Pre-election thoughts on the protests at that time

I wrote this material about three months before the election in response to the massive protests that were occurring at the time.  In many ways, the spirit of these protests continued on through to the first few months of the Trump administration, particularly in the form of the protests at the airports that occurred when the Muslim ban was first announced, but also in the form of street fights with the so-called alt right and the far more legal and formal protests of the women's march.  It also took a far smaller and local form through protests of representatives and phone calls as well.  However, it seems like that high tide of protest has at least ebbed.  My hope is that we will see such forms of ungovernability soon and in larger numbers.  I put up the essay as a marker of the time period.  I'm not sure if I would write it the same way at this point, but I still think its worth putting up.

            In the proliferation of such a massive amount of political action within the past year, particularly around the Black Lives Matter movement, I found myself thinking of a passage within Rosa Luxemburg's treatise on the Russian revolution of 1905, titled "The Mass Strike".  Luxemburg exams the phenomenon of the mass strike within the revolution as both a critique of the top down notions of struggle as developed by mainstream of the main intellectual of the SPD, Karl Kautsky, along with the ahistorical concept of the mass strike as developed by anarchists.  In opposition to both, Luxemburg emphasizes the mass strike as a phenomenon that arises out of the self-development of the proletariat through the process of the class struggle.  Through that engagement, Luxemburg emphasizes both the multiplicity of the struggle, along with intensity of the struggles.  She notes:

            The mass strike, as the Russian Revolution shows it to us, is such a changeable phenomenon that it reflects all the phases of the political and economic struggle, all stages and factors of the revolution. Its adaptability, its efficiency, the factors of its origin are constantly changing. It suddenly opens new and wide perspectives of the revolution when it appears to have already arrived in a narrow pass and where it is impossible for anyone to reckon upon it with any degree of certainty. It flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena. And the law of motion of these phenomena is clear: it does not lie in the mass strike itself nor in its technical details, but in the political and social proportions of the forces of the revolution. (Luxemburg, The Mass Strike)

            At the most immediate level, we can see that Luxemburg recognizes what Louis Althusser might later refer to as a moment of revolutionary fusion as occurring within the years of her analysis.  An almost infinite array of discrete and concrete struggles or contradictions came together, aligned themselves in a manner to challenge the very nature of the empire.  But her insight moves beyond that initial insight.  If we see a moment of revolutionary fusion, it does not take the form of a synthesis.  Instead the struggles maintain their multiplicity, their inability to form a whole.  At the same time, the struggles are marked by a form of indistinction, of mutation, 'peaceful wage struggles' become 'street massacres, barricade fighting'.  Through this description, we can see an embrace of what Hobbes phobically linked to the figure of the multitude, a disjointed and militant mob that refuses to become a people and refuses to be governed.  Luxemburg draws on the naturalistic metaphor of the sea to describe the pervasiveness of the social movements of the time and their ability to adapt and mutate themselves in the face of a multiplicity of efforts to repress that refusal.  The movements ‘bubble forth’ ‘ceaselessly’ move, and constitute a ‘changing sea of phenomena.’  She ties that movement to the strength of the revolutionary forces in the country, to the logic running counter to capital.  One one hand, these movements reflect the multiplicity that is at the heart of the concept of use value, the multiplicity of needs that continually exists exogenously to the logic of exchange, even as exchange is absolutely dependent on that multiplicity.  On the other hand, the movements constitute a kind of counter flow to the flows of labor and commodities that define capitalist accumulation.  It’s a flow that refuses the coagulation into the logic of exploited dead labor, the infinite exchangeability of labor time.  Inasmuch, these movements point to an alterity always present within capital, the potential for another way of life.

            In the past year, we have been seeing a similar moment in our own country, albeit with a smaller magnitude than the one that Luxemburg discusses, largely, but not exclusively around the phenomenon labelled Black Lives Matter^[1].^[2]  To rehearse material that is undoubtedly familiar to the audience, we have seen an explosion of demonstrations in response to police violence.^[3]  That violence has become a focal point to challenge the ever-changing structures of white supremacy that at are so significant in structuring the logic of capitalist accumulation, both at the present moment and through the entire history of the country.  It’s taken the form of insurrectionary violence^[4] in Ferguson and other cities, objects hurled at police officers, freeway occupations around the country, peaceful marches of school children, lock-downs of police stations, demands made to Democratic presidential candidates, and a variety of other conventional protest.  The truth is that any effort to document the rich variety of protest will necessarily fail in capturing the rich diversity of activities that has occurred in the past year, and any effort to demarcate these protests as being a part of a particular moment is necessarily going to erase the histories that feed into these protests and inform their logic.  At the same time, we can see a particular language of action, slogans, and social formations that are particular to this moment. And we can see the impact of those movements on the presidential campaign through the disruption of the Sanders and Clinton campaigns, through explosive protests against the racist authoritarian nature of the Trump Campaign.^[5] Through those actions, it has introduced a genuinely democratic and agonistic dimension to the stage managed theatrics of the presidential campaign.  The movement has also challenged the connections between the traditional trade union movement and police unions, and has succeeded in creating a meaningful wedge between these formations.  It has also formed alliances with elements of those traditional structures.  But perhaps most significantly, it has transformed the freeway, that representation of the flow of labor, of commodities, into a representation of a profound refusal, through its blockage.  We’ve seen this tactic not only employed in cities traditionally associated with protest, but across the country.^[6]

            Within this web of activity, we can see the possibility of a new form of live, although perhaps only in a negative form, through the refusal of so many to be governed by the same oppressive institutions that have committed such violence.  We can perhaps see the capacities of such a movement in its spectral form, in the phobic descriptions of the movement by the recent comments by Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke at the Republican National Convention.  Clarke marks the organization, along with the Occupy movements, as breaking an unspoken and unwritten code of conduct for the country, and therefore standing outside the respectable conventions of protest, and representing anarchy.  It’s initially difficult to negotiate this description with the often quite modest political reforms called for by the official representatives of the movements, but it makes sense when we look at the protests themselves, which have pushed far beyond these official demands in their radicality.  It also makes sense when we see the refusal of even the reform branch of the movement to be formally incorporated into the political system.^[7]  If anything, we have seen an intensification of this refusal in the continuation of street protest, despite the calls for official calls for calm after sniper attack in Dallas.  Through such actions, we see a movement that is increasingly unconcerned with the preservation of the forces of the status quo.  At the same time, it would be a mistake to ignore the precarity of the contingent web of alliances that created this potential historic bloc.  At the most obvious level, there is the threat of the opportunistic incorporation of this formation into the Democratic Party, a threat that is most notably media personality and former mayoral candidate, DeRay Mckesson.  However, the conflicts that defined the freeway occupation in Minneapolis between activists seem like a greater threat.  Without getting into the details, the arguments represent long historical divisions that intersect questions of identity and tactics.  They represent the profoundly divided nature of the proletariat itself, and aren’t easily resolved through simple slogans.  The question the movement and those who wish to see it succeed have in front of them is how to make this multiplicity productive and grow.  We can see the violence of the backlash beginning to grow.

