silly horizontals spend all their time engaging concretely with
their bounded life-worlds. <i>Jacobin</i>
isn’t as explicitly antagonistic toward the local, but it seems clear to me
that any form of political centralization necessarily requires a reconstitution
of political space, an accumulation of political power/consciousness in a
determinate (virtual or real-physical) locale. (We will call that locale Yew
Nork.) In both cases, I think that there is a profound misrecognition regarding
contemporary scales of the political-economic. Particularly in the case of
#Accelerate: Can anyone really oppose the global to the local in binary fashion
anymore? (Could we ever?) Some of the most vibrant radical movements of our
time have moved from “the local” to form an alternative mode of worldliness.
I’m thinking here of a movement like Via Campesina, which uses a kind of
federative organizational structure to articulate and coordinate diverse
localities. (There doesn’t seem to be much room for peasant movements, or
really any movements from the Global South at all, in the big-data,
fast-capital world of #Accelerate.) At the same time, these evacuations of the
local as a scene of political import reproduces the inaugural gesture of
capitalist parliamentarianism, which accumulates the political, centralizes it,
and puts it at a practical and sensory distance from ordinary lifeworlds. “Die
Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen!” says the centralized Party to the local.
But the point of all this can’t be to carry the bereft prepolitical masses into
the over-there world of the Real Political, right? Isn’t at least a small part
of our work linked to the production of new political sensoriums, new
sensoriums of the political, so that we can ironize the ontological density of
the state and capital and not feel like we’re living defective half-lives if
we’re barred from access to either?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I’m obviously annoyed at all
of this stuff, but I think I get it. The <i>Jacobin</i>
piece and the #Accelerate manifesto are the products of a profound sadness,
even a despair. They’re replaying the late cycle of rebellion in their
collective brains, wondering where it all went wrong. If only Occupy hadn’t
been so bogged down in a de-centralized democratic process that inhibited
concrete actions… If only there was some vigorous leadership to steer the
rudderless masses… If only we had found a tactic that didn’t bind us to
concrete localities—a park, a campus green—and instead had come up with some
counter to the flexible globality of capitalism… Bad faith in the present allows for a
recuperation of bad pasts: “Fellow Travelers” reads like a Party program from
1941, and Marx-Engels already wrote #Accelerate in 1847 (just sub in the
Internet for “electric telegraphs,” “big data” for the “application of
chemistry to industry,” and anarchists and horizontalists for Marx’s utopian
socialists). The Party-to-come is a kind of afterparty, a mournful tired
attempt to recuperate what was but in an alternative form. Recent history is
what hurts; donning the costumes of deep history is warm and cozy and
fuzzy-feeling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">But the last cycle of
rebellion didn’t collapse because we didn’t have proper leadership, proper
theory, proper direction. (Or, Jesus help me, adequate liberal allies.) We
didn’t—and don’t—need leaders, orientation, or a Plan. We don’t need “small
groups of organized militants” to “pav[e] the way for mass action and sweeping
structural change.” (Occupy marked the massification of the figure of the
militant in the U.S.) The last cycle of rebellion closed because we couldn’t
keep up the intensity, because our feedback loop of positive affect was
shattered by the State and by our own failures to stay committed to the
democracy that we were making. There certainly were organizational problems at
the encampments—after all, we’re still learning how to be democratic, how to be
productively and unproductively in each other’s way. But I don’t think we can
derive any grand organizational-theoretical knowledge from Occupy’s collapse,
and certainly none that could justify a shift in organizational axioms and a return
to left verticalism. (We can, and have, drawn plenty of
practical-organizational lessons from it, however.) There’s no big lesson: we
just fucking lost. Got beat. Got beat up. “Not everything’s a lesson,” in the words
of one fictional <i>Office</i> worker,”
“sometimes you just fail.” (Let’s take a pause to listen to “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTIrnfYijVQ">Benfica</a>.”)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The New Newest Left is
turning to the Party in a spirit of sadness; it’s a reparative gesture, and all
claims about confidence in its politico-organizational future are simply therapeutic
utterances. Indeed, I find the New Newest Left’s sadness to be contagious: it’s
upsetting to watch smart comrades spend so much time shitting on radical
