I just realized that I haven't utilized my somewhat small and dubious public platform to discuss the upcoming elections. We are yet again at the momentous crossroads in which, we, the public, are allowed to choose between one of two factions of wealthy property owners. It would be remiss of my esteemed position as 'public intellectual not to comment on this profound process. However, I find myself in a quandary. Who should I support? I thought that I would pose this question here to the various candidates that crowd my blog everyday, and provide a political framework, which if taken up, would lead to my endorsement, and advocacy for on this blog. I thought that the best way of framing these positions would be through a set of songs.
The Coup describe a tax policy that I can get behind....
Asian Dub Foundation provide some thoughts on immigration and a general orientation for foreign policy
The Clash take a position on our occupations...
Public Enemy offer a cogent critique of the police....
Bikini Kill critique patriarchy from an intersectional perspective
I realize that this only covers a few of the very important social problems of the country and issues of the election. I invite readers to make other suggestions for our electoral framework. Additionally, I invite all Californian politicians to explain how they will fulfill the demands contained in our platform. No doubt they will see the need for the abolition of private property, prisons, the police, white supremacy, and all patriarchal forms of domination after this thoughtful posting. I await their responses with a sovereign sense of patience.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Saturday, October 30, 2010
An essay on Organizing, Hope, and Fear after the 2004 election
This was written after the 2004 elections, in response to an article about Hope written by the anarchist philosopher Todd May. It never got beyond this draft stage. I thought I would put it up as a kind of historical document of a point in my political thinking. There are a number of points that I still hold to, but I wouldn't sign on to the entire document at this point. I'm open to discussing the problems if anyone is interested in the conversation. I would also like to note that the interpretation of Levinas is Mbembe's and there are some fairly good critiques of Levinas, most notably in Judith Butler's work, particularly her Giving an Account of Oneself.
For theirs is a land with a wall around it
And mine is a faith in my fellow man
Theirs is a land of hope and glory
Mine is the green field and the factory floor
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers
And mine is the peace we knew
Between the wars
--Billy Bragg
The initial discussion about the Bush victory in the recent elections focused initially on the ‘values voter.’ The mythology surrounding this figure posits a victory obtained through Karl Rove’s Machiavellian recognition of the voting bloc, and exploitation of it through certain well thought out ballot initiatives. This discussion also produced a brief flurry of articles by a number of authors on the left, only to be dropped for a discussion of vote counting, and conflicting accounts of vote suppression. Without denigrating the importance of the latter discussion, I am interested in returning to the conversation around the “faith based voter.” I am interested in entering this discussion as a way of looking critically at its structures, and as a way of pushing that stillborn conversation towards a critique of progressive activism, and a call for a new direction in some of that activism.
To look at some of the initial discussion of the ‘faith based voter’, three terms were most prevalent. They were “fear”, “ignorance”, and “superstition.” All of these terms tend to link back to a certain secularist project and present the danger present in these terms in a more state based religious fundamentalism. After all, as hinted at above, one of the most successful methods of getting out the vote for the right was associated with the anti-gay marriage initiatives that were peppered across the states, and the President’s frequent and oblique references to religious text. Also the administration has increasingly filled its functionary positions with individuals who are involved in what might be termed a sort of ‘political Christianity.’
This fact is recognized in some of the more rigorous formulations of these thoughts on the “faith based voter.” The best example is perhaps Todd May’s short article “Religion, the Election and the Politics of Fear.” In it he argues, “the religious character of these people is characterized by constant fear of the 'Other' that is perpetually seeking to infiltrate, seduce, and ultimately destroy the minds and lives of good Christians.” May pushes this formulation farther linking it with the foreign ‘other.’ The term in fact circulates with the others, reinforcing them and exchanging itself with them.
Ultimately May is caught within the same fetishization of a certain type of Christianity, but the question brings to bear within that admittedly limited perspective, the question of the other seems to be the crucial one. The terms that are chosen by the commentators of this phenomenon, namely fear and superstition, seem to be good terms for understanding what is going on. However, we need to disconnect them from an exclusively religious context. Although more than a few examples of fear and superstition can be connected to religion, there are just as many that don’t work within this context. Xenophobia is in many ways a significant engine of U.S. society, and one that cannot be reduced to religion.
This trace of xenophobia gestures to a particular way of relating to a perceived outside, and transfers that structure on to the 'Other' as well. We can see this in the perception of both the foreign other as well the internal counterpart. The 'Other' becomes an ideological potent term, circulating not only in the discourse of the threat to the Family, but in racial profiling of Arabs and terror level alerts as well. This figure of the 'Other' gains its power through its ambiguity as the welfare mother morphs into the mullah who manages to transform himself into the homosexual seducer of our youth. All in defense of the structures of dominance in the society at large.
In presenting this fear in the context of an exoticized religious subject misses an essential element, an element that cuts across the boundaries of the secular and the religious, a certain superstitious fear of the ‘other.’ The most obvious trope that can be brought into play is of course the disastrous events of September 11, 2001. This event brought the United States out of its sheltered position and put it into the modes of insecurity that the rest of the world had been experiencing for some time. This is not a minor occurrence. It points to the declining hegemony, and perhaps even dominance, of U.S. power on a global stage. This throws its citizens into the quandary of rethinking their relationship with the rest of the world in new terms.
In truth, it must be said that this fear has been on the world stage for some time. Slavoj Zizek may have not been diplomatic when he said that September 11th could have allowed the United States to join the rest of the world, but he was by in larger correct. The United States has been increasingly important in the defense of global capital since the World War I, and has been the dominant power since World War II. Under its gaze, capital has managed to perfect its domination in ways that were previously unimaginable. This domination has been enabled by the military of the United States in the last instance. This system of domination is enabled by a circulation, an economy if you will, of fear. This fear becomes even more magnified as the logic of the system begins to collapse. In these cases, those who have benefited from domination fear that the newly liberated will treat them in the same manner of brutality that was inflicted upon them. It is something that cannot be simply solved through a judicious return to an old-fashioned secularism.
We need to understand that this structure is not one that has benefited the United States citizenry uniformly. Quite to the contrary, the same system has had a dramatic impact on large sections of the U.S. population, particularly after Fordism begins to collapse in 1968. But U.S. ideology has encouraged a strong sense of identification with those who benefit from the logic of exploitation. Instead the strong resentment that is felt by a large portion of the population has been strongly displaced on any number of figures of the 'Other', the class struggle has transformed into a fear and hatred of the stranger.
The counterweight that Todd May and many others give is that of hope. I have two basic critiques of this notion. The first is contained in the word ‘hope.’ Hope is not the opposite of fear as these commentators suggest in either structure or intensity instead, hope is as Spinoza points out, a fluctuation between fear and joy. It is in fact a somewhat amorphous affect, one that already has one foot in fear. One has to ask the question if what these commentators are proposing is something that flits away all too quickly in the time of threat, whether real or imagined.
If we return to Spinoza, the proper opposition to fear is joy. Joy is defined in Spinoza’s terms as the strengthening of one’s capacities, within a communal setting it would be related to the strengthening of the capacities of the community. The difference between hope and joy is not a merely semantic one, but is the difference between the possibility of a different way of engaging with others and its concrete manifestation. A more concrete way of saying this is contained in a comment by the British organization Class War when they noted the need for redistribution of wealth in the here and now, and not in some visionary, socialist future. Similarly, we need to produce a community founded in joy, which I think is best defined by the term mutual aid, in the here and now.
But even more significantly, it ignores the fact that the reactionary community is not merely organized on the principle of fear, instead it organizes a community on homogenous principle as a fortress against the feared outside. To think through this we need to return to the question of the church, albeit with different inflections than the commentators above, and it should be noted a very specific church. In a very excellent article briefly after the elections, Barbara Ehrenreich noted that one of her informants made the comment that when entering a town in need the first place one should go is the church. The steady destruction of redistributive programs on the part of the society as a whole in the form of welfare, education, etc. has made a vacuum for these functions. The Bush administration has pushed this even farther with his “faith based initiatives” placing these functions not only in the hands of religion, but a mode of religion that accepts the basic suppositions that are essential to the survival of the Bush administration.
In this context, the hope offered by a progressive community seems like a very vague and ephemeral thing. “What is the alternative?” the taunt that haunts so very many demonstrations comes to mind. The progressive community has come up with very many reasons why George W. Bush is a very bad man, a stupid man, a superstitious man, a hypocrite etc. What I fail to see coming out these very same mouths is an alternative form of community because to do so would be to reveal the very need for a radical substantive transformation of our society, a statement which is simply impermissible within our society. For all of its obvious contradictions, the current administration offers something tangible in its ‘faith base initiatives’ in the face of a monolithic structure of fear.
In a real sense, I feel that the well meaning, mainstream leftist critiques of George W. Bush contribute to this sense of connection. The elitist connotations implied in such commentaries give rise to a sense of identification with the man, as do the foible and idiosyncrasies. In effect, these formulations have by in large backfired, transforming Bush from what he is, one of the most privileged of this society, educated in the most expensive schools of the nation, into a sort of bumbling, addled common man. This perversely transforms him into a proletarian figure, persecuted by a sort of cultured bourgeois elite.[1]
Religion becomes an important element of this mode of identification. As I noted before, conflating religious belief with superstitious fear avoid the more substantial structural issue buried beneath it, but it also alienate a substantial portion of the U.S. audience, who are religious. Karl Marx, whose commentary is so often taken out of context, has something substantial to add to this conversation. He notes that “religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world. It is the opium of the people.”
Religion, even in its most reactionary formations, is a place of community. It offers its adherents a sense of belonging and love outside of a capitalist structure in which all that is sold melts into air. It provides a basis of common identity in the love and kingdom of god. And within that structure, there are both opportunities to care and to be cared for. We may prefer, as Marx does, that these communal functions occur elsewhere, in the workplace, the union hall, the international, but the reality is that for most, these structures have been laid to waste by capitalist domination. In this void, it is not that surprising that many would turn to religion despite the fact it is so frequently manipulated for the needs of the status quo.
So in effect, this mode of critique offers no real alternative to people, while at the same time mocking the tools that they have available to them in order to cope with and engage with a world that is so exploitative. We need to offer something more than this superior laughter. I think that Barbara Ehrenreich has the right train of thought in this matter. She suggests returning to a certain programmatic element of 1970’s feminist organizing. This element recognized the importance of mutual aid. It offered things such as child care, health care, and other essentials of life. What’s more, within these contributions to life, it offered a real meaningful alternative for the structuring of a community, a real meaningful definition of liberty and equality in the face of hierarchical patriarchy.
We need to take up this project with a sense of urgency. The possibilities of a foundation are already in existence through a myriad of collectives, co-ops, social service, and mutual aid organizations. Similarly, the possibilities for the expansion of this project already exist in the immense creativity and interaction that allows for the production of a world system that is mind boggling in and of itself. In the most modest and simple of settings we need to desire, conceive and create a new structure for the future, both with our labor and our imagination. I neither think that this task is easy, nor do I think that it can be accomplished in a short period of time. Instead I propose in the spirit of a long march of transformation, one in which there is very little alternative to in the creation of a new society.
In the end, I am reminded of a lecture by social theorist Achille Mbembe. He posed two alternatives for engagement with the ‘Other’. The first was that of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt defined sovereignty in the battle with an alien 'Other' that he defines as the ‘enemy’ where one kills or is killed. This very much defines the position of the Bush administration and its followers, with the exception that they may hold the possibility of the neutralization of the 'Other'. The second formulation was Emmanuel Levinas’, who placed his definition of sovereignty on the recognition of the 'Other', and his care. This recognition moreover is not dependent on the assimilation of the 'Other' into the recognizable. One perspective creates a world of walls and paranoia, the other is based, as Billy Bragg puts it so eloquently, in “faith in my fellow man” and mutual aid. This second option is not available as long as a small portion of the world’s population dominates the vast majority of its resources. I am not sure of the likelihood of this radical transformation of the world, but we need to put it forwards in both our words and deeds, as a response to the current state of things.
For theirs is a land with a wall around it
And mine is a faith in my fellow man
Theirs is a land of hope and glory
Mine is the green field and the factory floor
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers
And mine is the peace we knew
Between the wars
--Billy Bragg
The initial discussion about the Bush victory in the recent elections focused initially on the ‘values voter.’ The mythology surrounding this figure posits a victory obtained through Karl Rove’s Machiavellian recognition of the voting bloc, and exploitation of it through certain well thought out ballot initiatives. This discussion also produced a brief flurry of articles by a number of authors on the left, only to be dropped for a discussion of vote counting, and conflicting accounts of vote suppression. Without denigrating the importance of the latter discussion, I am interested in returning to the conversation around the “faith based voter.” I am interested in entering this discussion as a way of looking critically at its structures, and as a way of pushing that stillborn conversation towards a critique of progressive activism, and a call for a new direction in some of that activism.
To look at some of the initial discussion of the ‘faith based voter’, three terms were most prevalent. They were “fear”, “ignorance”, and “superstition.” All of these terms tend to link back to a certain secularist project and present the danger present in these terms in a more state based religious fundamentalism. After all, as hinted at above, one of the most successful methods of getting out the vote for the right was associated with the anti-gay marriage initiatives that were peppered across the states, and the President’s frequent and oblique references to religious text. Also the administration has increasingly filled its functionary positions with individuals who are involved in what might be termed a sort of ‘political Christianity.’