---

^[1] Although it may actually involve more people than were involved in the insurrectionary activities in the Russian Empire at the time.

^[2] Given some of the confusions around the slogan, I should note that I am referring to the larger movement that has congealed around the term, rather than the specific network that has named itself Black Lives Matter.  The distinction is important since the movement is far larger than the network and contains both elements far more insurrectionary than the network, along with highly opportunist individuals and groupings tied to the Democratic Party and Teach For America.

^[3] There is a need more a more intense engagement with the logic of policing, one that could be informed by the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who draws from the earlier work of Marx and Foucault amongst others.  There is also a larger conversation within the Black Radical Tradition, as well.

^[4] It’s important to note that this has been largely limited to property damage, but not exclusively.

^[5] Which was produced by a large intersection of actors, but this could be said about the broad phenomenon, as well.

^[6] The tactic itself deserves more discussion than provided here, and it would be a mistake to think of the action as a unified.  Instead, we have seen very different approaches to taking over freeways.  Some have been mass actions, while others have been controlled protests by small groups.  Some are deliberately designed as acts of civil disobedience, while others are taken up by parties who are not interested in being arrested. 

^[7] Once again, we definitely see some opportunist exceptions, but the network has largely refused this incorporation.

Cognition and Fantasy: China Mieville's Subversion of Fantastic Literature (a rough draft of a talk)

It's been a while since I have posted and I have woefully failed to live up to my previous plans as discussed on the blog. I posted nothing on the Hugo Awards and don't plan to at this point, and most of my other plans have been forgotten. A lot of this had to do with travel, but it also had to do with lack of inspiration. However, during this time, I managed to get an article accepted for publication and gave a short talk at the Marxist Literary Group talk at UC Davis. I thought I would post that talk to get the blog started up again. This is lightly revised, but I plan on putting together a far more polished and expanded version of the paper in the future for another venue.

A narrative thread in the second book of the Bas Lag trilogy, The Scar, offers a potentially productive entrance into an analysis of the work of China Mieville’s relationship to the fantastic. The novel itself shifts focus from the city of New Crobuzon in the first novel to the sea, following the voyage of Bellis Coldwine as she seeks to escape the city into exile. The ship she is on is eventually captured by a group of pirates and is taken to their floating city, Armada. However, the significant part of the narrative for us begins just before the capture of the ship, with the diplomatic visit to Salkrikaltor City, the city of the cray, that introduces Bellis’ companion through most of the voyage, Silas Fennec. Fennec is immediately introduced as a significant figure within the government of New Crobuzon, and commandeers the ship for an unnamed purpose. However, his plans are thwarted by the pirate takeover of the ship. After that occurs, Fennec eventually turns to the protagonist, Bellis, for support. In the process of getting her support, Fennec tells a variety of different stories why he left the isolated grindylow community that he had been living with for years. The initial story involved breaking a mysterious taboo of the society, and his story shifts to involve a conflict with a shaman, an inexplicable invasion of the city of New Crobuzon, and finally, the theft of a sacred magical object.

In each of these stories, the grindylow are marked as the mysterious and threatening other that simultaneously threatens and stabilizes the meaning of the imperial center of New Crobuzon. The grindylow are inexplicable, and mark the limit point of reason. Through the invocation of such a threat, Fennec is able to convince Bellis to send a secret message to the city of New Crobuzon, which, unknown to her and her friends, also includes information about the city of Armada. When this betrayal is discovered, Bellis and her friends are taken prisoner and Fennec must go on the run, increasingly dependent on the magical device stolen from the grindylow, which begins to transform him and is interpreted by Bellis as the ultimate reason why the grindylow hunt the ship.

However, when the grindylow eventually catch up to the ship and overtake it, they contemptuously slap the magical totem out of Bellis’ hands when she offers it to them to abandon the attack and gather up Fennec and his notebook full of the shipping routes that he planned to give to the government of New Crobuzon. The collection of stories that Fennec had been telling throughout the narrative turn out to be a series of lies, designed to appeal to the prejudices of Bellis, and to cover up the genuine goal of undermining the trade monopoly of the equally rational grindylow by the city of New Crobuzon. This reversal is emblematic of the narrative structures of China Mieville’s novels, upending and subverting the conventions of fantastic literature and their relation to cognition. If fantastic literature is the literature of limits, whether in the form of the limits of cognition within the framework of Todorov or transgression in the work of Rosemary Jackson, Mieville continually shows up those limits as ideological constructs through a parody of an expectations of the fantastic. Through this parody, he produces a kind of cognitive fantasy that folds the liminal imagery of the fantastic into the flow of capital and its resistances.

However, this term, cognitive fantasy is in direct contradiction to the generic analysis of Darko Suvin, who implicitly inspires this term. Suvin is an early critic of science fiction, and was one of the founders of Science Fiction Studies. His book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is an early attempt to classify science fiction as a genre through a series of oppositions that shores up the definition of the genre through those distinctions. Suvin argues that science fiction can be distinguished from other genres via a concept of a multi-dimensional cognitive estrangement, that both separates it from realism due to its estrangement and away from myth, fantasy, and folklore due to its multi-dimensional and cognitive nature. Suvin separates the novum or innovation of science fiction from an emphasis on the formalities of technology and scientific data that comes out of the tradition of Jules Verne. Instead this novum is linked to the anticipation for another future and the oscillation between the social laws that define that future and the laws that define contemporary society. The estrangement provided by science fiction operates between the oscillation between the reader’s critical engagement with the alternate environment as it exists in the novel and the world as it is ideologically constructed.

For our purposes, Suvin’s oppositions need to be explored more fully. Most significantly for our conversation, science fiction must be defined in opposition to the genre of fantasy through the category of cognition. Suvin frames this opposition in the following manner.