leftists in the hope of forming a party acceptable to liberals in order to
recompose a Keynesian state that quite simply will never come back. Reformism
today is more utopian than revolution. When I read <i>Jacobin</i>, I can’t help but think of one of Berlant’s points from <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Female-Complaint-Unfinished-Business-Sentimentality/dp/0822342022">The
Female Complaint</a></i>: the assumption of certain forms of conventionality
allows for a feeling of being in proximity to a world, but at the cost of a
crazy expenditure of affective energy and cognitive attention. Left conventionalism
is hard work, it takes a lot of time and effort to try to resuscitate the
Party, and I wonder what might happen if this energy and attention were
directed elsewhere. And it should be: the Party isn’t coming back, and long
marches through institutions will always turn into highways through an
interminable hell. (Sidebar: If some party does come back, though, if you guys
manage to get something off the ground—great! I’ll be at your marches, your
gatherings, I’ll read your shit. Horizontals are always pretty okay with forming
temporary alliances with verticals; anarchists are always at the anti-austerity
demos, after all. It would be easier to be in the same cognitive and real space
as you guys, though, if you could stop anarchist-bashing so as to be more
appealing to liberals, okay?)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I want to end by returning
to C.L.R. James, the Great Disorganizer. Starting in the late 40s, James’
adopted a new premise in his approach to the social: for James, state-capitalism
had in effect valorized workers’ capacities to the point that all forms of
politico-economic organization (by Party, by State, by Capital) were
experienced by all as the mere brutality of violent command. With the Hungarian
Revolution, he declared the Party decisively defeated: “One of the greatest
achievements of the Hungarian Revolution was to destroy once and for all the
legend that the working class cannot act successfully except under the
leadership of a political party” (<i>Facing
Reality</i>, 14). Confronted with the revolution’s defeat, James didn’t look
backwards for to-hand principles of organization—the Party—but forwards, to a
future he couldn’t know. “The pitfall,” he and his comrades caution, “is to
believe and to act as if these or other formations are embryonic Soviets,
Workers Councils, parties of the future, and such-like fantasies. No groups of
individuals can anticipate the social formations of the future. These gestate,
no one knows how long, but compensate by being full-grown at birth. The mass
organizations of today are distinguished as much by anything as by this: they
do not worry about their future.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The sadness of the New
Newest Left, the worrying over futures: this derives from their conception of
themselves as occupying a position of exteriority vis-à-vis the social, of
standing outside or looking down on it, and thinking, “Fuck, what are we going
to do?” It’s a false drama, the old theater of “activists” and “militants” and,
above all, the Party. We need to get that, today, the term “activist” can only
serve as a sociological (auto)description, never as a social-ontological
reality. There are no more activists, no more militants, no more Parties. All
of the social knowledges and powers we used to attribute to those terms are
immanent to the social itself. We don’t need to organize, to treat ourselves or
the social as a technical object. “We” don’t need to worry about the future of
the social, whoever the fuck the “we” is that arrogates to itself the role of
providing pastoral, Dad-ish, anxious care. The future of the social will always
outwit us, evade and erode our anticipations; the combined mass of the social
will always be more creative than a cohort of comrades or the editorial board
of a small mag. Let’s put paid to the entire organizer’s imaginary, the
exhausted vocabulary of the Party and the Plan. Let’s disorganize—that is, let’s
undertake the labor of interdicting politico-social forms that inhibit the
immanent auto-organization of the invading socialist society. In the end, it’s
not “young activists” that should “leave us confident about the future” (more
self-love) but the teeming mass of disorganized and disorganizing sociality
finding its own immanent form.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">#NoDads #NoBosses #NoParties #<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M11SvDtPBhA">MileyRox</a>!</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">[THE AFTERPARTY--my response to Jodi Dean]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Hi Jodi—Maybe we can both
tone it down a little. I’ll go first. If I could reboot, I’d begin with
something that only appears way down at the bottom of my post, and in
parentheses to boot: </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">“(Sidebar: If some party
does come back, though, if you guys manage to get something off the ground—great!