This fact is recognized in some of the more rigorous formulations of these thoughts on the “faith based voter.” The best example is perhaps Todd May’s short article “Religion, the Election and the Politics of Fear.” In it he argues, “the religious character of these people is characterized by constant fear of the 'Other' that is perpetually seeking to infiltrate, seduce, and ultimately destroy the minds and lives of good Christians.” May pushes this formulation farther linking it with the foreign ‘other.’ The term in fact circulates with the others, reinforcing them and exchanging itself with them.
Ultimately May is caught within the same fetishization of a certain type of Christianity, but the question brings to bear within that admittedly limited perspective, the question of the other seems to be the crucial one. The terms that are chosen by the commentators of this phenomenon, namely fear and superstition, seem to be good terms for understanding what is going on. However, we need to disconnect them from an exclusively religious context. Although more than a few examples of fear and superstition can be connected to religion, there are just as many that don’t work within this context. Xenophobia is in many ways a significant engine of U.S. society, and one that cannot be reduced to religion.
This trace of xenophobia gestures to a particular way of relating to a perceived outside, and transfers that structure on to the 'Other' as well. We can see this in the perception of both the foreign other as well the internal counterpart. The 'Other' becomes an ideological potent term, circulating not only in the discourse of the threat to the Family, but in racial profiling of Arabs and terror level alerts as well. This figure of the 'Other' gains its power through its ambiguity as the welfare mother morphs into the mullah who manages to transform himself into the homosexual seducer of our youth. All in defense of the structures of dominance in the society at large.
In presenting this fear in the context of an exoticized religious subject misses an essential element, an element that cuts across the boundaries of the secular and the religious, a certain superstitious fear of the ‘other.’ The most obvious trope that can be brought into play is of course the disastrous events of September 11, 2001. This event brought the United States out of its sheltered position and put it into the modes of insecurity that the rest of the world had been experiencing for some time. This is not a minor occurrence. It points to the declining hegemony, and perhaps even dominance, of U.S. power on a global stage. This throws its citizens into the quandary of rethinking their relationship with the rest of the world in new terms.
In truth, it must be said that this fear has been on the world stage for some time. Slavoj Zizek may have not been diplomatic when he said that September 11th could have allowed the United States to join the rest of the world, but he was by in larger correct. The United States has been increasingly important in the defense of global capital since the World War I, and has been the dominant power since World War II. Under its gaze, capital has managed to perfect its domination in ways that were previously unimaginable. This domination has been enabled by the military of the United States in the last instance. This system of domination is enabled by a circulation, an economy if you will, of fear. This fear becomes even more magnified as the logic of the system begins to collapse. In these cases, those who have benefited from domination fear that the newly liberated will treat them in the same manner of brutality that was inflicted upon them. It is something that cannot be simply solved through a judicious return to an old-fashioned secularism.
We need to understand that this structure is not one that has benefited the United States citizenry uniformly. Quite to the contrary, the same system has had a dramatic impact on large sections of the U.S. population, particularly after Fordism begins to collapse in 1968. But U.S. ideology has encouraged a strong sense of identification with those who benefit from the logic of exploitation. Instead the strong resentment that is felt by a large portion of the population has been strongly displaced on any number of figures of the 'Other', the class struggle has transformed into a fear and hatred of the stranger.
The counterweight that Todd May and many others give is that of hope. I have two basic critiques of this notion. The first is contained in the word ‘hope.’ Hope is not the opposite of fear as these commentators suggest in either structure or intensity instead, hope is as Spinoza points out, a fluctuation between fear and joy. It is in fact a somewhat amorphous affect, one that already has one foot in fear. One has to ask the question if what these commentators are proposing is something that flits away all too quickly in the time of threat, whether real or imagined.
If we return to Spinoza, the proper opposition to fear is joy. Joy is defined in Spinoza’s terms as the strengthening of one’s capacities, within a communal setting it would be related to the strengthening of the capacities of the community. The difference between hope and joy is not a merely semantic one, but is the difference between the possibility of a different way of engaging with others and its concrete manifestation. A more concrete way of saying this is contained in a comment by the British organization Class War when they noted the need for redistribution of wealth in the here and now, and not in some visionary, socialist future. Similarly, we need to produce a community founded in joy, which I think is best defined by the term mutual aid, in the here and now.
But even more significantly, it ignores the fact that the reactionary community is not merely organized on the principle of fear, instead it organizes a community on homogenous principle as a fortress against the feared outside. To think through this we need to return to the question of the church, albeit with different inflections than the commentators above, and it should be noted a very specific church. In a very excellent article briefly after the elections, Barbara Ehrenreich noted that one of her informants made the comment that when entering a town in need the first place one should go is the church. The steady destruction of redistributive programs on the part of the society as a whole in the form of welfare, education, etc. has made a vacuum for these functions. The Bush administration has pushed this even farther with his “faith based initiatives” placing these functions not only in the hands of religion, but a mode of religion that accepts the basic suppositions that are essential to the survival of the Bush administration.
In this context, the hope offered by a progressive community seems like a very vague and ephemeral thing. “What is the alternative?” the taunt that haunts so very many demonstrations comes to mind. The progressive community has come up with very many reasons why George W. Bush is a very bad man, a stupid man, a superstitious man, a hypocrite etc. What I fail to see coming out these very same mouths is an alternative form of community because to do so would be to reveal the very need for a radical substantive transformation of our society, a statement which is simply impermissible within our society. For all of its obvious contradictions, the current administration offers something tangible in its ‘faith base initiatives’ in the face of a monolithic structure of fear.
In a real sense, I feel that the well meaning, mainstream leftist critiques of George W. Bush contribute to this sense of connection. The elitist connotations implied in such commentaries give rise to a sense of identification with the man, as do the foible and idiosyncrasies. In effect, these formulations have by in large backfired, transforming Bush from what he is, one of the most privileged of this society, educated in the most expensive schools of the nation, into a sort of bumbling, addled common man. This perversely transforms him into a proletarian figure, persecuted by a sort of cultured bourgeois elite.[1]
Religion becomes an important element of this mode of identification. As I noted before, conflating religious belief with superstitious fear avoid the more substantial structural issue buried beneath it, but it also alienate a substantial portion of the U.S. audience, who are religious. Karl Marx, whose commentary is so often taken out of context, has something substantial to add to this conversation. He notes that “religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world. It is the opium of the people.”
Religion, even in its most reactionary formations, is a place of community. It offers its adherents a sense of belonging and love outside of a capitalist structure in which all that is sold melts into air. It provides a basis of common identity in the love and kingdom of god. And within that structure, there are both opportunities to care and to be cared for. We may prefer, as Marx does, that these communal functions occur elsewhere, in the workplace, the union hall, the international, but the reality is that for most, these structures have been laid to waste by capitalist domination. In this void, it is not that surprising that many would turn to religion despite the fact it is so frequently manipulated for the needs of the status quo.
So in effect, this mode of critique offers no real alternative to people, while at the same time mocking the tools that they have available to them in order to cope with and engage with a world that is so exploitative. We need to offer something more than this superior laughter. I think that Barbara Ehrenreich has the right train of thought in this matter. She suggests returning to a certain programmatic element of 1970’s feminist organizing. This element recognized the importance of mutual aid. It offered things such as child care, health care, and other essentials of life. What’s more, within these contributions to life, it offered a real meaningful alternative for the structuring of a community, a real meaningful definition of liberty and equality in the face of hierarchical patriarchy.
We need to take up this project with a sense of urgency. The possibilities of a foundation are already in existence through a myriad of collectives, co-ops, social service, and mutual aid organizations. Similarly, the possibilities for the expansion of this project already exist in the immense creativity and interaction that allows for the production of a world system that is mind boggling in and of itself. In the most modest and simple of settings we need to desire, conceive and create a new structure for the future, both with our labor and our imagination. I neither think that this task is easy, nor do I think that it can be accomplished in a short period of time. Instead I propose in the spirit of a long march of transformation, one in which there is very little alternative to in the creation of a new society.
In the end, I am reminded of a lecture by social theorist Achille Mbembe. He posed two alternatives for engagement with the ‘Other’. The first was that of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt defined sovereignty in the battle with an alien 'Other' that he defines as the ‘enemy’ where one kills or is killed. This very much defines the position of the Bush administration and its followers, with the exception that they may hold the possibility of the neutralization of the 'Other'. The second formulation was Emmanuel Levinas’, who placed his definition of sovereignty on the recognition of the 'Other', and his care. This recognition moreover is not dependent on the assimilation of the 'Other' into the recognizable. One perspective creates a world of walls and paranoia, the other is based, as Billy Bragg puts it so eloquently, in “faith in my fellow man” and mutual aid. This second option is not available as long as a small portion of the world’s population dominates the vast majority of its resources. I am not sure of the likelihood of this radical transformation of the world, but we need to put it forwards in both our words and deeds, as a response to the current state of things.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The Proletarian Science of the Pet Shop Boys vs. The Bourgeois Ideology of Crimethinc, or, desire within the ruins of subculture in late capitalism
s "It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away. Some people were dying. Some people were busy. Some people were cleaning their houses while the war movie played on television." Sarah Schulman, People In Trouble
This posting has a somewhat curious origin. A couple days after I had posted my critique of Crimethinc, I happened to listen to an old Pet Shop Boys song, "In The Night,"while at the gym, using some machine that approximates the motions of running. It really struck me that the Pet Shop Boys were able to provide a much more nuanced and deeper analysis of the relationship between subcultures and structures of domination than is offered by hundreds of pages of analysis created by Crimethinc within the context of a four minute pop song. The group's analysis is developed through reference and analysis of a phenomenon during the Nazi occupation of France, the Zazou.
The Zazou movement was an early form of youth culture, which formed as a sort of informal opposition to the occupation of France, and the collaborationist, Vichy Regime. Zazou was a nation wide phenomenon, but were most often associated with Paris. Neither a formal group, nor aligned with the Resistance, the Zazou expressed their discontent through elaborate forms of dress, avoidance of work, and an identification with jazz culture. The combined transgressive effect of this is captured by a comment of a participant, Pierre Seel, “The Zazous were very obviously detested by the Nazis, who on the other side of the Rhine, had since a long time decimated the German cultural avante garde, forbidden jazz and all visible signs of…degenerations of Germanic culture…” (libcom.org) The elaborate dress was a way to flouting government policies on the rationing of cloth. The refusal of work's political significance should be obvious from anti-capitalist standpoint, but it was also a refusal of a nationalist narrative of labor, as well. The name of group was probably drawn from the songs of Cab Calloway, and the embrace of jazz simultaneously challenges the conservative racial nationalism of Vichy and shows an affinity with the aesthetic avant-garde of surrealism and dada.
Seel gestures toward the other transgressive thread that defined the subculture, the rejection of the rigid notions of masculinity that not only defined fascist Vichy, but simultaneously defined both the nationalist and PCF's versions of resistance culture. They do so through their refusal to organize their libidinal energies within the logic of sacrifice, a sacrificial commitment to the nation. Instead of operating within Schmitt's logic of the political, that is a space in which one is willing to kill or die for a cause, the Zazous create a critical the stylization of ephemera, a position which Dick Hebdige identifies as the form of subculture, par excellence. As Neil Tennant notes, "I was just fascinated that they were totally out of the context of their times; that you had this beaknik culture in the middle of the Second World War in occupied Paris." Tennant goes on to link the untimeliness of les Zazous to conversations about love and the meaning of life, as well their contempt for the 'masculinity' of the conflict between the resistance and Vichy. The rage of the fascist response focused precisely on these refusals, recognizing the stylizations of les Zazous, particularly their long hair, as a refusal of nationalist ideology. "They became Enemy Number One of the fascist youth organizations, Jeunesse Populaire Française. “Scalp the Zazous!” became their slogan. Squads of young JPF fascists armed with hairclippers attacked Zazous. Many were arrested and sent to the countryside to work on the harvest." (libcom.org)
The first three stanzas of the Pet Shop Boys song capture this dialectic of revolt and repression.
Zazou, what you're gonna do?
There's a lot of people coming for you
Zazou, comment allez-vous?
A knock on the door in the night
That Zazou, he don't care
Dark glasses, long hair
Takes his time, sneers at men
Some ugly people want revenge
That Zazou, he sleeps all day
Then down to Select or Le Collisee
Sips his drinks, orders more
Says what he thinks and it's a crazy war
There is a difference in emphasis between the narrative offered by the Pet Shop Boys, and the one that is found in the account in libcom, which can be linked to the implicit purpose behind each of the narratives. For libcom, the purpose of reporting the history of the group is pretty simple. Libcom is interested in looking at the ways that les Zazous constitute a form of resistant self-organization. It is part of a larger libertarian, anti-capitalist project arguing for a non-vanguardist revolutionary practice. We can see the power of people in revolt, and the ability to create an alternative social logic within the most repressive of societies. The subculture gestures towards a set of lines of flight from the logic of the mass worker, mass production, etc. It contains a refusal of a type of production, and, simultaneously, a gesture towards a logic that uses the commodity form, but is not caught within the commodity form.
The difference in the Pet Shop Boys narrative is immediately signaled by Tennant's claim that the movement was 'non-political.' The narrative of the song is far more interested in exploring the practices within the continuity, or perhaps as a untimely precursor of subculture, and more implicitly, the discotheque as a social and cultural space for gay men. The song shifts the narrative of les Zazous from a narrative about men and women to a distinctly male figure who stands in for the movement as a whole, and it strips out the historical particularities one gets in the lib.com narrative. The figure of the Zazou is defined by a set of traits that can run through any number of subcultural practices. He is linked to a narrative of subcultural stylization (through the gestures towards dark glass and long hair), social antagonism through that stylization, and club culture.