“Even less congenial to SF is the fantasy (ghost, horror, Gothic, weird) tale, a genre committed to the interposition of anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environment. Where the folktale is indifferent, the fantasy is inimical to the empirical world and its laws. The thesis could be defended that the fantasy is significant insofar as it is impure and fails to establish a superordinated maleficent world of its own, causing a grotesque tension between arbitrary supernatural phenomena and the empirical norms they infiltrate” (Suvin).

The fantastic is defined by its antagonism to the ‘empirical world and its laws.’ Rather than exploring the possibilities for transformation within the contradictions and tensions of the world as it exists, the fantastic creates a form of estrangement that exists in a sort of malevolent tension with the world. The fantastic is a literature of irrationality and limits to the possibility of critical cognition. In a sense, we are not that far away from the definitions of the genre offered by Todorov and Jackson, even if we are looking at those rules from a drastically different and phobic perspective. The fantastic shatter the possibility of certainty, setting up a set of static laws even as the genre transgresses them. The monstrous images of the fantastic freeze the ability to develop a complex and nuanced understand of the world. For Suvin, the estrangement of the fantastic represents a reactionary trend within literature. It’s a deeply reactionary artform, defined by irrationality and escapism, and is one that Suvin sees as a constant threat to the cognitive dimension of science fiction.

However, Mieville’s narrative structure throws the generic schema of Suvin into crisis through his hybridization of science fictional and fantasy generic forms. At initial reading, this process of hybridization might not be of great concern in Suvin’s interpretation of the narrative forms. After all, Suvin recognizes the influences that science fiction draws from a variety of sources, including fantastic literature. However, he largely interprets those negatively, examining how a variety of pulp influences draw science fictional narratives away from a commitment to cognitive estrangement into a variety of forms of mystification. This is where Mieville’s narrative becomes so problematic for Suvin’s narrative framework. His work is committed to a rigorous exploration of the social, political, and cultural structures of its world, while at the same time, engaging with the history of fantastic literature in its formal structure. Mieville imagines a materialist engagement with the fantastic, producing a set of naturalistic rules for the functioning of magic and fantastic creatures, and more significantly, by placing those creatures into a history of domination and resistance, of exploitation and racialization that critically comments on the history of colonialist exploitation of the past 500 years, rather than simply replicating its effects.

Mieville hasn’t limited his critique of Suvin to the implicit material contained in his fiction either, giving critical lectures on the subject and taking it on in his essays. All of this material works to reject the distinction between the non-cognitive and reactionary fantastic and the cognitive and progressive science fiction. In his talk at Kansas University, Mieville engages with the limitations of the theoretical framework as developed by Suvin and Carl Freedman, showing how the “cognitive effect” emphasized by both authors is a product of a kind of rhetorical maneuver, a trick on the part of the author to get the reader to get them to accept the cognitive effect of the work in question. Mieville notes that this largely operates as a consensual game, but that the logic implicit in the work of Suvin and Freedman evades the way that the modes of scientific cognition that both celebrate are formed out of and are embedded in the logic and violence of capitalist accumulation. He rejects the ‘epistemological firewall’ implicit in the concept of cognition and argues that science fiction and fantasy should be seen as slightly different modes of estrangement, both deeply embedded in the ideological matrix of capitalist accumulation.

Mieville’s critique certainly represents an engagement with a dominant strain of reading Suvin’s work, one that emphasizes the cognition of the scientific method over Suvin’s interest in in temporality and historical transformation. Insofar as that engagement with Suvin reproduces the epistemological firewall discussed earlier, it represents an important intervention, but it potentially misses out on the other dimension of Suvin, the cognitive process that challenges the inevitability of capitalist accumulation. That other dimension of cognition, a definition that is connected to the idea of cognitive mapping as borrowed from Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City by Fredric Jameson, can potentially connect the two through another notion of cognition. Within this context, Mieville’s engagement of the genre can be perhaps understood through a structurally possible, but unexplored dimension of Suvin’s work, which recognizes the ability of fantasy to reduce the cognitive dimension of science fiction, but leaves out the ability to imagine a cognitive or materialist fantasy. As Mieville notes in his discussion of Carl Freedman’s extension of Suvin’s work, “…if the predicates for a fantasy are clearly never-possible but are treated systemically within the fantastic work, then its cognition effect is precisely that normally associated with SF (Mieville 339). Although the comment is not followed up on in the essay, the interest in this sort of cognitive or even materialist fantasy can be found elsewhere.

The building blocks of Mieville’s construction of a materialist or cognitive fantasy can be found in his introductory essay on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Mountains of Madness.

“Lovecraft is pulled to do this in part by the “scientism,” the materialist articulation, of his vision, which embeds horror in material reality. Through a key driver behind this new form of weird was the specific political/cultural apocalypse of the war, in its own aesthetics a materialist “scientific” weird implies a universe that has always been monstrous and implacable. Lovecraft’s uncanny, in other words, expresses this radically new crisis precisely by depicting an eternal and unsympathetic uncanny.

This is the paradox in this utterly new kind of fantasy. In expressing the ‘supernatural’ in materialist terms, Lovecraft will not use the standard figures of supernature, with all their mythic baggage. But his materialism means it is not just in his creatures that horror lies, but in the material reality that they are a part—and that awe-ful reality is eternal. Lovecrafts’s radical innovations must seem to have resonated for eons” (Mieville xvi).

Although it is an odd place to begin framing a materialist fantasy, Mieville sees in Lovcraft a shifting of the topography of fantasy. The horror of the first world war causes a dramatic shift Lovecraft’s fantastic world, shifting it from the supernatural to natural and the material. The horror of the world is a product of the indifference of the natural laws of the universe, and is no longer the product of a supernatural good and evil, terms that simply are mistakenly placed on the indifferent phenomenon by a primitive and mistaken humanity. At the same time, there is certainly still a dimension of mystification within this framework, as it expresses ‘this radically new crisis precisely by depicting an eternal and unsympathetic uncanny.’ The cause for the innovation, a distinctively historical shift, is still occluded from the discussion. At the same time, the fantastic is not a product of a supernatural dimension intruding into the empirical world. If the fantastic cannot be understood by humanity, that lack of understanding is produced through the cognitive limitations of humanity itself, and the monstrous creatures operate within their own unnamed naturalistic expectations.