I’ll be at your marches, your gatherings, I’ll read your shit. Horizontals are
always pretty okay with forming temporary alliances with verticals; anarchists
are always at the anti-austerity demos, after all. It would be easier to be in
the same cognitive and real space as you guys, though, if you could stop
anarchist-bashing so as to be more appealing to liberals, okay?)”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It’s a small moment, too
small to claim that the entire piece was motivated by a desire to come to an
understanding with Partiers and Statists. I was no doubt much more motivated by
my anger at the rhetorical treatment that the non- or anti-Party left has
received in the wake of Occupy—just as you are angered at me for “[d]ismissing”
the dedication, courage, or history of our militants. (I wasn’t doing that at
all, by the way.) And not, mind, angry as an anarchist, as you identified me. I
actually consider myself an autonomist Marxist, or some hybrid anarcho-Marxist,
but, no matter what, you and I actually think with, refer back to, and identify
with the same tradition. Differently, to be sure, but we’re playing with the
same deck of cards. So, when I offered my critique of the new Party Left, I
wasn’t doing it from a position of exteriority. I was doing it as a Marxist,
concerned both to bring the communist horizon nearer and to patch up the
needlessly antagonistic relationship between verticals and horizontals,
Partiers and partiers.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I thus found it both sad and
symptomatic when you wrote: “Who would want to eliminate or undermine left
militants and leaders? It makes me wonder about COINTELPRO and disinformation
operations.” I think, first off, that you are misreading of my point: I wasn’t
talking about elimination but generalization, a positive massification. More
importantly, it is worrisome that dissenting from a program is taken as playing
for the other side. I know you meant it jokingly, and that you regret having
written it. I can’t let the point go, though, because I think it exposes a
fundamental problem with all of these calls-to-Party. Security culture is no
doubt terribly important for left organizations, particularly in light of grand
juries terrorizing anarchists in the northwest and the revelations about the
extent of FBI and DHS surveillance of Occupy. But, like, in this case, there is
nothing to secure. No Party, no mass collectivity—just a magazine and a
manifesto and their authors, all engaged in totally legal, mostly harmless
activities. We should recall that Lenin didn’t build the Party from the Cheka
up. I read the impulse to do so, even as a merely rhetorical flourish, as a
symptom of a felt lack: the lack of a mass constituency that would positively ground
a Party, that would give material positivity to its possibility. Your joke is,
of course, a small moment, but it serves as a synecdoche for the broader ways
in which Party Marxists are attempting to constitute an organization through
negation, through beating up on anarchists and horizontals. All of this
negation is purely rhetorical, totally abstract, and utterly delinked from actual
social movements. As a couple friends pointed out to me, without a constituent
power at the bottom, all of this Party-talk is utopian normativity without
effective reality. We might as well be reading Habermas.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">That’s why I said the New
Newest Left is sad. Sure, there’s a flurry of activity—journals formed,
conferences held—but it’s taking place without the material-affective charge of
an actual mass movement. And when this Left gets sad it gets mean, and beats
down the dedication, courage, and history of anarchists who have already been
beaten down enough. But realize: if every horizontal, if every anarchist, if
every autonomist vanished over night, you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">still</span></i> wouldn’t have a Party, you
would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">still</i> lack an actual material
base. A collectivity isn’t going to materialize once anarchists perform a
vanishing act. After all, it is the materiality of the social that moves history,
not the “will”—however optimistic—of a Party-to-be. The disorganizationist
approach I vaguely sketched was, if nothing else, an attempt to keep close to
the actual materiality of social worlds. I never, incidentally, said that
potentials immanent to the social will necessarily emerge left, or anything
like that—just that the social resists organization from outside or above, and
that we need to develop a politics adequate to that fact.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There’s a lot more I could
say to justify what I wrote. I’ll footnote it.* Just, you know, please: as you
Party Marxists try getting something going, please do so through the
cultivation of positivities—positive communities, positive organizations,
positive affects—and less through the negativity of the Bad Anarchist Example. We
will all see one another on the streets—right?—so we should try actually
getting along.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">best,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Chris</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*The post-Fordist thing: I
marked out the centralization of capital through channels of profit; I was
talking about production process, not distribution. New sensoriums of the
political: what was Occupy but a mode of allowing the mass of people, excluded
from the political by the dominant spatializations of parliamentary capitalism,
to (quite literally) get in touch with the affectivity of democracy in their
ordinaries. It’s hard for me to see mass self-activation as reparative of or
functional for capital. (And, hey, maybe apologize to depressed people,
addicts, and yogis.)</span></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Chris Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17875747224742048877noreply@blogger.com12