The figure within the song is singular. The narrative focuses on his passage through the public streets of Paris, rather than the collective intimacy of the club or the disco. Within that context he is the one who hates and is hated, and that mutual antagonism can only be understood within the context of the non-normativity of his stylization. The Zazou is hated because he refuses his role as a man in the public sphere through his refusal of the sacrifice of war, but also through the blank refusal of the gaze through his sunglasses and the refusal of the norms of masculinity through his long hair. He also refuses the normative dialectic of conversation, remaining voiceless until his exit from the street in the club. The figure of the Zazou then can be linked to the long history of the drag queen, which emerged antagonistically into the public through the Stonewall revolt, the history of gay liberation, as well as the transgressive intermingling of disco, often noted to be one of the only genuinely integrated social phenomenon in the United States.
And yet there is still a profound ambiguity in this position, which is immediately apparent with the next couplet. "Zazou, what you're gonna do?/ A knock on the door in the night" This couplet immediately shifts the narrative from a timeless story of aesthetic revolt to a moment of decision. The figure of the Zazou is left in this moment of suspension, indicating a vacillation, an inability to critically respond to fascist domination even in his own defense. Within this context, Tennant makes the following analysis of his own song, "The song looks at the moral implications, because the Nazis hated them and the Resistance hated them, because they were fatalistic and didn't participate in the resistance, and the song asks whether that's collaboration. It revolves around the chorus - "Well, there's a thin line between love and crime/And in this situation/A thin line between love and crime and collaboration" - because the fact of the matter is that if you're not really against something, you're for it, and in a way they collaborated with the Nazis just by carrying on a normal life. So, in the end, I am criticizing them."
And despite Tennant's conclusion, the song itself remains open, oscillating between the valourized revolt of the Zazous and its refusal or inability to enter into the political. That oscillation pivots on the following lines of the song.
And when the soldiers strut, all he cares about
Is love
When the flags are out, all he cares about
Is love
Well, there's a thin line between love and crime
And in this situation
A thin line between love and crime and -
Collaboration (-ration)
Although the chorus ends with the possibility of collaboration discussed above, its put into a context of a refusal, a refusal of the logic of militarism, and a refusal of the logic of nationalism. That double refusal is countered by an affirmation of 'love,' or perhaps more bluntly, the narrative logic of romance. That narrative is simultaneously the most banal narrative possible, dragged through the mud of decades of terrible pop songs, popular novels, and films, leaving us to wonder where the sentiment begins and the commodity form ends, and yet at the same time, it gestures to something that escapes both the logic of that form and allows for the Zazou to see the common nationalism and militarism contained in the logic of both the resistance and the conservative politics of Vichy. The very banality of the lines gestures towards a sort of double bind between a unrepresentable logic that gestures toward the sort of revolt demanded by the radical project demanded by Libcom, and infinite ability for capital to translate romance into its own reproductive logic of exploitation.
At this point, perhaps we should bring in the context of the release of the song, which came out as a B side to the "Opportunities" single, as well as being released as an extended remix on the first Disco complation released the same year. It occurs at the height of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the beginning of a full scale counter-offensive on the part of capital that continues to this day. On one side, we can see the release of the 1984 album please and the later singles tied to the collapse of a set of political possibilities contained in musical subculture, with the collapse of punk and post-punk as the end point of a terrain of ruins (please note that this narrative doesn't work quite as well in the English context, which I can discuss more in detail if you would like, but you could probably glean more on this from Richard Seymour's blog, Lenin's Tomb) Disco also had collapsed in both its mainstream and avant-garde forms, and the electronic music dance scene that would replace it was only beginning. Finally, the HIV crisis was devastating the gay community with the conservative administrations of Reagan and Thatcher acting in almost open complicity with the disease.
The album please was then produced in this curious moment between capital's complete co-optation of subculture into post-Fordist consumerism, and the simultaneous indifference of dominant political institutions and temporary inability of the gay community to respond to the AIDS crisis. Within that context, there is a curious erasure of the political in the narratives of the song, remaining caught up in the adventures of lovers, hustlers, and criminals, who are caught within the web of the bourgeois city without a horizon. The songs offer us small moments of release, of joy, but only within the logic of a mutual criminality captured best by the song, Opportunities and Two divided by zero, which offer narratives of romantic escape through a criminality that mirrors the exploitative criminality of capital at a micro level. It is a replay of Brecht's analogy between the one who steals from the bank and the greater criminality of the bank owner. However, it does so without the revolutionary horizon of the proletariat. At the same time, the crisis of AIDS leads to an aporia within the gay community, neither the privatized terrain of the disco nor the older narratives of liberation offering an adequate response to the crisis.
Within this context, we can see the Pet Shop Boys intervention as a presentist historical narrative, presenting a productive contrast to both the nostalgia of libcom, as well as the willfully stupid naivete of Crimethinc. It neither looks back at older forms of revolt as loss, nor does it pretend that our capital is the capital of the protestant ethic, the continual error of CrimeThinc. It recognizes the only way to understand the history of subculture is to understand it as a history in ruin, or perhaps a history of ruins, defined by the dialectical oscillation of lines of flight and apparatuses of capture, a dialectic that neither progresses nor fully contains, but repeatedly mutilates. We are marked by this history of mutilation, but not as a common phenomenon. Instead, it constitutes and is constituted by histories of race, of gender, of sexuality, replicating and transforming the violence and constitutive division of the proletarian body in the 16th and 17th centuries. (Please see Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch) And yet at the same time, the logic of "In the Night" is not fully that of please, containing a historicity that both informs the present, and at the same time, while unable to contain a horizon, gestures towards the very contingency of the present.
I plan on offering a second part to this narrative through a reading of ACT-UP and the Sarah Schulman novel, People In Trouble. I intend to argue that these might give us resources to think through the process of revolutionary reconstitution in the same way that the Pet Shop Boys allow for us to recognize the shifts in subculture, capital, and the thread of desire, and the aporia that faced counter-systemic movements at that time. However, my argument will depend on an understanding of ACT-UP as crisis itself, and the knowledge coming out of the ruins of ACT-UP through its own contradictions. I recommend the following website as a starting point.
This posting has a somewhat curious origin. A couple days after I had posted my critique of Crimethinc, I happened to listen to an old Pet Shop Boys song, "In The Night,"while at the gym, using some machine that approximates the motions of running. It really struck me that the Pet Shop Boys were able to provide a much more nuanced and deeper analysis of the relationship between subcultures and structures of domination than is offered by hundreds of pages of analysis created by Crimethinc within the context of a four minute pop song. The group's analysis is developed through reference and analysis of a phenomenon during the Nazi occupation of France, the Zazou.
The Zazou movement was an early form of youth culture, which formed as a sort of informal opposition to the occupation of France, and the collaborationist, Vichy Regime. Zazou was a nation wide phenomenon, but were most often associated with Paris. Neither a formal group, nor aligned with the Resistance, the Zazou expressed their discontent through elaborate forms of dress, avoidance of work, and an identification with jazz culture. The combined transgressive effect of this is captured by a comment of a participant, Pierre Seel, “The Zazous were very obviously detested by the Nazis, who on the other side of the Rhine, had since a long time decimated the German cultural avante garde, forbidden jazz and all visible signs of…degenerations of Germanic culture…” (libcom.org) The elaborate dress was a way to flouting government policies on the rationing of cloth. The refusal of work's political significance should be obvious from anti-capitalist standpoint, but it was also a refusal of a nationalist narrative of labor, as well. The name of group was probably drawn from the songs of Cab Calloway, and the embrace of jazz simultaneously challenges the conservative racial nationalism of Vichy and shows an affinity with the aesthetic avant-garde of surrealism and dada.
Seel gestures toward the other transgressive thread that defined the subculture, the rejection of the rigid notions of masculinity that not only defined fascist Vichy, but simultaneously defined both the nationalist and PCF's versions of resistance culture. They do so through their refusal to organize their libidinal energies within the logic of sacrifice, a sacrificial commitment to the nation. Instead of operating within Schmitt's logic of the political, that is a space in which one is willing to kill or die for a cause, the Zazous create a critical the stylization of ephemera, a position which Dick Hebdige identifies as the form of subculture, par excellence. As Neil Tennant notes, "I was just fascinated that they were totally out of the context of their times; that you had this beaknik culture in the middle of the Second World War in occupied Paris." Tennant goes on to link the untimeliness of les Zazous to conversations about love and the meaning of life, as well their contempt for the 'masculinity' of the conflict between the resistance and Vichy. The rage of the fascist response focused precisely on these refusals, recognizing the stylizations of les Zazous, particularly their long hair, as a refusal of nationalist ideology. "They became Enemy Number One of the fascist youth organizations, Jeunesse Populaire Française. “Scalp the Zazous!” became their slogan. Squads of young JPF fascists armed with hairclippers attacked Zazous. Many were arrested and sent to the countryside to work on the harvest." (libcom.org)
The first three stanzas of the Pet Shop Boys song capture this dialectic of revolt and repression.
Zazou, what you're gonna do?
There's a lot of people coming for you
Zazou, comment allez-vous?
A knock on the door in the night
That Zazou, he don't care
Dark glasses, long hair
Takes his time, sneers at men
Some ugly people want revenge
That Zazou, he sleeps all day
Then down to Select or Le Collisee
Sips his drinks, orders more
Says what he thinks and it's a crazy war
There is a difference in emphasis between the narrative offered by the Pet Shop Boys, and the one that is found in the account in libcom, which can be linked to the implicit purpose behind each of the narratives. For libcom, the purpose of reporting the history of the group is pretty simple. Libcom is interested in looking at the ways that les Zazous constitute a form of resistant self-organization. It is part of a larger libertarian, anti-capitalist project arguing for a non-vanguardist revolutionary practice. We can see the power of people in revolt, and the ability to create an alternative social logic within the most repressive of societies. The subculture gestures towards a set of lines of flight from the logic of the mass worker, mass production, etc. It contains a refusal of a type of production, and, simultaneously, a gesture towards a logic that uses the commodity form, but is not caught within the commodity form.
The difference in the Pet Shop Boys narrative is immediately signaled by Tennant's claim that the movement was 'non-political.' The narrative of the song is far more interested in exploring the practices within the continuity, or perhaps as a untimely precursor of subculture, and more implicitly, the discotheque as a social and cultural space for gay men. The song shifts the narrative of les Zazous from a narrative about men and women to a distinctly male figure who stands in for the movement as a whole, and it strips out the historical particularities one gets in the lib.com narrative. The figure of the Zazou is defined by a set of traits that can run through any number of subcultural practices. He is linked to a narrative of subcultural stylization (through the gestures towards dark glass and long hair), social antagonism through that stylization, and club culture.
The figure within the song is singular. The narrative focuses on his passage through the public streets of Paris, rather than the collective intimacy of the club or the disco. Within that context he is the one who hates and is hated, and that mutual antagonism can only be understood within the context of the non-normativity of his stylization. The Zazou is hated because he refuses his role as a man in the public sphere through his refusal of the sacrifice of war, but also through the blank refusal of the gaze through his sunglasses and the refusal of the norms of masculinity through his long hair. He also refuses the normative dialectic of conversation, remaining voiceless until his exit from the street in the club. The figure of the Zazou then can be linked to the long history of the drag queen, which emerged antagonistically into the public through the Stonewall revolt, the history of gay liberation, as well as the transgressive intermingling of disco, often noted to be one of the only genuinely integrated social phenomenon in the United States.
And yet there is still a profound ambiguity in this position, which is immediately apparent with the next couplet. "Zazou, what you're gonna do?/ A knock on the door in the night" This couplet immediately shifts the narrative from a timeless story of aesthetic revolt to a moment of decision. The figure of the Zazou is left in this moment of suspension, indicating a vacillation, an inability to critically respond to fascist domination even in his own defense. Within this context, Tennant makes the following analysis of his own song, "The song looks at the moral implications, because the Nazis hated them and the Resistance hated them, because they were fatalistic and didn't participate in the resistance, and the song asks whether that's collaboration. It revolves around the chorus - "Well, there's a thin line between love and crime/And in this situation/A thin line between love and crime and collaboration" - because the fact of the matter is that if you're not really against something, you're for it, and in a way they collaborated with the Nazis just by carrying on a normal life. So, in the end, I am criticizing them."
And despite Tennant's conclusion, the song itself remains open, oscillating between the valourized revolt of the Zazous and its refusal or inability to enter into the political. That oscillation pivots on the following lines of the song.
And when the soldiers strut, all he cares about
Is love
When the flags are out, all he cares about
Is love
Well, there's a thin line between love and crime
And in this situation
A thin line between love and crime and -
Collaboration (-ration)
Although the chorus ends with the possibility of collaboration discussed above, its put into a context of a refusal, a refusal of the logic of militarism, and a refusal of the logic of nationalism. That double refusal is countered by an affirmation of 'love,' or perhaps more bluntly, the narrative logic of romance. That narrative is simultaneously the most banal narrative possible, dragged through the mud of decades of terrible pop songs, popular novels, and films, leaving us to wonder where the sentiment begins and the commodity form ends, and yet at the same time, it gestures to something that escapes both the logic of that form and allows for the Zazou to see the common nationalism and militarism contained in the logic of both the resistance and the conservative politics of Vichy. The very banality of the lines gestures towards a sort of double bind between a unrepresentable logic that gestures toward the sort of revolt demanded by the radical project demanded by Libcom, and infinite ability for capital to translate romance into its own reproductive logic of exploitation.