The distinct shift that Mieville introduces into the genre is the dimension of historicity. The fantastic is not only made material, but made historical, notably in a manner that intersects with the forms of mystification and obfuscation that are embedded in the commodity form itself. For Mieville, this critical engagement can allow for a critical engagement with capitalism’s modes of domination that are made invisible in the ‘zero world’ of ‘naturalism.’ Mieville notes, “Under capitalism, the social relations of the everyday—that “fantastic form”—are the dreams, the grotesque”, of the commodities that rule” (Mieville, Marxism and Fantasy 336). The estrangement of science fiction may help in revealing those structures of domination, the ‘social relations of the everyday” that are the “grotesque of the rule of the commodity, and point to the possibility of another structure of social relations. The fantastic no longer simply is a symptom of the contradictions of capital, a sign of the deluge of the counterrevolution to use the terms of a later essay by Darko Suvin, but a way into understanding the grotesque relations created through the commodity form. But Mieville’s transformation of the fantastic genre goes beyond the terms that he sets out for it, engaging with the history of the monstrous images of the fantastic, making them material, and using them to explore the conflicts embedded in the history of what might be provisionally and inadequately called racial capitalism. Mieville drags the liminal and supernatural constructions of the fantastic and introduce them into the rationality of capitalism and more significantly puts them into the struggles that point to the limit of that rationality.

In this sense, Mieville’s conceptualization of the fantastic aligns itself far more with the concept of grotesque realism that Mikhail Bakhtin uses to describe the novels of Rabelais than the concepts of the fantastic developed by either Rosemary Jackson or Todorov. The concept of degradation as developed in Bakhtin’s analysis of Rabelais is helpful. Within this frame work, Bakhtin notes,

“To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth takes place. Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb, it is always conceiving.” (Bakhtin 21)

To be sure, there are elements of Bakhtin’s description that we need to jettison, its emphasis of the rural, the organic, the local, but the emphasis of the creative powers that the material world and the body provides a powerful tool to read the politics of Mieville’s novel. It also can be found in the supernatural elements of the story; the realms of hell, magic, etc. are all dragged into the realm of the material, rendering them up for the gristmill of capital and labor, power and counter power. To return to the image of the grave provided by Bakhtin, it is the continual production of corpses and the fear of death that continually draws the fantastic elements of the book into the productive womb of materiality. Along with this, the fantastic is continually incorporated into the instrumental world of the bourgeoisie, revealing its own fantastic nature. But that materiality goes beyond the modes of parody that are invoked above, which is represented by the concept of remaking in the Bas Lag novels. Remaking is a form of punishment in the world, a product of bio-thaumaturgy, a sort of rationalized magic that is used to manipulate the body, and more specifically used to punish criminals by transforming them in a manner that replicated the nature of their crimes. The scene that exemplifies this process in the first novel, Perdido Street Station, involved a man whose flesh was manipulated to look like a bird-like garuda. The punishment was in response to the man’s attempt to steal a painting with the portrait of a garuda. The former thief describes the punishment as such, “Magister said since I was so impressed with garuda, I could—“ his breath caught for a moment “—I could become one.” The punishment operates as a cruel sort of parody.

The figure before Isaac and Derkhan shivered and scratched its stomach. Its skin was pale and pockmarked with disease and cold. Isaac’s eyes wove all over its body in dismay. Bizarre nodes of tissue burst from its bunched toes: claws drawn by children. Its head was swathed in feathers, but feathers of all sizes and shapes, jammed at random from its crown to its neck in a thick, uneven, insulating layer. The eyes that peered myopically at Isaac and Derkhan were human eyes, fighting to open lids encrusted in rheum and pus. The beak was large and stained, like old pewter.

Behind the wretched creature stretched a pair of dirty, foul-smelling wings. They were no more than six feet from tip to tip. As Isaac watched, they half-opened, jerked and twitched spastically. Tiny pieces of organic muck spilt form them as they shuddered.

The creature’s beak opened and, underneath it, Isaac caught a glimpse of lips forming the words, nostrils above. The beak was nothing but a roughly made fixture shoved and sealed into place like a gas-mask over the nose and mouth he realized. (Mieville 100)

The process of remaking is a deeply material process and transforms the forms of alterity implicit in fantastic literature into a deeply material, historical, and social process. The abject body of the thief turned remade is described in detail, marking the abject physical transformation of the body. It is a process that looks careless at the surface level, with its ‘claws drawn by children’ and head covered in ‘feathers of all sizes and shapes’, but beneath that surface carelessness is deliberation, designed to punish and distinguish the prisoner’s body. The disciplinary process of the state and its ability to categorize and discipline state populations is mapped onto the abject body of the criminal. By physically marking and transforming the body of the convicted, the act of Remaking becomes a way of producing a disciplinary marker on the surplus army of the unemployed, placing them outside the space of respectable society, marking them as a universally hated class. It both represents the naked power of the state, its capacity to inflict extraordinary level of pain and suffering on those who transgress its order, and a mode of abject alterity that is hated and feared. This same power is explored within the next novel, not as a way to return the punished body to its originary state, but to heal and make that body productive, to explore the possibilities implicit in that body, but both acts are twin sides of this intense materiality, a process of remaking the body, and exploring its monstrosity. The fantastic is then engaged with as a mode to engage with that history and to think through it, but that engagement is dependent on a reframing of the genre that no longer accepts it on its own terms, one that potentially could be understood under the sign of cognition.

Some Thoughts About The Response to a Controversial Everyday Feminism Article

A think-piece by the website, Everyday Feminism, has produced quite a bit of criticism on a variety of platforms, from Facebook to a variety of blogs. The criticism shouldn’t have been terribly surprising. After all, the blog managed to write an entire post about the proper way for employers to respond to food insecurity without suggesting the possibility of paying the person a living wage. In response to the criticism, the site has pulled the essay, and issued what can fairly be called a substantial apology. Within that context, I suspect that the whole issue is going to disappear relatively quickly, and will be overtaken by some other controversy.

However, I thought it might make sense to return to the controversy from an analytical, rather than polemical framework, and attempt to read the posting as a symptom of the present moment. While there are some real reasons to criticize the website, and its approach to understanding social phenomenon, I want to avoid focusing on its particular foibles and think about the way that the response stands in for a wide swath of behaviors. In order to do that, I propose to look at the initial attempt an apology, instead of the original article or the more substantial apology that followed.

The initial apology attempted to frame the problems of the essay as a failure of rhetorical context, simultaneously apologizing for the rhetorical failure, and attempting to defend the larger message of the think-piece.