At this point, perhaps we should bring in the context of the release of the song, which came out as a B side to the "Opportunities" single, as well as being released as an extended remix on the first Disco complation released the same year. It occurs at the height of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the beginning of a full scale counter-offensive on the part of capital that continues to this day. On one side, we can see the release of the 1984 album please and the later singles tied to the collapse of a set of political possibilities contained in musical subculture, with the collapse of punk and post-punk as the end point of a terrain of ruins (please note that this narrative doesn't work quite as well in the English context, which I can discuss more in detail if you would like, but you could probably glean more on this from Richard Seymour's blog, Lenin's Tomb) Disco also had collapsed in both its mainstream and avant-garde forms, and the electronic music dance scene that would replace it was only beginning. Finally, the HIV crisis was devastating the gay community with the conservative administrations of Reagan and Thatcher acting in almost open complicity with the disease.
The album please was then produced in this curious moment between capital's complete co-optation of subculture into post-Fordist consumerism, and the simultaneous indifference of dominant political institutions and temporary inability of the gay community to respond to the AIDS crisis. Within that context, there is a curious erasure of the political in the narratives of the song, remaining caught up in the adventures of lovers, hustlers, and criminals, who are caught within the web of the bourgeois city without a horizon. The songs offer us small moments of release, of joy, but only within the logic of a mutual criminality captured best by the song, Opportunities and Two divided by zero, which offer narratives of romantic escape through a criminality that mirrors the exploitative criminality of capital at a micro level. It is a replay of Brecht's analogy between the one who steals from the bank and the greater criminality of the bank owner. However, it does so without the revolutionary horizon of the proletariat. At the same time, the crisis of AIDS leads to an aporia within the gay community, neither the privatized terrain of the disco nor the older narratives of liberation offering an adequate response to the crisis.
Within this context, we can see the Pet Shop Boys intervention as a presentist historical narrative, presenting a productive contrast to both the nostalgia of libcom, as well as the willfully stupid naivete of Crimethinc. It neither looks back at older forms of revolt as loss, nor does it pretend that our capital is the capital of the protestant ethic, the continual error of CrimeThinc. It recognizes the only way to understand the history of subculture is to understand it as a history in ruin, or perhaps a history of ruins, defined by the dialectical oscillation of lines of flight and apparatuses of capture, a dialectic that neither progresses nor fully contains, but repeatedly mutilates. We are marked by this history of mutilation, but not as a common phenomenon. Instead, it constitutes and is constituted by histories of race, of gender, of sexuality, replicating and transforming the violence and constitutive division of the proletarian body in the 16th and 17th centuries. (Please see Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch) And yet at the same time, the logic of "In the Night" is not fully that of please, containing a historicity that both informs the present, and at the same time, while unable to contain a horizon, gestures towards the very contingency of the present.
I plan on offering a second part to this narrative through a reading of ACT-UP and the Sarah Schulman novel, People In Trouble. I intend to argue that these might give us resources to think through the process of revolutionary reconstitution in the same way that the Pet Shop Boys allow for us to recognize the shifts in subculture, capital, and the thread of desire, and the aporia that faced counter-systemic movements at that time. However, my argument will depend on an understanding of ACT-UP as crisis itself, and the knowledge coming out of the ruins of ACT-UP through its own contradictions. I recommend the following website as a starting point.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Addendum to the Elizabeth Moon Posting
In my polemic against Elizabeth Moon's comments about Islam and the Islamic Community Center in New York, I had also offered a critique of the WisCon board's decision to uphold her status as the Guest of Honor for next year's WisCon. It looks like there may be some movement on that issue. SF3 (Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction), the 'mother corporation' of WisCon has passed a recommendation motion on the issue. The motion recommends that the the GoH invitation should be rescinded, along with a recognition of the committee's work. My hope is that the committee takes up this advice. I fall into the all-to-American (a very, very problematic idiomatic way of saying that I fall into the trap of a lot of white U.S. citizens.... feel free to list them. I'll probably miss a couple) love of redemption narratives, and would love to see a thoughtful Moon thinking critically through her own discourse in the name of an anti-racist project at a future date, but I think that her actions should have consequences. That should mean losing the ability to claim a privileged space within a feminist project (at least temporarily.) I don't envy the committee's responsibility to make this decision, but I don't think that I am alone in hoping that they will follow the recommendation of SF3.
Update: The invitation has been rescinded, and Moon has accepted this decision. There has been a bit of backlash directed towards the board and SF3. You might want to go over to their sites and express your support. I'm glad that this decision was made and thank the folks who made for taking this important decision.
Update: The invitation has been rescinded, and Moon has accepted this decision. There has been a bit of backlash directed towards the board and SF3. You might want to go over to their sites and express your support. I'm glad that this decision was made and thank the folks who made for taking this important decision.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Variations on a Theme: Tower of Babel, Part 1
This is the first of a series of short essays looking at different versions of the Tower of Babel story, drawing from film, literature, and music. The first selection comes from the film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang and written by Thea von Harbou. The particular clip includes a new score for the film, which isn't very good, although it is better than the Giorgio Moroder soundtrack from the early eighties. However, I chose this particular version of the film because the clip allows us to see the story of the Tower of Babel in the larger context of the film.
The scene opens with two sets of figures entering into the underground cathedral, first the mad scientist Rotwang leading the city's founder, Joh Frederson to spy on the precedings, and second, the exhausted workers looking for guidance and relief in the city, including Frederson's son, Freder, who has only just discovered the costs of his privilege. The cuts between the scheming conspirators and the exhausted workers, until the workers enter into the sanctuary. The camera focuses on Freder as he grasps his heart in pain and exhaustion. He looks up and the camera cuts to the cathedral itself, and we follow the gaze of the workers to the lit figure of Maria, standing in front of nine crosses, positioned to represent the tower of the cathedral. The camera holds onto this scene for a few seconds as Maria begins to speak, and then cuts back to a close up of Freder as he takes in the message. The camera then cuts between the two to create a sense of identity between the preaching Maria, and the reverent figure of Freder, who has fully joined the workers in the act of worship. The camera cuts back to see Freder fall to his knees, and then cuts to his father as he watches from the outside, through a small hole in the wall. They look at the scene from above, creating distance between the figures of the worshipers and Joh Frederson and Rotwang. The camera then returns to the perspective of the cavern itself to begin Maria's narrative, a narrative of the Tower of Babel.
The first intertitle announces the narrative, and the camera cuts to the figure of a priest or intellectual speaking before an informal audience of his peers. He looks down from the heavens, and the intertitle announces his first words, "Come, let us build a tower whose top may reach unto the stars!" The speech continues and we are then given a second intertitle, "And on top of the tower we will write the words: Great is the world and its Creator! And great is Man!" The film then cuts to an image of the tower, which then becomes a model of the tower surrounded by the intellectuals who were in the first scene. Their leisurely contemplation reflects back on the leisurely pursuits of the wealthy elite that the film introduced in its first scenes.
Before we move on there is an interesting shift in the language of the narrative of the film, with the Biblical narrative. The King James Bible translates the text in the following manner, "Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." The Luther translation, which is canonical in Germany, is as follows, und sprachen: Wohlauf, laßt uns eine Stadt und einen Turm bauen, dessen Spitze bis an den Himmel reiche, damit wir uns einen Namen machen; denn wir werden sonst zerstreut in alle Länder. In both translations, we can see a distinct difference from the version offered in Metropolis. The word Himmel/Heaven has been replaced with Sterne/Stars. The shift strips out the particular theological implications embedded in the term Heaven, which contains both the the notion of the literal heights of the sky as well as a blasphemous claim to an equivalence with god, and replaces it with a science fictional modernist ability to produce technological wonders. The second phrase shifts the sovereign act of making a unifying name with the creation of a monument to dual wonder of creator and humanity (the literal German in the film is der Mensch, which can be translated as person, man, or human) implicitly in the Cartesian conceptualization of the universe. We have moved from the terrain of the theological and the attempt on the part of humanity to claim the throne of god, or at least claim an equivalence to god to an enlightenment narrative of the power of der Mensch.
It is at this point that the narrative shifts with the intertitle, "....but the minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. The task was too great. So they hired hands for wages." The next immediate scene cuts not to a scene of wage laborers, but five streams of faceless, nearly naked masses of humanity merging into one stream. Their heads are shaved, and they are almost entirely bereft of individualization. The scene reflects back on the earlier scene of the workers entering into the factory, replicating and intensifying the inhumanity contained in their robotic motions. The film then offers the intertitle, "But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived of it." The next scenes offer a juxtaposition between the priest/intellectual who worships at the alter of the image of the city, and the workers who experience the drudgery, violence, and exhaustion of the labor. After another intertitle explaining this juxtaposition, the film cuts to a scene in which the figure of the intellectual priest is speaking to the workers, who respond in anger. The intertitle notes, "People spoke the same language, but could not understand each other," alluding to the common language held by humanity before the destruction of the tower. But the narrative of the film sees the aporia created through the radically different experiences of the tower based on class position, rather than through the interdiction of god.
The film then cuts to the sea of faceless inhuman workers shifting from angry speech into action, pouring up the stairs in murderous rage towards the intellectual priest. The film then cuts to a sea of hand rising up to pull down the image of the tower. The next scene shows the remain ruins of the tower, leaving the inscription, "Great is the world and its Creator! And great is Man!" to hang above it, reminding us of the failure of the plans that started the process. After the clip, the film then moves back to Maria, who offers a third term which would allow for the process to work successfully, a figure that will take the place of the heart, and which could mediate between the intellectual priest who stands in for the brain, and the hands and bodies of the workers. The clip already gestures towards Freder's role in fulfilling this function through his pained gesture towards his own heart. The mediation of the heart, perhaps the third term in the dialectic, then becomes the force of poltical neutralization, both humanizing the proletarian mass and through that process, making them accept the necessity of their exploited labor. Simultaneously, he neutralizes the potential feminine threat of Maria, shifting her role from agitator, vamp, and icon to housewife. (For more on this, please see Andreas Huyssen's "The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis")
The Tower of Babel narrative captures the doubleness of this narrative, between its exposure of the violence, exploitation, and irrationality of capitalism, and its refusal to imagine another order that would not reproduce the Cartesian mind-body split, precisely because of its fear of the masses. Interestingly, one of the film's biggest fans was Adolf Hitler, who identified with the role of Freder, the mediator and defender of the functions and the organic whole of the city project. The history of which would contribute to the end of the marriage of Harbou and Lang, the former remaining in the German state as a loyal citizen (although Harbou always stated that her alliance with Nazism was in solidarity with the Indian anti-colonial movement) and the later leaving the country for exile and Hollywood. In many interviews, Lang would return to the debates that he and Harbou had over the metaphor of the heart, a metaphor created by Harbou that Lang hated. For Lang, it's power always seemed to be an enigma, perhaps because it both contained the fantasy of the Fuhrer that Hitler desired, and the fact that it contained something else, something that would make it a favorite of the counterculture that could not be fully contained in the science fiction world that Lang so brilliantly created.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
A Critique of the Crimethinc Approach to Desire and Play in the Context of Anti-Globalization
I wrote this a couple years ago for a conference on Play at the University of California-Irvine. I think that I was one of the few people who didn't write a paper from the perspective of either psychoanalysis or deconstruction. I've edited this slightly, but I suspect that the critical dimension needs to be expanded considerably. If I were to rewrite this, I think I would work through the material on opportunism that I draw from Virno in greater detail, and would probably think through the question of the common more as well. I would also be tempted to link this to certain aspects of the anti-austerity protests, particularly around dance parties and occupations. However, this would be a long endeavor, as that those actions are quite complex in themselves, and don't map neatly onto the analysis that I provide here. Still, I would be open to its discussion. Ultimately, I think that Crimethinc should be read as a symptom of the complex, exciting, and problematic events of anti-globalization, rather than a critical analysis of them. That work is still needed.
As an opening salvo I would like to recall a pair of images that I recall from a local Quebec newspaper at the time of the Quebec City FTAA protests in 2001. The first image showed a nude man mooning the authorities in front of the fence keeping the protesters away from the conference. The man is replaced by the blast of water in the second image. At this point, there is something similar to my topic at this point in the United States. The a mode of protest organization appeared spontaneously at the 1999 protests at Seattle, and were quickly blown off the maps, if not by the violence of Genoa, then by the extraordinary state violence that came in the wake of the attacks that occurred on September 11. Between those dates a whole series of massive protests occurred at the sites of international trade conferences. The tactics, now effaced by the despondency created by the war and the security crackdown, drew directly from the discourse of play, and made that discourse productive for the protests. The first purpose could be considered the more instrumental of the purposes. The image of play became a way of partially disguising militant action. For instance, a puppet theater disguised shields at a Minneapolis Mayday protest as large puppets. The second purpose becomes both less instrumentalized and considerably more complex. Play also operates as a temporary reconstruction of space and time within the protest. In effect, play becomes the medium in which a ‘new world’ is shown to be possible, both at the constitutive level in the interactions between the protestors and at the level of representation.
There are a number of ways you could take this project. You could go in a historical direction. This would entail producing a narrative of the history of the use of play in social protest movements. After all, play has been a factor in those movements for a considerably longer time than the initial snapshot allows. This would be a narrative that discussed the role played in the practices of the new left in the sixties, the new social movements of the 70’ and 80’s, etc. It would be a story of the yippies, the diggers, ACT-UP and others. A second direction could be to destabilize this conceptualization by provincializing, and asking to what extent does this concept relate to struggles outside the extraordinary comfort granted to fairly comfortable members of the overdeveloped world. These questions will come up in this talk at points, but I want to stay focused on the concept of play as it was developed in this context. My intention is to begin with an examination of the idea from within the logic of the movement. This will draw on the work of an anarchist collective, Crimethinc that took part in the demonstrations and produced a narrative of those events through its various polemics in both book and pamphlet form. The contradictions and problems of this conceptualization will become readily apparent and the talk will shift to work through those issues in order to read the importance of play as a symptom of the structures of post-fordist capital as much as revolt against it. This demystification puts us in the position to re-read play as an ideological construction, although a crucial one within context of the contemporary class struggle.
To return to the initial conceptualization of play, it becomes immediately obvious that this conceptualization bares a strong resemblance to the conception of the space and time of the carnival that Bakhtin presents in his work on Rabelais. For Bakhtin, “the basic carnival nucleus… is by no means a purely artistic form nor a spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play.” (Bakhtin 7) Play becomes the key term to understand the radicality of the time and space of the carnival. It operates as a mode of stylization that rewrites the social codes of the time and place. Bakhtin calls it a borderline precisely because of this. It deliberately reshapes and reverses the ideological codes, but this reshaping doesn’t occur purely as an act of spectacle or representation. Instead, it operates as an idealization of radically different set of social relations.
This loops back neatly into the structure of the protests. One of the continual messages of the organizers of the protests was that manner in which the protest took place constituted a model for the type of society that they would like to see. The most obvious example of this was the processes of decision making that were employed for the demonstrations. These processes were open and based on large consensus oriented meetings. But the very way that space was reterritorialized within the large protest sites entered into this as well. Puppets, games, people in costumes as well as other events were used to transform commercial spaces into spaces of utopian imagination. These tactics ranged from simple sit-ins to the destruction of private property. But despite the frequently vitriolic disputes around the question of tactics, a common thread ran through them that emphasized precisely this ability to transform social space. The sit in, the spontaneous puppet theater, or the shattered windows of a Starbucks constituted a glimpse into another world that existed outside the instrumental logic of capital.
Although the rhetoric of the movement feels a bit bombastic and unreal at this point, its important to recognize that this was taken seriously by state authorities as well as by activists. Taken seriously, this play world is no less universal in its logic than the world constructed by capital. To return to the question of the carnival, Bakhtin notes, “While the carnival lasts, there is no life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.” (Bakhtin 7) The idealization discussed above necessarily links into a notion of totality, or universality. Those terms would be anathema to the movements, but nonetheless the slogan “another world is possible” invites this conceptualization. A free world, by this logic would be one that breaks away from the logic of capital altogether through a wide variety of practices of resignification and reterritorialization. The precise nature of that new structure was both unknown and in dispute. In effect, play operated as the medium that allowed these competing visions to coexist and coagulate into a social network. At this point, play takes on a double function. It both constitutes the medium in which the nexus of state and capital is challenged and the instantiation of another possible world radically opposed to both state and capital. We are offered an image of two worlds within the logic of this model, the secretive negotiations of state and capital that seek domination and a world understood through the free association and mutual aid constituted by play.
The group that has made the greatest attempt to mobilize this logic has been the anarchist collective, Crimethinc. Crimethinc was initially formed in 1996, but its visibility increased substantially due to the protests from 1999 to 2001. The group claims that it has no “platform or ideology” and that it operates as a free association of like-minded individuals who political conceptions are constantly in flux. It also allows for the possibility of non-affiliated groups of individuals to take actions in its name. The group also operates a publishing house that has produced a substantial amount of documents in the form of newsletters, posters, books, etc. It has published a number of polemical tracts, poetry, and even a Kerouacesque novel. This work has simultaneously attracted very little mainstream attention, and has become a dominant ideological force within anarchist circles, particularly young anarchist circles. This paradox has been able to occur due to the infrastructure of independent and alternative bookstores and infoshops that can be found nationally and globally. They have also contributed to those bookshops staying open through their sales, which are comparable to the sales of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.
The message that these publications offer has been fairly consistent despite the claims that the collective is continual flux. This message has taken on a level of political sophistication and maturity as the publications have occurred. For instance, there is a recognition of white privilege in later publications, that one cannot find in the initial publication, Days of War, Nights of Love. However, there is a theoretical thread that runs throughout the publications that links up to a concept of play that can be found more fully developed in that early publication. This book also remains the best selling book of the collective, and therefore the book that is most commonly taken as the group’s political philosophy. There is something remarkably paradoxical in its discursive operations. The book can be described as both extraordinarily naïve in its theoretical sophistication and a fairly sophisticated understanding of marketing. Although it would be tempting to read this contradiction through a lens of manipulation, I will eventually argue that the very sincerity of the contradiction is move revelatory.
The word play only appears once in Days of War, Nights of Love; however it appears a critical moment in the book. The chapters are organized in a roughly alphabetical order, moving from A for Anarchy to W for Work. The reference to play occurs at the end of the chapter entitled politics. The chapter makes an argument that former modes of radical politics have failed to create the changes that they have ostensibly attempting to create because its ‘irrelevance.’ This irrelevance is revealed by boredom. This boredom points to a loss of what the collective sees as an origin of revolutionary, which might be called a vitalist excitement. A genuinely radical politic points to some sort of authentic origin that constitutes both a means and ends of a new society. Contained within this theorization is a rejection of any mode of instrumentality. This is phrased in the following manner. “Acting in a way that is tedious, tiresome, and oppressive can only perpetuate tedium, fatigue, and oppression in our lives.” (Crimethinc 191) The essential joy and light of the revolution is opposed by the dull grey of responsibility. For the folks of Crimethinc, the opposition set up earlier in the paper can operate in terms of a moralistic obligation of capital versus the novum or novelty of the revolution, a novum that is both completely natural and constantly in danger of destruction through tedious analysis. Play then becomes the privileged site for this sort of revolt. The group ends with a call to action. “Join us in making the “revolution” a game; a game played for the highest stakes of all, but a joyous carefree game nonetheless!” (Crimethinc 192)
This theory of the spontaneous nature of revolt is linked to a particular theory of desire, which can be called both utopian and naïve. Desire becomes the authentic force that points to an ethos of freedom. The book opens with what could read as an advertising pamphlet that opposes an empty homogenous conception of time to another possibility only expressed negatively. It states, “How are you affected by holding back your desires?” It then follows with a list of things lost to the ‘delay or denial of pleasure.’ This list emphasizes the spontaneous, the authentic, the animal, and the wild. This is also linked to both the possibility of adventure and the possibility of danger. Tapping into this space creates the possibility of not only being a subject rather than an object in your life, but it also allows you to become the figure of the sovereign itself. But this sovereignty that is gained from play, is a very strange one. It is placed in opposition to power. For the collective, a gaze of power is necessarily not a gaze of desire. Power is necessarily linked to the repressive, the restrictive, the boring.
This element links the collective’s ideas to a strain of individualist anarchist thought, particularly the work of Max Stirner. Stirner argues for a radically nominalist concept of the individual that emphasizes the autonomy of that individual that is linked to the unique ‘properties’ held by each individual that must be absolutely respected against any collective concepualization that will damage that property. The sovereignty invoked by Crimethinc ties directly into that idea of the individual, and explains why the group is so terrified of being identified as a movement. Stirner feels that any ‘meta-narrative’ is both a fiction and a substitution of the essential qualities of the individual. This thread runs through to the work of Crimethinc when they reject the notion of movement. A movement is no longer a “convergence of unique desires.,” which would protect and foster the individual properties of those desires. Instead, it becomes “a standard for what those desires should be—or at best a model for how to integrate different desires.” (Crimethinc 168) The transindividualism of the movement then becomes the space of inauthenticity and repression.
This radically individualist conception produces a fairly substantial contradiction with the conception of collectivity emphasized by the idea of mutual aid as developed by Kropotkin, which is also invoked by the group through the invocation of love and community as equally authentic sites of radical possibility. Kropotkin developed the theory in response to the popular uptake of Darwin in the second half of the 19th century. Rather than emphasizing competition as the key to strength and survival of a species, Kropotkin looks at the modes of cooperation that occur both in the animal world as well as the human world, and argues that it is this cooperation that is the key to survival. In effect, the theory of mutual aid challenges the notion that society needs the vertical dimension of sovereignty and the state in order to produce social space. At the same time, this conception challenges the earlier notion of the individual as theorized by Stirner. Similarly, any invocation of community necessarily undoes the essential qualities of an individual, particularly a conceptualization that rejects the liberal distinction between public and private as Crimethinc does.
Play becomes the way of negotiating through this substantial contradiction between the sovereign individual and the collective vision of mutual aid. It allow for mutual aid to be marked off as the space of converging individual desires, rather than marking an “integration” of desire that necessarily marks the space of movement. It stitches together the contradictory narrative of the individual’s desire as sovereign and the modes of collectivity that are implicit within the idea of mutual aid. This stitching doesn’t constitute either a synthesis of these contradictory elements nor is a form of mediation. Instead, play allows for an oscillation between the two that operates less as a mode of integration and more as an eclecticism that skips between rule system to rule system in a manner equivalent to the music of Mike Patton or John Zorn. This movement between contradictory structures of subject formation is both opportunistic in its negative valiance and improvisitory in positive one, but it cannot be read as a mode of instrumental cynicism. This reading is thrown out precisely because of the emphasis on the element of spontaneity that is emphasized within the conceptualization of play. Instead, it needs to be read on the unconscious terrain of ideology, remembering that when this term is invoked it is meant as a starting point of the class struggle and not false consciousness.
Before we move into the contradictions and problems with this mode of improvisation or opportunism, I want to emphasis its ability to mobilize particular people. Within the youth community of anarchists, Crimethinc has taken on what might be called a hegemonic role. I think that this has occurred for three significant reasons. The first is that it argues that there is an intuitive revolutionary drive within young people and that they already have something to contribute to politics. Simultaneously, it cultivates this revolutionary subjectivity through the set of divisions that have already been discussed. Despite its dismissal of subculture, it constitutes a set of social networks based on style of dress, speech and other modes of signification. Last, it offers open form of sexuality that challenges the cynical forms of sexual education that have come about in the pas twenty years. As frustrating as the structure can be, it has become the mode of mobilization for middle class anarchists.
But at the same time, there have been some serious contradictions that have shown some of the problems of this combination of free desire, play, and spontaneity. The most immediate of those is the question of sexual assault within activist communities. Within a year of the major protests, anarchist sub-cultures across the country were being torn apart by issues of sexual violence. Although Crimethinc has no responsibility for this situation, it nonetheless provided a serious challenge to the narrative that the organization provided, a narrative that opposed a libratory desire with the repressive desire of the state. However, the minute one deals with the question of violence or sexual violence within intimate relationships, it becomes impossible to ignore the forms of power and domination that constitute the terrain of the social. The fantasy that domination is the sole property of a malignant sovereign who wields it against an innocent people becomes transparently untenable. To the extent that desire is constitutive force, it contains the possibility of producing radical and free social assemblages, but at the same time, it can create fascist or neo-liberal assemblages. To put it into other terms, it has to be understood as a terrain of struggle that cuts through us, rather than a source of authentic liberation.
Another immediate challenge came to the refusal of responsibility implicit in the concept of play as provided by Crimethinc through the question of raising children within activist communities. The most notable form of this challenge came through an essay put together by the group, RAMBL (the name had multiple meanings from Radical Activist Mother and Baby League to Radical Anarchist Mother and Baby League, with other variations.) The group challenged the ways that the activist and anarchist subculture made its spaces and activities inaccessible to parents and children through indifference, neglect, and, at times, hostility. The group demanded that meetings, protests, and collective spaces responded to the needs of children, through meaningful forms of childcare, spaces that were safe for children, and safe spaces in protests. Indirectly, they critiqued the subculture’s investment in spontaneity, precisely because of the ways that discourse privileged certain bodies, and restricted others. They demanded democratic planning to create new forms of access, and as significantly, they demanded that men take responsibility and sacrifice a portion of their privileged autonomy in order to contribute to this labor. In effect, they returned to a politics of reproductive labor, which cannot be accounted for within the Crimethinc narrative, despite the move on the part of the group towards a far less heteronormative concept of sexuality.
The two examples point to moments in which Crimethinc opportunistic linkage of the individualist and collectivist strains of anarchism break down. They break down because the forms of homogeneity that allow for that linkage to exist can no longer be assumed. In effect, the forms of common that must operate within the logic of mutual aid become labored, that is, they become deliberate, rather than assumed, frameworks created by their participants rather than created for them. It’s notable that the audience for Crimethinc is homogenous in age and race, although not always in income status. Within that context, the obvious structures of power they operate in appear to be simplified, with the figure of the parent or principal standing in for the figure of the sovereign. However, this obfuscates the larger structures of capital that those figures operate within. When we look at the demands for immediacy and liberation made by Crimethinc, they have an uncanny resonance to the utopian promise made by the commodity form itself. This logic, which is most evident in advertising, continually offers the promise of fulfillment through the act of purchase. In its conceptualization of an opposition to the fantasy of a stultifying and conformist capitalist designed around the mass subject, the Crimethinc collective have ignored the transformations that have occurred within the logic of capitalist accumulation. Unwittingly, they have uncritically replicated the logic of the pleasure of the commodity of late capitalism. That promise and its falsity must be engaged with within our struggles, but critically. Crimethinc is absolutely correct in its demand for a politics of joy, but its embrace of the logic of the commodity doesn’t provide for the radicality needed to challenge the deceit, misery, and violence of capital. It does not take the production of the common seriously enough, the only space which can create revolutionary politics of joy.