We've received a lot of pushback on this piece and we appreciate all of the critical perspectives you brought to the table.

We agree with you that raising wages and pursuing economic justice is, first and foremost, what's needed to alleviate food insecurity.

For the author (who commented numerous times here), sometimes our survival can't wait for raised wages, and in some places (like non-profits), wages can't be raised at all. Sometimes meeting people where they are, while also pursuing other avenues for justice, is what sustains us in the immediate moment.

However, that nuance was lost, which is on us. Our editorial team is discussing the best way to move forward and we will keep you posted.

Thank you for always pushing us to do better – we are the platform we are because of the amazing community that surrounds us.

The message begins by acknowledging the need for economic justice, but then argues that the demand for higher wages is in some sense out of reach, either in the short term or completely out of reach, when referring to non-profit employment. It then tries to retrospectively reframe the article as one that operated under this assumption, one that took for granted both the need for higher wages, and the inaccessibility of those wages in the short term. They effectively accomplish this shift through the phrase, “that nuance was lost’ which then shifts the substantive argument to a rhetorical one. While I think there is a reason to be skeptical of this reformatting, I’m going to accept it for the sake of the more significant assumptions that are embedded in that argument.

That more significant issue is the way a wage increase is framed as a political demand, one that is either a distant goal or completely inaccessible. Small, informal and interpersonal forms of activism are the only forms of change that are possible. We see a profound shift in the terrain of possibility. Practical political work is no longer incremental reform, but the act of scraping by to survive, or the facilitation of that contingent survival. The idea of a wage increase, previously a modest and incremental political goal, has become remote and almost utopian in nature. Lest we think that this shift is an exceptional one, we can look at the common-sense response on the part of many rank and file liberals to the Sanders campaign. The fairly modest suggestions of an expansion of Medicare and the subsidy of public education were derided as utopian delusions.

There are a number of legitimate reasons to be skeptical of our ability to accomplish these modest, incremental goals at both the micro and macro levels. After all, we have seen the power of unions gutted, and the wholesale destruction and neutralization of any number of social movements. At the macro level, we can see a series of concentrated efforts to increase the political power of capital, and to neutralize the strength of poor people’s movements. But efforts such as the one under discussion never frame these limitations within the framework of political defeat. Such a framework is pessimistic, but it nonetheless understands the present moment as one that is constructed, for the lack of a better phrase, within the terrain of a wide swath of social struggles. It would provide an analysis that would mark the present moment as one that was constructed through a lens of contingent political struggle, and point to ways in which that present could transformed.

Instead of this mode of analysis, we are offered an analysis that operates within the generic logic of ‘realism.’ This generic logic is signaled within the piece with the following language, “Sometimes meeting people where they are, while also pursuing other avenues for justice, is what sustains us in the immediate moment.” The ‘immediate moment’ is the moment of reality, while ‘the other avenues of justice’ are never given thought beyond the gesture. Through that process, the ‘immediate moment is reified and the social relations of the present are effectively naturalized. We might think of this as the moment where social movements embrace the logic embedded in Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “There is no alternative.”

The political theorist Jacques Ranciere provides a useful framework for understanding the framework operating within the aesthetics of this realism. He notes, “Realism claims to be that sane attitude of the mind that sticks to observable realities. It is in fact something quite different: it is the police logic of order, which asserts, in all circumstances, that it is only doing the only thing possible to do." (Ranciere 132) Realism is, in effect, the aesthetic logic of Thatcher’s phrase. It justifies the existing order by positing its existence as natural and inevitable. It effaces the possibility of transformation, and marks it off as impossible, as utopian. Through such an engagement, it becomes a form of enforcing that order, of operating within the logic of the police, as Ranciere and Foucault understand that term, as defenders of the hierarchical structures of a particular society.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that we find the expression of this sort of logic even among those who are ostensibly trying to transform the world. After all, we operate within a world that is constructed through those modes of policing, in opposition to a long history of social movements. Those modes are articulated through a dense grid of institutions, social practices, and media representations that are enmeshed in our daily lives. It’s easy to understand why we might begin to naturalize these projects; after all, they all but constitute our grid of intelligibility. In many ways, it’s very difficult to imagine meaningfully transforming it. But that has been true of every dominant order. We have seen profound challenges to those previous orders that imagine profoundly different social structures, and have managed to change or destroy those previous systems, even if they frequently fail themselves. That engagement depends on a continual process of estrangement, a process of denaturalizing the categories of daily life, recognizing their historicity, their contradictions, and their possibility of change.

What comes after that moment of tarrying with the negative? I’m not sure.  

planting a tree as metaphor for long term organizing

    I recently read a most likely apocryphal story about Hegel during the period of the French Revolution.  The story isn't terribly complicated; Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling took the time from their studies to plant a tree of liberty.  Despite the very different directions the three thinkers took, the fictional act gestured towards a commitment to the radical possibilities embodied by the revolution.  The act of planting a tree doesn't strike me as the worst metaphor for a radical political project.  It gestures towards three substantial aspects of any political project committed to radical and systemic transformation, the fact that any such project will take time, the care that needs to be put into such  a project, and finally, the immense contingency implicit in such a project.

      Time:  The act of planting of tree implicitly has a fairly long period of time in mind.  It's going to take most trees at least twenty of thirty years to develop any significant growth, and even fast growing trees take a few years to take hold.   Most radical or progressive reformist groups work within a considerably shorter period of time, often only thinking about the next rally or, if the group is particularly ambitious, the next year long campaign.  Even NGOs tend to think within a shorter timeline, developing, at most, five year plans.  In this sense, we can think of the activities of most radical or reformist organizations as being profoundly opportunist in their organizational practices, if not their rhetoric, in the framework that is implicit in both the work of Paulo Virno and V.I. Lenin .  Within both thinkers' frameworks, opportunism operates on the premise of accepting the rules set of the existing system without challenging the rules and structures of that system.  By refusing to or perhaps more significantly being unable to create long term goals and projects, radical and reformist projects find themselves playing by the rules of the systems that they ostensibly oppose.  I think this opportunist framework is an effect, rather than a cause of the profound destruction of the counter-systemic movements of the second half of the twentieth century.  However, it's difficult to imagine escaping this situation without having the resources and foresight to begin the process of developing meaningfully long future projects.

      It's notable that the thirty year time period that it takes for a tree to grow is remarkably close the the medium time-frame that Immanuel Wallerstein posits as the length of the medium term project that is largely ignored by the counter-systemic movements of the present within the United States. Wallerstein opposes this medium time frame to a set of long term goals, which take the form of large, global projects that take the form of abstract concepts such as communism, the end of exploitation, etc.  Short term goals take the form of an organizing campaign such as organizing a workplace, a campaign to end a particular practice at an institution such as using sweat shop labor, or often in the case of subcultural activism, simply organizing a demonstration or an action.  This work involves immediate goals.  How do we get people to the rally?  Can we get media attention?  Can we disrupt the actions of decision makers in a way that causes them to change their behavior?  These are all important questions, but they don't lead to giving any meaningful thought to the larger goals that the movements ostensibly have.  Instead, their framework is largely negative.  How can we disrupt?  How can we translate that disruption into policy makers changing their actions?  I'm not saying that these are irrelevant questions, but they abandon the element of planning to the structures we ostensibly oppose.  They also abandon the question of how we form new forms of social structure and create new modes of governance within those forms of social structure, and what kinds of representation will define new forms of democratic practice.

Care:  To return to the metaphor of the tree, it takes quite a bit of care to get a tree to take root and adjust to the environment in which you have place it.  This is notably true for Southern California because of the lack of rain and its poor soil.  However, it's a metaphor that works elsewhere.  At the most obvious level, the creation of any social structure is dependent on formal and informal structures of social reproduction.  You need to not only bring new people into an organization or movement, but you need to create social spaces that cause those people to stay in those structures, to allow them a sense of meaning and participation in those organizations and movements, and to create structures of care.  These are questions that are taken quite seriously at the most immediate level by anarchists, particularly the focus on self care.  However, those same organizations have difficulty imagining how you might participate in these movements when you're thirty or forty, rather than twenty, or how to be a part of a movement when you have children or you have a disability.  I don't think these are problems that can be solved through a movement that continues to operate as a subculture, that is as a community largely produced through voluntary and informal labor.  It should be additionally noted that those informal structures tend to unduly burden women with the 'traditional' tasks of reproductive labor, leaving them unpaid and undervalued.  We need structures and institutions that we can plug into, and that is going to involve getting people money to do those jobs.  There's a real question of how we do this and continue to hold onto forms of democratic governance and representation, but refusing to pose those questions by refusing to create any kind of formal structure has clearly not translated into either sustainability or equality.

Contingency:  There is quite a bit of contingency implicit in the act of planting the tree.  The most obvious contingency is the fact that trees can die, even with all the care of the world that is put into the project.  Analogously, projects fail, even with the best intentions and plans.  However, at a more modest level, even when a tree lives and grows, it doesn't grow in precisely the way you plan it to grow.  That is to say, there is a need to recognize that as a plan develops and perhaps even progresses, the means and even the ends of that plan are going to change.  That doesn't mean that you don't plan, but that you recognize that your plans are going to change.  We're good at dealing with that kind of contingency at the level of the event, and even the campaign, but we don't spend a lot of time thinking beyond that. At the level of a lot of subcultural activism, we rarely even spend much time discussing what succeeded or failed within an individual event afterwards, often leaving events as isolated and unrelated events.  When criticism does occur, it often spirals out of control becoming a circle of mutual incrimination.  We lack the mechanisms for a form of collective and individual assessment that operates constructively, rather than disastrously destructively, a mechanism that would teach organizers better practices and encourage them to engage in those practices. At some level, we need forms of self-criticism primarily for organizations, but also for individuals, but in a manner that somehow escapes from the logic of the confessional within which that mode was initially created.  Just as significantly, we need forms of institutional knowledge that will preserve that knowledge to direct future campaigns and future actions, and we need to be able to think about what the successes and failures of those actions say about our longer term plans.

To draw off the example of an old friend, we might look at the anarchist project in Spain.  We think about the high point of anarchism in the mid to late 1930's, but in doing so, we miss out on the fact that it took decades of organizing, starting withing the middle part of the nineteenth century for this wave of militancy to occur.  It involved engaging in and creating institutional and educational structures, and involved creating forms of engagement that were not simply accessible to the young. When we simply look back nostalgically at the height of a moment of struggle without recognizing the conditions that produced that struggle, we're going to lack any ability of how to advance our own goals of creating similar or more successful movements.  We have to see those movements with the context of the long duree of time, and the day to day work that occurred in that time frame.  The question is how to return to that form of longer term thinking.

The Labor of Academic Writing

     Our analysis of academic life is curious.  We have increasingly recognized that most aspects of academic life can be understood through the category of labor, whether in the form of grading, our interactions with students or colleagues, or in the construction  of courses.  We've been forced to recognize this fact because of the privatization of the university, a process that has taken away our job security, increased our workload, and has decreased the time to accomplish that work.  Although rarely explicitly recognized, we might note that embedded in this shift is precisely the logic of the panopticon, the process of constructing hierarchies, of individuating subjects, and of making grids of intelligibility.   Through that process, we have also considerably lost our academic freedom, or ability to teach and engage in research as we see fit, even if that right has been, at best, never fully in place, and at times, an illusion.  The figure of the adjunct has come to stand in for this process, although that process has impacted all but a very few in academic life, albeit unevenly.

      However, when we begin to discuss academic writing, our tone changes.  We are suddenly shifted from the world of disciplinarity and precarity, to curiously sovereign space, one in which our production can only be understood individually, as our own burden.  Academic writing operates as a sort of empire within an empire, to borrow a phrase from Spinoza, an arena that operates outside the logic of the university, of capital, and squarely returns us to a fantasy of the sovereign individual.  We lose touch of the world that this writing is produced in, its structures, institutions, and the collective life that is embedded within it.  And through that erasure, we are offered a curious construct, a writer that has far more control over that process of literary production that we would ever recognize in or field of analysis, and yet a sovereign who inevitably fails or betrays us.  We are poor stylists.  We fail to engage the multitudes.  Often, we even fail in saying anything of significance in our dense, jargon-laden prose. In a sense, this mystification is understandable.  Our writing is only connected to our position within the academy indirectly.  After all, we are generally not directly paid for this work, either as writers or as editors or proofreaders.  Instead, we are paid by the opportunity to enter into a sort of lottery, the prize being a tenure track position, which can itself only be guaranteed through publication. One might say that we do know, but we act.