As an opening salvo I would like to recall a pair of images that I recall from a local Quebec newspaper at the time of the Quebec City FTAA protests in 2001. The first image showed a nude man mooning the authorities in front of the fence keeping the protesters away from the conference. The man is replaced by the blast of water in the second image. At this point, there is something similar to my topic at this point in the United States. The a mode of protest organization appeared spontaneously at the 1999 protests at Seattle, and were quickly blown off the maps, if not by the violence of Genoa, then by the extraordinary state violence that came in the wake of the attacks that occurred on September 11. Between those dates a whole series of massive protests occurred at the sites of international trade conferences. The tactics, now effaced by the despondency created by the war and the security crackdown, drew directly from the discourse of play, and made that discourse productive for the protests. The first purpose could be considered the more instrumental of the purposes. The image of play became a way of partially disguising militant action. For instance, a puppet theater disguised shields at a Minneapolis Mayday protest as large puppets. The second purpose becomes both less instrumentalized and considerably more complex. Play also operates as a temporary reconstruction of space and time within the protest. In effect, play becomes the medium in which a ‘new world’ is shown to be possible, both at the constitutive level in the interactions between the protestors and at the level of representation.
There are a number of ways you could take this project. You could go in a historical direction. This would entail producing a narrative of the history of the use of play in social protest movements. After all, play has been a factor in those movements for a considerably longer time than the initial snapshot allows. This would be a narrative that discussed the role played in the practices of the new left in the sixties, the new social movements of the 70’ and 80’s, etc. It would be a story of the yippies, the diggers, ACT-UP and others. A second direction could be to destabilize this conceptualization by provincializing, and asking to what extent does this concept relate to struggles outside the extraordinary comfort granted to fairly comfortable members of the overdeveloped world. These questions will come up in this talk at points, but I want to stay focused on the concept of play as it was developed in this context. My intention is to begin with an examination of the idea from within the logic of the movement. This will draw on the work of an anarchist collective, Crimethinc that took part in the demonstrations and produced a narrative of those events through its various polemics in both book and pamphlet form. The contradictions and problems of this conceptualization will become readily apparent and the talk will shift to work through those issues in order to read the importance of play as a symptom of the structures of post-fordist capital as much as revolt against it. This demystification puts us in the position to re-read play as an ideological construction, although a crucial one within context of the contemporary class struggle.
To return to the initial conceptualization of play, it becomes immediately obvious that this conceptualization bares a strong resemblance to the conception of the space and time of the carnival that Bakhtin presents in his work on Rabelais. For Bakhtin, “the basic carnival nucleus… is by no means a purely artistic form nor a spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play.” (Bakhtin 7) Play becomes the key term to understand the radicality of the time and space of the carnival. It operates as a mode of stylization that rewrites the social codes of the time and place. Bakhtin calls it a borderline precisely because of this. It deliberately reshapes and reverses the ideological codes, but this reshaping doesn’t occur purely as an act of spectacle or representation. Instead, it operates as an idealization of radically different set of social relations.
This loops back neatly into the structure of the protests. One of the continual messages of the organizers of the protests was that manner in which the protest took place constituted a model for the type of society that they would like to see. The most obvious example of this was the processes of decision making that were employed for the demonstrations. These processes were open and based on large consensus oriented meetings. But the very way that space was reterritorialized within the large protest sites entered into this as well. Puppets, games, people in costumes as well as other events were used to transform commercial spaces into spaces of utopian imagination. These tactics ranged from simple sit-ins to the destruction of private property. But despite the frequently vitriolic disputes around the question of tactics, a common thread ran through them that emphasized precisely this ability to transform social space. The sit in, the spontaneous puppet theater, or the shattered windows of a Starbucks constituted a glimpse into another world that existed outside the instrumental logic of capital.
Although the rhetoric of the movement feels a bit bombastic and unreal at this point, its important to recognize that this was taken seriously by state authorities as well as by activists. Taken seriously, this play world is no less universal in its logic than the world constructed by capital. To return to the question of the carnival, Bakhtin notes, “While the carnival lasts, there is no life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.” (Bakhtin 7) The idealization discussed above necessarily links into a notion of totality, or universality. Those terms would be anathema to the movements, but nonetheless the slogan “another world is possible” invites this conceptualization. A free world, by this logic would be one that breaks away from the logic of capital altogether through a wide variety of practices of resignification and reterritorialization. The precise nature of that new structure was both unknown and in dispute. In effect, play operated as the medium that allowed these competing visions to coexist and coagulate into a social network. At this point, play takes on a double function. It both constitutes the medium in which the nexus of state and capital is challenged and the instantiation of another possible world radically opposed to both state and capital. We are offered an image of two worlds within the logic of this model, the secretive negotiations of state and capital that seek domination and a world understood through the free association and mutual aid constituted by play.
The group that has made the greatest attempt to mobilize this logic has been the anarchist collective, Crimethinc. Crimethinc was initially formed in 1996, but its visibility increased substantially due to the protests from 1999 to 2001. The group claims that it has no “platform or ideology” and that it operates as a free association of like-minded individuals who political conceptions are constantly in flux. It also allows for the possibility of non-affiliated groups of individuals to take actions in its name. The group also operates a publishing house that has produced a substantial amount of documents in the form of newsletters, posters, books, etc. It has published a number of polemical tracts, poetry, and even a Kerouacesque novel. This work has simultaneously attracted very little mainstream attention, and has become a dominant ideological force within anarchist circles, particularly young anarchist circles. This paradox has been able to occur due to the infrastructure of independent and alternative bookstores and infoshops that can be found nationally and globally. They have also contributed to those bookshops staying open through their sales, which are comparable to the sales of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.
The message that these publications offer has been fairly consistent despite the claims that the collective is continual flux. This message has taken on a level of political sophistication and maturity as the publications have occurred. For instance, there is a recognition of white privilege in later publications, that one cannot find in the initial publication, Days of War, Nights of Love. However, there is a theoretical thread that runs throughout the publications that links up to a concept of play that can be found more fully developed in that early publication. This book also remains the best selling book of the collective, and therefore the book that is most commonly taken as the group’s political philosophy. There is something remarkably paradoxical in its discursive operations. The book can be described as both extraordinarily naïve in its theoretical sophistication and a fairly sophisticated understanding of marketing. Although it would be tempting to read this contradiction through a lens of manipulation, I will eventually argue that the very sincerity of the contradiction is move revelatory.
The word play only appears once in Days of War, Nights of Love; however it appears a critical moment in the book. The chapters are organized in a roughly alphabetical order, moving from A for Anarchy to W for Work. The reference to play occurs at the end of the chapter entitled politics. The chapter makes an argument that former modes of radical politics have failed to create the changes that they have ostensibly attempting to create because its ‘irrelevance.’ This irrelevance is revealed by boredom. This boredom points to a loss of what the collective sees as an origin of revolutionary, which might be called a vitalist excitement. A genuinely radical politic points to some sort of authentic origin that constitutes both a means and ends of a new society. Contained within this theorization is a rejection of any mode of instrumentality. This is phrased in the following manner. “Acting in a way that is tedious, tiresome, and oppressive can only perpetuate tedium, fatigue, and oppression in our lives.” (Crimethinc 191) The essential joy and light of the revolution is opposed by the dull grey of responsibility. For the folks of Crimethinc, the opposition set up earlier in the paper can operate in terms of a moralistic obligation of capital versus the novum or novelty of the revolution, a novum that is both completely natural and constantly in danger of destruction through tedious analysis. Play then becomes the privileged site for this sort of revolt. The group ends with a call to action. “Join us in making the “revolution” a game; a game played for the highest stakes of all, but a joyous carefree game nonetheless!” (Crimethinc 192)
This theory of the spontaneous nature of revolt is linked to a particular theory of desire, which can be called both utopian and naïve. Desire becomes the authentic force that points to an ethos of freedom. The book opens with what could read as an advertising pamphlet that opposes an empty homogenous conception of time to another possibility only expressed negatively. It states, “How are you affected by holding back your desires?” It then follows with a list of things lost to the ‘delay or denial of pleasure.’ This list emphasizes the spontaneous, the authentic, the animal, and the wild. This is also linked to both the possibility of adventure and the possibility of danger. Tapping into this space creates the possibility of not only being a subject rather than an object in your life, but it also allows you to become the figure of the sovereign itself. But this sovereignty that is gained from play, is a very strange one. It is placed in opposition to power. For the collective, a gaze of power is necessarily not a gaze of desire. Power is necessarily linked to the repressive, the restrictive, the boring.
This element links the collective’s ideas to a strain of individualist anarchist thought, particularly the work of Max Stirner. Stirner argues for a radically nominalist concept of the individual that emphasizes the autonomy of that individual that is linked to the unique ‘properties’ held by each individual that must be absolutely respected against any collective concepualization that will damage that property. The sovereignty invoked by Crimethinc ties directly into that idea of the individual, and explains why the group is so terrified of being identified as a movement. Stirner feels that any ‘meta-narrative’ is both a fiction and a substitution of the essential qualities of the individual. This thread runs through to the work of Crimethinc when they reject the notion of movement. A movement is no longer a “convergence of unique desires.,” which would protect and foster the individual properties of those desires. Instead, it becomes “a standard for what those desires should be—or at best a model for how to integrate different desires.” (Crimethinc 168) The transindividualism of the movement then becomes the space of inauthenticity and repression.
This radically individualist conception produces a fairly substantial contradiction with the conception of collectivity emphasized by the idea of mutual aid as developed by Kropotkin, which is also invoked by the group through the invocation of love and community as equally authentic sites of radical possibility. Kropotkin developed the theory in response to the popular uptake of Darwin in the second half of the 19th century. Rather than emphasizing competition as the key to strength and survival of a species, Kropotkin looks at the modes of cooperation that occur both in the animal world as well as the human world, and argues that it is this cooperation that is the key to survival. In effect, the theory of mutual aid challenges the notion that society needs the vertical dimension of sovereignty and the state in order to produce social space. At the same time, this conception challenges the earlier notion of the individual as theorized by Stirner. Similarly, any invocation of community necessarily undoes the essential qualities of an individual, particularly a conceptualization that rejects the liberal distinction between public and private as Crimethinc does.
Play becomes the way of negotiating through this substantial contradiction between the sovereign individual and the collective vision of mutual aid. It allow for mutual aid to be marked off as the space of converging individual desires, rather than marking an “integration” of desire that necessarily marks the space of movement. It stitches together the contradictory narrative of the individual’s desire as sovereign and the modes of collectivity that are implicit within the idea of mutual aid. This stitching doesn’t constitute either a synthesis of these contradictory elements nor is a form of mediation. Instead, play allows for an oscillation between the two that operates less as a mode of integration and more as an eclecticism that skips between rule system to rule system in a manner equivalent to the music of Mike Patton or John Zorn. This movement between contradictory structures of subject formation is both opportunistic in its negative valiance and improvisitory in positive one, but it cannot be read as a mode of instrumental cynicism. This reading is thrown out precisely because of the emphasis on the element of spontaneity that is emphasized within the conceptualization of play. Instead, it needs to be read on the unconscious terrain of ideology, remembering that when this term is invoked it is meant as a starting point of the class struggle and not false consciousness.
Before we move into the contradictions and problems with this mode of improvisation or opportunism, I want to emphasis its ability to mobilize particular people. Within the youth community of anarchists, Crimethinc has taken on what might be called a hegemonic role. I think that this has occurred for three significant reasons. The first is that it argues that there is an intuitive revolutionary drive within young people and that they already have something to contribute to politics. Simultaneously, it cultivates this revolutionary subjectivity through the set of divisions that have already been discussed. Despite its dismissal of subculture, it constitutes a set of social networks based on style of dress, speech and other modes of signification. Last, it offers open form of sexuality that challenges the cynical forms of sexual education that have come about in the pas twenty years. As frustrating as the structure can be, it has become the mode of mobilization for middle class anarchists.
But at the same time, there have been some serious contradictions that have shown some of the problems of this combination of free desire, play, and spontaneity. The most immediate of those is the question of sexual assault within activist communities. Within a year of the major protests, anarchist sub-cultures across the country were being torn apart by issues of sexual violence. Although Crimethinc has no responsibility for this situation, it nonetheless provided a serious challenge to the narrative that the organization provided, a narrative that opposed a libratory desire with the repressive desire of the state. However, the minute one deals with the question of violence or sexual violence within intimate relationships, it becomes impossible to ignore the forms of power and domination that constitute the terrain of the social. The fantasy that domination is the sole property of a malignant sovereign who wields it against an innocent people becomes transparently untenable. To the extent that desire is constitutive force, it contains the possibility of producing radical and free social assemblages, but at the same time, it can create fascist or neo-liberal assemblages. To put it into other terms, it has to be understood as a terrain of struggle that cuts through us, rather than a source of authentic liberation.
Another immediate challenge came to the refusal of responsibility implicit in the concept of play as provided by Crimethinc through the question of raising children within activist communities. The most notable form of this challenge came through an essay put together by the group, RAMBL (the name had multiple meanings from Radical Activist Mother and Baby League to Radical Anarchist Mother and Baby League, with other variations.) The group challenged the ways that the activist and anarchist subculture made its spaces and activities inaccessible to parents and children through indifference, neglect, and, at times, hostility. The group demanded that meetings, protests, and collective spaces responded to the needs of children, through meaningful forms of childcare, spaces that were safe for children, and safe spaces in protests. Indirectly, they critiqued the subculture’s investment in spontaneity, precisely because of the ways that discourse privileged certain bodies, and restricted others. They demanded democratic planning to create new forms of access, and as significantly, they demanded that men take responsibility and sacrifice a portion of their privileged autonomy in order to contribute to this labor. In effect, they returned to a politics of reproductive labor, which cannot be accounted for within the Crimethinc narrative, despite the move on the part of the group towards a far less heteronormative concept of sexuality.
The two examples point to moments in which Crimethinc opportunistic linkage of the individualist and collectivist strains of anarchism break down. They break down because the forms of homogeneity that allow for that linkage to exist can no longer be assumed. In effect, the forms of common that must operate within the logic of mutual aid become labored, that is, they become deliberate, rather than assumed, frameworks created by their participants rather than created for them. It’s notable that the audience for Crimethinc is homogenous in age and race, although not always in income status. Within that context, the obvious structures of power they operate in appear to be simplified, with the figure of the parent or principal standing in for the figure of the sovereign. However, this obfuscates the larger structures of capital that those figures operate within. When we look at the demands for immediacy and liberation made by Crimethinc, they have an uncanny resonance to the utopian promise made by the commodity form itself. This logic, which is most evident in advertising, continually offers the promise of fulfillment through the act of purchase. In its conceptualization of an opposition to the fantasy of a stultifying and conformist capitalist designed around the mass subject, the Crimethinc collective have ignored the transformations that have occurred within the logic of capitalist accumulation. Unwittingly, they have uncritically replicated the logic of the pleasure of the commodity of late capitalism. That promise and its falsity must be engaged with within our struggles, but critically. Crimethinc is absolutely correct in its demand for a politics of joy, but its embrace of the logic of the commodity doesn’t provide for the radicality needed to challenge the deceit, misery, and violence of capital. It does not take the production of the common seriously enough, the only space which can create revolutionary politics of joy.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Contributing to the chorus on Elizabeth Moon and WisCon, plus a few thoughts on the concept of the "safe space"
I'm not sure to the extent that my audience is aware of the conflicts that occur within fandom, but a recent blog posting by science fiction author Elizabeth Moon, dealing with Muslims, citizenship, and the Islamic community center has created such a conflict. There has been some thoughts on the topic from a number of sources, most notably a set of very good posts by K. Tempest Bradford, but it made me think of a few things that fall outside of those posts.
The basic situation is pretty easy to explain. Moon posted a long, rambling post that took on the controversy surrounding the proposed Islamic community center in New York. In her response to that controversy, she reproduced a problematic set of assumptions about Muslims, the religious tenets of Islam, and the history of immigration in this country. Through those faulty assumptions, Moon goes on to make a set of claims about why the community center in New York should not be built. These blog postings became a significant controversy within the fan subculture of science fiction because of Moon's status as an author, but probably more significantly, because she is going to be a guest of honor at the largest feminist science fiction convention, WisCon. I'm not going to directly link to her blog post, but I'll give you a sense of the rhetoric through two of the paragraphs in her missive.
Moon states,
"When an Islamic group decided to build a memorial center at/near the site of the 9/11 attack, they should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people. Not only were the attackers Islamic--and not only did the Islamic world in general show indecent glee about the attack, but this was only the last of many attacks on citizens and installations of this country which Islamic groups proudly claimed credit for. That some Muslims died in the attacks is immaterial--does not wipe out the long, long chain of Islamic hostility. It would have been one thing to have the Muslim victims' names placed with the others, and identified there as Muslims--but to use that site to proselytize for the religion that lies behind so many attacks on the innocent (I cannot forget the Jewish man in a wheelchair pushed over the side of the ship to drown, or Maj. Nadal's attack on soldiers at Fort Hood) was bound to raise a stink. It is hard to believe that those making the application did not know that--did not anticipate it--and were not, in a way, probing to see if they could start a controversy. If they did not know, then they did not know enough about the culture into which they had moved. Though I am not angry about it, and have not spoken out in opposition, I do think it was a rude and tactless thing to propose (and, if carried out, to do.)
I know--I do not dispute--that many Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could. I do not dispute that there are moderate, even liberal, Muslims, that many Muslims have all the virtues of civilized persons and are admirable in all those ways. I am totally, 100%, appalled at those who want to burn the Koran (which, by the way, I have read in English translation, with the same attention I've given to other holy books) or throw paint on mosques or beat up Muslims. But Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they've had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing...but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues--and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism. What I heard, in my area, after 9/11, was not condemnation by local mosques of the attack--but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened. Our church, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a "peace and reconciliation" program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent Muslims but the attackers themselves. It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque--but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was--totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence." (Moon)
The problems with this statement should be fairly obvious, but I'll take some time to work through those issues. The first and most obvious problem is that despite Moon's insistence that she isn't doing this, she takes the behavior of a few Muslims and allows them to stand in for a complex religious belief system of two billion people, a belief system that far from unified, is defined by debates, factions, and radically different approaches to textual exegesis. The reduction of a group of people to a small, static group of features is, as critical theorist Stuart Hall notes, at the very heart of stereotyping, the logic of racism and empire. Any attempt to define Islam as a form of unified other, is, at its heart, bigoted. The violent actions that lead to her fantasy of a 'long chain' of an essentialized Islam need to be understood within the complex history of the region, a history of European domination and colonialism. None of this excuses any particular action, but it demands that any act of judgment focus on particular conflicts, political formations, etc. Islam, as such, does not exist. It is as multiple as liberalism, marxism, or Christianity. (Another point that should be made is that Moon also is taking up a common trope of Islamophobes, that is 'racialization', collapsing the figure of the Muslim and the Arab together to further the project of demonization.)
The particular narrative that Moon is offering has a long history, one that has legitimated systemic racialized domination of large sections of the world. It operates not only by the logic of stereotyping discussed above, but it's system of classification operates through a logic of the absence of coevalence. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian noted that the discipline of anthropology operated through a logic of positing a temporal difference between the anthropologist and the 'primitive' subjects that he studies. That subject is not formed within the social relations of the modern world. He is not modern. He operates within a different time than our own, the past, which is primitive and less formed than us. He instead can only be understood as a operating within a logic of our past. Moon takes up this logic when she implicitly argues that acts of violence can be discussed outside the context of the global political forces that shape those actions. She, in effect, argues that the Muslim can only be understood within her or his 'primitive' and 'violent' roots, rather than as modern subjects shaped through the very modern forms of violence and domination that exist today. Her particular attempt to deflect this criticism by posing the good moderate or liberal Muslim against the bad fundamentalist has its own colonialist legacy, operating neatly besides the binary of the good and bad colonial subject, defined by a set of narratives of assimilation. If you are looking for more material, I would recommend both Edward Said's Covering Islam, and his more academically oriented, Orientalism. Although both are over ten years old, they are still the strongest analysis on the topic.
There is another, more subtle thread of resentment that runs through her narrative as well, though. Moon seems to feel that Muslims have been coddled by liberal society, that they have been allowed to hold onto a set of particularities that the 'rest of us' have had to abandon. Rather than recognizing the extraordinary measures of certain institutions as a necessary response to often violent forms of racism, Moon sees these as a form of 'forebearance' of peculiarity that other immigrant groups have not received. It is narrative of immigration that ignores the long history of foreign language papers in the country, of separate cultural institutions, etc. Unfortunately, this is an all too common fantasy of the immigration process. The narrative of assimilation that she takes up throughout the piece has two basic problems. The first is simple. The narrative of assimilation is false. The ostensibly voluntary immigration patterns of any particular group (this is a set of claims that doesn't work very well when thinking about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, although as James Baldwin points out, most immigration into the United States is not as voluntary as it has been represented) has never been defined by simple assimilation. Instead, we can invariably see a dialectical interaction, in which the synthesis is something quite different than what came before. (I can say more about this if you want.)
The second problem is the more serious one. The narrative that Moon is drawing on, a narrative that is both false and extraordinarily powerful, is precisely the narrative of the assimilation to whiteness. The demand of assimilation has always been defined by a legal definition of citizenship that operated through the logic of whiteness as property (See Cheryl L. Harris) In addition the work of David Roediger and James Baldwin through their work have shown the linkage between the acceptance of European immigrants as white and the acceptance of those very immigrants as citizens, a process that operates through their acceptance of the exclusionary logic of that racialization. (In effect, it is a process that simultaneously shifts and reinforces whiteness, while reinforcing the exclusion of the racialized other, the alien.) In effect, Moon's criticism can only be understood within this racial economy. Her anger that the Muslim population (once again, ignoring that Muslims in the United States are not simply Middle Eastern immigrants) have not assimilated is built upon an unconscious expectation that those populations embrace these forms of white citizenship. Although she would not recognize it, she is angry because the immigrant populations cannot or refuse to conform to a set of expectations of citizenship based on whiteness.
Within this context, it is very difficult not to be disappointed in the decision of WisCon's organizing committee not to revoke Moon's invitation. Certainly, the committee has acknowledged that Moon's word were offensive (Here is their response.) But, it's also a very unsatisfying response, primarily through its recourse to the language of 'difficult conversation.' I think that posing the need for dialogue with positions such as the one that Moon has expressed is disagreeable at best. WisCon was organized for explicitly political purposes, to create a feminist space for fandom. I believe that expressing the kind of bigotry contained in Moon's piece excludes her from that conversation, in the same way that most feminists have recognized that the sorts of transphobia expressed by Janice Raymond should exclude them from that space as well. This refusal is at the heart of any genuine intersectional analysis. I support difficult conversations, but a commitment to some meaningful form of anti-racism needs to be an expectation of that conversation.
This brings me to my final section. I suspect that much of what I have already said is a tad academic for a lot of folks who are (potentially) reading this. But, I think that this section may be a little less obvious. If you take a look at Tempest's posts, the primary subject that is being worked through is the question of 'safe spaces.' Tempest is troubled by who such spaces are for, what kinds of comfort are relevant, which forms are not relevant. Her posts pose the question of why it is important to create a 'safe space' for some people, while its equally important to challenge other forms of 'safety.' Without criticizing Tempest (who's position, I suspect, is close to mine) the larger conversation around the concept seems to have mystified this very concept. 'Safe Space' seems to have moved from a set of tactics (speech and behavioral regulations) that are designed to shift who has access to a particular community or are designed to allow for previously excluded forms of conversation into an end itself. It has moved from a mode of re-imagining the political to a neutralization of the political, per se.
The problem is that the form of neutralization imagined by Tempest's opponents (within this logic, Tempest is simply a representative of a set of networks of anti-racist fandom, a problematic form of representation, but not really mine) is itself a form of political inclusion and exclusion in and of itself. It re-formats a set of techniques designed to fight exclusion (racial, gender, class, etc.) as techniques to reinforce a particular mode of exclusion, whiteness. Her opponents do not want to face the discomfort of having this challenged. This is why its really important to recognize that the creation of a space space is always a technique directed towards another end. It can be used to create powerful feminist and anti-racist spaces, but we should recognize that misogynists and racists use these very techniques to create the opposite. It's use is always simultaneously an act of inclusion and exclusion, that is, a consciously political act.
The question then becomes what kind of political community will those actions produce, who will be excluded? who will be included? Every community consciously and unconsciously makes these decisions. From Schmitt's perspective, this is a very mild form of separation, after it's a separation of groups of people from tasty treats, gin and tonics, and conversations about C.J. Cherryh, not life or death. Our use of this technique should always have that political dimension in mind. Every formation of community at this point is constituted through modes of inclusion and exclusion, and one has the choice of reaffirming a community built on whiteness or patriarchy or attempting to disperse that community for another community formation. The purpose of the action is to combat bigotry, to produce experiments directed towards imagining a futurity without such forms of oppression.
Update: The invitation has been rescinded, and Moon has accepted this decision. There has been a bit of backlash directed towards the board and SF3. You might want to go over to their sites and express your support. I'm glad that this decision was made and thank the folks who made for taking this important decision.
The basic situation is pretty easy to explain. Moon posted a long, rambling post that took on the controversy surrounding the proposed Islamic community center in New York. In her response to that controversy, she reproduced a problematic set of assumptions about Muslims, the religious tenets of Islam, and the history of immigration in this country. Through those faulty assumptions, Moon goes on to make a set of claims about why the community center in New York should not be built. These blog postings became a significant controversy within the fan subculture of science fiction because of Moon's status as an author, but probably more significantly, because she is going to be a guest of honor at the largest feminist science fiction convention, WisCon. I'm not going to directly link to her blog post, but I'll give you a sense of the rhetoric through two of the paragraphs in her missive.
Moon states,
"When an Islamic group decided to build a memorial center at/near the site of the 9/11 attack, they should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people. Not only were the attackers Islamic--and not only did the Islamic world in general show indecent glee about the attack, but this was only the last of many attacks on citizens and installations of this country which Islamic groups proudly claimed credit for. That some Muslims died in the attacks is immaterial--does not wipe out the long, long chain of Islamic hostility. It would have been one thing to have the Muslim victims' names placed with the others, and identified there as Muslims--but to use that site to proselytize for the religion that lies behind so many attacks on the innocent (I cannot forget the Jewish man in a wheelchair pushed over the side of the ship to drown, or Maj. Nadal's attack on soldiers at Fort Hood) was bound to raise a stink. It is hard to believe that those making the application did not know that--did not anticipate it--and were not, in a way, probing to see if they could start a controversy. If they did not know, then they did not know enough about the culture into which they had moved. Though I am not angry about it, and have not spoken out in opposition, I do think it was a rude and tactless thing to propose (and, if carried out, to do.)