     I don't doubt that there is a lot of bad academic writing, and no doubt, I have done as much as anyone else to contribute to that problem.  But what if we moved away from the myth of the sovereign academic writer, the god who must inevitably fail, to an understanding of academic writing as an ordinary process.  That is to say, what happens if we understand academic writing a collective material process, produced in institutions, by subjects who are at least in part themselves produced by those institutions, operating within the terrain of the processes of capitalist accumulation, and the struggles that act as the engine of that process.  This is not to say our role in that system has as direct connection to the processes of accumulation as say a worker in an auto plant or a cashier at a grocery store or even a commercial engineer, but that our role must be understood in the reproduction of that system, both in the production of educated subjects that can work in that system, and in the production of forms of knowledge for that system.  Increasingly, we are demanded to reproduce the cultural logic of that system of accumulation through a regime of instrumental reason and immediate results.  In crude terms, we are facing a speed up of the production process, and an externalization of the costs of social reproduction.  Whether willingly or grudgingly, we are required to enact this grotesque pageant in order to gain a foothold in this process.

      Not surprisingly, I'm not in a position to develop this point with the sort of depth it deserves, which would involve something like the scholarly investigation of the public university produced by Christopher Newfield.  However, I will try to produce a rough sketch of some of the points that produce the sort of writing that is so often and understandably criticized.  We might start our investigation at the point that we enter into the university as potential scholars, that is when we become graduate students.  Our coursework spends a great deal of time developing our skills as writers, but rarely do we discuss the process of writing in such detail.  Instead, we push the process of writing to the last weeks of the class, to be produced in hurry isolation, and to produce essays to which we rarely return.  Often, we get very little in the way of response about this writing from our faculty, who are, after all, producing their own work. Once we move out of course work, we frequently lose any collective working environment, beyond those fragile ones we set up for ourselves, often in the form of small groups that are occasionally recognized and sanctioned by the university.  But more often, we write alone with the interventions of our advisers and committees.  I'm not attempting to criticize the individuals in this system, but if we want to prioritize writing, perhaps it would make sense to construct a system of instruction that incorporating developing those processes into it, of recognizing and incorporating the collective process of writing into grad school itself.

      By all descriptions, the process only becomes worse when you leave graduate school.  To begin, you're expected to produce published work in order to both enter into the tenure process, and to receive tenure.  David Harvey once noted that it used to be exciting if you put out a book, even more so if you put out two, but people started wondering if you were neglecting your students with the third book.  We've replaced this more modest system with a far greater demand for publishing, making the publication of a book as the precondition for tenure, and increasingly, the publication of material, a precondition for being hired at one of the increasingly dwindling tenure track jobs.  This demand has led to a glut in publishing, and frequently translates into us pushing out material that is insufficiently developed and hasn't gone through the editing process that it needed.  It's also led to a hyper-specialization that has led to more and more materials that are not of much interest except for a very small audience.  Moreover, non-specialized knowledge production, particularly for popular audiences is not terribly valued in the tenure process. In addition, the labor that allows for the publication, the process of editing, of the peer evaluation process, etc. is extraordinarily undervalorized, and is viewed as a voluntary labor that generally is the understandably last concern of those involved in the process.  Often, even established academic presses will demand that authors pay for the basic costs of indexing and books, rather than taking on those costs themselves.  At a basic level, we might say that the basic social processes of producing an interesting and readable text have been externalized, and placed back on the authors, who are patently ill equipped to deal with that process.

      In a sense, our former illusion perhaps becomes a bit more understandable.  After all, if the figure of the sovereign writer must inevitably fail, it still offers a fantasy of control that becomes impossible when begin to explore the process as ordinary labor.  We can harbor the illusion of choice.  We can choose not to be this bad subject, or perhaps more honestly, there will be a time when we will choose not to be this bad subject.  But when we turn to the material and collective process of writing, we have to face a system that shows no interest in putting in the necessary money to produce quality writing, to create the social structures that would allow for us to write differently.  Each of the problems I mention earlier in the essay is easily solvable, but it would require the funding that is increasingly being taken away from the humanities and social sciences, and has never really existed in the STEM fields.  We have to face a capitalist system that no longer sees our labor as central to its reproduction.  Therefore, our ability to produce quality writing feels very impossible, as that the precondition for creating the social tools needed to produce a different form of academic writing would involve a profound social transformation, one that would probably not be simply limited to refunding the humanities, the social sciences, or creating other writing opportunities for the STEM fields.  It's a transformation that I must confess that I find difficult to imagine at this point, but even with that difficulty, I prefer posing that as a project than continuing down a moralistic path of mutual incrmination.

On the Hugo Award finalists

     I thought I would write a very brief update to the comments that I posted on Tuesday, March 21st, while on spring break.  Within that post, I noted that I planned on writing about the upcoming Hugo Awards, notably discussing my voting process.  I also expressed my hopes that the award finalists would not be as affected by the chicanery of the Sad and Rabid Puppies, two groups of conservative fans who had previously attempted to manipulate the nomination process through slate voting.  Both groups attempted to present their manipulation as an effort to bring forgotten and suppressed works back on the finalists list, either in the name of traditional science fiction or in the name of a suppressed politically conservative science fiction, but both groups tended to create their lists based on group identity, nominating friends of the primary organizers of both groups.  The work itself ranged from mediocrity to abject failure with a small number of exceptions.

      I was fairly optimistic that we weren't going to see the same kind of influence that we saw in the past couple years.  The Sad Puppies had abandoned the slate process last year and embraced a largely ineffectual and unpromoted recommendation list  They even abandoned that pretense this year, and presented no recommendations.  The Rabid Puppies didn't entirely abandon the fight, but presented a list of recommendations that only included one or two recommendations per category.  With both groups ending their efforts to choose the entire slate of finalists, it was fairly probable that, barring some secret and highly unlikely cabal of slate organization, we were going to see a list of candidates that more faithfully represented the interests of science fiction fans and readers.  Now that the finalists have finally been released, we can see that the influence of the puppies is fairly minimal.  Only sixteen of the list of twenty-two Rabid Puppy nominees were nominated, and three of those were disqualified. (look here for a more thorough analysis)  Additionally, it would be easy to imagine that the work of a number of the endorsed nominees (for instance, China Mieville and Neil Gaiman) would have received nomination without the influence of the slate, which further reduces the impact of the slate.  A number of people have given credited the recent reforms in the voting process for the reduced impact of the slates, but if there was an impact, it was more in its encouragement to abandon the practice of slating than in its actual impact on the vote totals.

     The resulting list of finalists is fairly exciting, and I'm looking forward to the process of reading the works.  For the most part, it's material that I have not read yet, although I read N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, which her recent nomination, The Obelisk Gate is a sequel, along with the first two books in the series by Cixin Liu.  I've also seen all of the nominated films, except Hidden Figures, and have been a fairly faithful reader of Ms. Marvel, which received another nomination. However, it's material that seems to have received primarily positive critical attention, and looks like a distinct step away from the tedium that defined too much of the last couple years of nominations.  I'm currently in process of placing the novels available at the library on hold.  Additionally, I'm hoping that this breadth of quality works will also translate into a more interesting competition.  My voting choices over the past year were also largely chosen by the majority of other Hugo voters.  I think that this is less a sign that my views are representative of that majority, and more a sign of the lack of meaningful choice among the nominees.  I suspect that the introduction of some real competition will lead to much less predictability in the winners, which will also make the process more interesting.

     You can still get involved in the voting process if you are interested.  You just need to get a supporting membership for $40 and you can vote.  Recently, voters have received electronic packets with some of the nominated material, a process which will probably be repeated this year.  You can find information here.

A Short Essay on Decline of Western Civilization, Three

           If one thing immediately stands out about the third installation of Penelope Spheeris's The Decline of Western Civilization series, it is the lack of innovation in the music.  Final Conflict sounds good, but are playing music they composed a decade earlier, from their 1987 lp, Ashes to Ashes.  The rest of the acts, Litmus Green, Naked Aggression, and The Resistance, who are perhaps even more obscure than the other bands, largely produce music that similarly could have been written a decade ago, or perhaps even earlier. This lack of innovation also really stands out when you look at the kid's t shirts. Everyone is wearing band shirts from groups that started in the late 70s or the 80s, Conflict, Misfits, Rudimentary Peni, etc. It's as if the whole thing had hit a dead end.  This, for lack of a better term, retrograde dimension places a gulf between the music of the film and the earlier two films, both of which represent both far diverse aesthetic streams in their respective subcultures, and represent music that it would be impossible to imagine as having been produced at any earlier time.  In the first film, we find ourselves immersed in the 'year zero' world of punk rock, exploring its various branches, from the art world of Catholic Discipline to the suburban hardcore of The Circle Jerks.  In the second film, we find ourselves in a far older world, defined by the newer stream of glam metal that dominated the strip at the time, along with the rising stream of thrash, but that world was supplemented with interviews with older acts in the genre, from Ozzy to Lemmy and a couple members of KISS.  In both cases, we are being introduced to aesthetic novelty, new forms of art, new forms of subjectivity.  The third film represents a subculture that no longer is creating something new, and a subculture that was on its way out, representing the endpoint of a musical moment, the punk revival, that began in the late 1980's and was in the process of closing.

            However, the film is worth watching because of its shift in focus.  Rather than focusing on the bands, which are the almost exclusive focus of the first film, and the dominant focus of the second film, the third film focuses on the primarily homeless punk kids who were the backbone of that scene.  We can already see a shift to a kind of ethnographic gaze with the second film, which brings in a bunch of kids who imagine themselves becoming the next big thing, but that engagement is far more limited.  We don't get a sense of how those kids live, and we don't get a real sense of their individuality.  Instead, we're offered a set of remarkably thought-free clichés, an exploration of the spontaneous ideology of Reaganism, really.  Spheeris really spends a lot of time with the punks in the third film, though.  We see how they live, make money, find places to sleep, etc.  There's a real sense of trying to create that sort of ethnographic engagement, of exploring an unknown way of life, of trying to understand its social mechanisms and driving motivations.  The film also explores some of the causal mechanisms of why these kids wound up on the street, which aren't terribly surprising, and involve a lot of issues around abuse and abandonment.  Just as significantly, through this engagement, we meet a group of young punks who are far more thoughtful, politically engaged, and sympathetic than the participants in the first two films.  The film series effectively moves from a focus on interviews and live footage of the bands to a film that focused on the daily lives of the subculture.  It also shifts from what can effectively be called a participant-observer document to a document from the perspective of an outsider.[1]

            And in a sense, it's that sense of estrangement that produces such a rich engagement with the scene, and effectively communicates why such an fascinating subculture produced such formulaic music.  Embedded in the film, are a number of short interviews with participants in the original LA punk scene, who are there to create a sense of change over the years.  One of the most significant interviews is with Flea, who talks about how the city had changed from his time as a homeless punk in the early eighties.  He noted that he was a kid in the scene there was so much more of an infrastructure to support him, from art venues to places to sleep.  The kids that were living on their own in the mid to late nineties had so much less to support their survival.  It was at that point that the lack of creativity made so much more sense.  Despite its fantasy of a 'year zero', the original punk scenes had a scaffolding of the counter-culture of the 1960's and 1970's to create itself within.  Veterans of those scenes helped provide venues for kids, found funding for them, and contributed to the cultural and political educations of the new folks involved in the scene.  Perhaps even more significantly, the welfare infrastructure that had been produced by the Johnson administration in the mid-century effort on the part of the political class to create what might be called a capitalism with a human face had not been entirely eviscerated by the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations.   

          The punks in the third film are left with only the dregs of both that counter-culture and the mechanisms of support that so many of the subculture could depend on in the first film.  Within such a situation, it's not surprising that the art that got produced within that scene didn't have the vibrancy and creativity of the earlier scenes.  The participants had to focus so much more on survival. The film deliberately creates this effect through its focus on the mechanisms of survival, eating, sleeping, drinking, and raising the money for those activities, contrasting those activities with the memories of the memories of participants in the earlier formation of the subculture.  The film further reveals the precarity of the life of its subjects through the depiction of two tragedies: the murder of one of its primary interview subjects, Squid, who was allegedly killed by his girlfriend, and the tragic death by another interview subject in a squat fire. If the first film points to a new sense of self-destructiveness, and the second film is largely about decadence and thoughtlessness, the final film is a film of exhaustion, the exhaustion of the subcultural formation, of the participants, trying to survive, and perhaps even a whole series of social reproduction.  Within that exhaustion, we find a rich cultural life, and actually a thoughtfulness lacking from the first two films, but it's so much harder to imagine transformation in that world.

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[1] Watching the first film for the second time, it's fairly obvious that Spheeris is effectively translating the formal structure of the fanzine for film.