I know--I do not dispute--that many Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could. I do not dispute that there are moderate, even liberal, Muslims, that many Muslims have all the virtues of civilized persons and are admirable in all those ways. I am totally, 100%, appalled at those who want to burn the Koran (which, by the way, I have read in English translation, with the same attention I've given to other holy books) or throw paint on mosques or beat up Muslims. But Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they've had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing...but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues--and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism. What I heard, in my area, after 9/11, was not condemnation by local mosques of the attack--but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened. Our church, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a "peace and reconciliation" program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent Muslims but the attackers themselves. It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque--but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was--totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence." (Moon)
The problems with this statement should be fairly obvious, but I'll take some time to work through those issues. The first and most obvious problem is that despite Moon's insistence that she isn't doing this, she takes the behavior of a few Muslims and allows them to stand in for a complex religious belief system of two billion people, a belief system that far from unified, is defined by debates, factions, and radically different approaches to textual exegesis. The reduction of a group of people to a small, static group of features is, as critical theorist Stuart Hall notes, at the very heart of stereotyping, the logic of racism and empire. Any attempt to define Islam as a form of unified other, is, at its heart, bigoted. The violent actions that lead to her fantasy of a 'long chain' of an essentialized Islam need to be understood within the complex history of the region, a history of European domination and colonialism. None of this excuses any particular action, but it demands that any act of judgment focus on particular conflicts, political formations, etc. Islam, as such, does not exist. It is as multiple as liberalism, marxism, or Christianity. (Another point that should be made is that Moon also is taking up a common trope of Islamophobes, that is 'racialization', collapsing the figure of the Muslim and the Arab together to further the project of demonization.)
The particular narrative that Moon is offering has a long history, one that has legitimated systemic racialized domination of large sections of the world. It operates not only by the logic of stereotyping discussed above, but it's system of classification operates through a logic of the absence of coevalence. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian noted that the discipline of anthropology operated through a logic of positing a temporal difference between the anthropologist and the 'primitive' subjects that he studies. That subject is not formed within the social relations of the modern world. He is not modern. He operates within a different time than our own, the past, which is primitive and less formed than us. He instead can only be understood as a operating within a logic of our past. Moon takes up this logic when she implicitly argues that acts of violence can be discussed outside the context of the global political forces that shape those actions. She, in effect, argues that the Muslim can only be understood within her or his 'primitive' and 'violent' roots, rather than as modern subjects shaped through the very modern forms of violence and domination that exist today. Her particular attempt to deflect this criticism by posing the good moderate or liberal Muslim against the bad fundamentalist has its own colonialist legacy, operating neatly besides the binary of the good and bad colonial subject, defined by a set of narratives of assimilation. If you are looking for more material, I would recommend both Edward Said's Covering Islam, and his more academically oriented, Orientalism. Although both are over ten years old, they are still the strongest analysis on the topic.
There is another, more subtle thread of resentment that runs through her narrative as well, though. Moon seems to feel that Muslims have been coddled by liberal society, that they have been allowed to hold onto a set of particularities that the 'rest of us' have had to abandon. Rather than recognizing the extraordinary measures of certain institutions as a necessary response to often violent forms of racism, Moon sees these as a form of 'forebearance' of peculiarity that other immigrant groups have not received. It is narrative of immigration that ignores the long history of foreign language papers in the country, of separate cultural institutions, etc. Unfortunately, this is an all too common fantasy of the immigration process. The narrative of assimilation that she takes up throughout the piece has two basic problems. The first is simple. The narrative of assimilation is false. The ostensibly voluntary immigration patterns of any particular group (this is a set of claims that doesn't work very well when thinking about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, although as James Baldwin points out, most immigration into the United States is not as voluntary as it has been represented) has never been defined by simple assimilation. Instead, we can invariably see a dialectical interaction, in which the synthesis is something quite different than what came before. (I can say more about this if you want.)
The second problem is the more serious one. The narrative that Moon is drawing on, a narrative that is both false and extraordinarily powerful, is precisely the narrative of the assimilation to whiteness. The demand of assimilation has always been defined by a legal definition of citizenship that operated through the logic of whiteness as property (See Cheryl L. Harris) In addition the work of David Roediger and James Baldwin through their work have shown the linkage between the acceptance of European immigrants as white and the acceptance of those very immigrants as citizens, a process that operates through their acceptance of the exclusionary logic of that racialization. (In effect, it is a process that simultaneously shifts and reinforces whiteness, while reinforcing the exclusion of the racialized other, the alien.) In effect, Moon's criticism can only be understood within this racial economy. Her anger that the Muslim population (once again, ignoring that Muslims in the United States are not simply Middle Eastern immigrants) have not assimilated is built upon an unconscious expectation that those populations embrace these forms of white citizenship. Although she would not recognize it, she is angry because the immigrant populations cannot or refuse to conform to a set of expectations of citizenship based on whiteness.
Within this context, it is very difficult not to be disappointed in the decision of WisCon's organizing committee not to revoke Moon's invitation. Certainly, the committee has acknowledged that Moon's word were offensive (Here is their response.) But, it's also a very unsatisfying response, primarily through its recourse to the language of 'difficult conversation.' I think that posing the need for dialogue with positions such as the one that Moon has expressed is disagreeable at best. WisCon was organized for explicitly political purposes, to create a feminist space for fandom. I believe that expressing the kind of bigotry contained in Moon's piece excludes her from that conversation, in the same way that most feminists have recognized that the sorts of transphobia expressed by Janice Raymond should exclude them from that space as well. This refusal is at the heart of any genuine intersectional analysis. I support difficult conversations, but a commitment to some meaningful form of anti-racism needs to be an expectation of that conversation.
This brings me to my final section. I suspect that much of what I have already said is a tad academic for a lot of folks who are (potentially) reading this. But, I think that this section may be a little less obvious. If you take a look at Tempest's posts, the primary subject that is being worked through is the question of 'safe spaces.' Tempest is troubled by who such spaces are for, what kinds of comfort are relevant, which forms are not relevant. Her posts pose the question of why it is important to create a 'safe space' for some people, while its equally important to challenge other forms of 'safety.' Without criticizing Tempest (who's position, I suspect, is close to mine) the larger conversation around the concept seems to have mystified this very concept. 'Safe Space' seems to have moved from a set of tactics (speech and behavioral regulations) that are designed to shift who has access to a particular community or are designed to allow for previously excluded forms of conversation into an end itself. It has moved from a mode of re-imagining the political to a neutralization of the political, per se.
The problem is that the form of neutralization imagined by Tempest's opponents (within this logic, Tempest is simply a representative of a set of networks of anti-racist fandom, a problematic form of representation, but not really mine) is itself a form of political inclusion and exclusion in and of itself. It re-formats a set of techniques designed to fight exclusion (racial, gender, class, etc.) as techniques to reinforce a particular mode of exclusion, whiteness. Her opponents do not want to face the discomfort of having this challenged. This is why its really important to recognize that the creation of a space space is always a technique directed towards another end. It can be used to create powerful feminist and anti-racist spaces, but we should recognize that misogynists and racists use these very techniques to create the opposite. It's use is always simultaneously an act of inclusion and exclusion, that is, a consciously political act.
The question then becomes what kind of political community will those actions produce, who will be excluded? who will be included? Every community consciously and unconsciously makes these decisions. From Schmitt's perspective, this is a very mild form of separation, after it's a separation of groups of people from tasty treats, gin and tonics, and conversations about C.J. Cherryh, not life or death. Our use of this technique should always have that political dimension in mind. Every formation of community at this point is constituted through modes of inclusion and exclusion, and one has the choice of reaffirming a community built on whiteness or patriarchy or attempting to disperse that community for another community formation. The purpose of the action is to combat bigotry, to produce experiments directed towards imagining a futurity without such forms of oppression.
Update: The invitation has been rescinded, and Moon has accepted this decision. There has been a bit of backlash directed towards the board and SF3. You might want to go over to their sites and express your support. I'm glad that this decision was made and thank the folks who made for taking this important decision.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Addendum to the Organizing Article
I have been in a couple informal conversations about an earlier posting that I wrote, Provisional Questions Around Organizing. I thought I would work through that all to fragmentary reception history here in a slightly more formal manner. A sympathetic reader implied that my posting questioned the ability of campus activists to work on non-campus issues effectively. The difficulty is that the bulk of my comments were not about student activism per se, but were focused on a specific project within student activism, that is the fight against the austerity measures in the university, as well as within public schools and community and state colleges. In this sense, we can think about the anti-austerity struggles a potential space for an intersectional alliance that brings in a multiplicity of concerns and subject positions, but that it is not the only potential for such an alliance, and more significantly, that particular movement does not exhaust either the existing or potential forms of activism that exist on campus. To put it simply, this alliance may take up the time of a lot of activists right now, but its only a small part of student activism, particularly when we think historically.
If the article that I had responded to had made the simple claim that activists should continue to work on other subjects, and continue to see the university as connected to the larger world through a set of practical projects, I wouldn't have had a problem with the article. (To give a couple examples of what this might look like, you might drawn on the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) campaigns against South Africa and Israel, or the attempts on the part of anti-sweatshop activists to demand that university apparel is produced by non-sweatshop labor. In both cases, activists look to university specific behavior that links to the structures of oppression within the world at large.) Let's be honest, this would be a fairly modest claim, but certainly not one that one can argue against. We as students have resources that can directly and indirectly contribute to global social justice struggles, although perhaps without the hubris that our activism frequently takes.
However, the article that I was responding to wasn't making a set of claims about what student activists can do, but how the anti-austerity movement can directly link itself to a diverse series of other struggles, from the Arizona immigration law to the Oscar Grant case. My argument wasn't that students couldn't contribute productively to those struggles, even within the space of the campus, but that the movement as such could immediately create an effective coalitional front that fused those issues. Instead, I suggested that there were much more immediate connections we could make with teachers and students to transform our struggle from one that is often read as a special interest to one that represented the needs and desires of the middling classes. (More specifically, a step towards that. I don't think that it would create that effect in and of itself, but it would put us in a much stronger position to both formulate and put forwards such claims. However, those are a set of formulations that would need to be created through struggle, and not assumed ahead of time.)
I suspect that this assumption comes out of the following passage from my comments. I noted, "I'm not sure what can practically be done to support struggles against police violence beyond education and fundraising within the space of the university." To be honest, it is probably one of the weaker statements that I made in the piece, but there are a couple problematic assumptions in operation when one reads this as dismissive. 1. It assumes that education is a lesser form of activism. 2. And within that assumption, it operates within the false binary of speech and action. To make this specific, I think that student organized forums on the topics of the Arizona law and the Oscar Grant case are in themselves important forms of activism, and were as significant as the more publicized anti-austerity demonstrations. They are ways of demanding that students take issues of social justice seriously, and at the same time, they are direct demands on our institution about what it means to educate and to be educated. Speech and pedagogy are the topography of struggle in the educational institution, and to ignore them is to not take one of the role of one of the largest ideological state apparatuses seriously.
However, I would also acknowledge that it contains its own flaws as a statement. The most obvious is that it collapses the particularities of the Grant case into police violence tout court. In a certain sense, this statement replicates the flawed thinking of the article that it responds to, except that rather than collapsing a multiplicity of forms of state violence into a homology, it takes one incident and uses it to define the phrase 'police violence.' Certainly, anyone who has been to a protest over the past year knows that police violence occurs on campus, but it's connections to a case such as Grant's is tenuous at best. (I think that there are forms of racialization that can be found to run through campus police violence and the Grant case, but that kind of analysis has to operate on a more complex level than simply declaring the events as the same.) There may be ways of connecting the prison with education, but this is a different logic than simply equating all forms of oppression with the swing of a police truncheon. The second is that symbolic solidarity protests are irrelevant. This is simply untrue. These actions can often serve to show support for our friends and often they become ways of showing that a particular struggle has wider relevance. Often, we're not very good at doing this effectively, but that doesn't mean that there aren't ways of accomplishing these goals.
As someone who has some sense of the traditional structures of composition, I'm tempted to end this with synthetic conclusion, but in some sense, that would be kind of dishonest. This is more or less a string of thoughts that connect to some conversations that I have had that I wanted to work through. I think I'll leave it at that.
If the article that I had responded to had made the simple claim that activists should continue to work on other subjects, and continue to see the university as connected to the larger world through a set of practical projects, I wouldn't have had a problem with the article. (To give a couple examples of what this might look like, you might drawn on the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) campaigns against South Africa and Israel, or the attempts on the part of anti-sweatshop activists to demand that university apparel is produced by non-sweatshop labor. In both cases, activists look to university specific behavior that links to the structures of oppression within the world at large.) Let's be honest, this would be a fairly modest claim, but certainly not one that one can argue against. We as students have resources that can directly and indirectly contribute to global social justice struggles, although perhaps without the hubris that our activism frequently takes.
However, the article that I was responding to wasn't making a set of claims about what student activists can do, but how the anti-austerity movement can directly link itself to a diverse series of other struggles, from the Arizona immigration law to the Oscar Grant case. My argument wasn't that students couldn't contribute productively to those struggles, even within the space of the campus, but that the movement as such could immediately create an effective coalitional front that fused those issues. Instead, I suggested that there were much more immediate connections we could make with teachers and students to transform our struggle from one that is often read as a special interest to one that represented the needs and desires of the middling classes. (More specifically, a step towards that. I don't think that it would create that effect in and of itself, but it would put us in a much stronger position to both formulate and put forwards such claims. However, those are a set of formulations that would need to be created through struggle, and not assumed ahead of time.)
I suspect that this assumption comes out of the following passage from my comments. I noted, "I'm not sure what can practically be done to support struggles against police violence beyond education and fundraising within the space of the university." To be honest, it is probably one of the weaker statements that I made in the piece, but there are a couple problematic assumptions in operation when one reads this as dismissive. 1. It assumes that education is a lesser form of activism. 2. And within that assumption, it operates within the false binary of speech and action. To make this specific, I think that student organized forums on the topics of the Arizona law and the Oscar Grant case are in themselves important forms of activism, and were as significant as the more publicized anti-austerity demonstrations. They are ways of demanding that students take issues of social justice seriously, and at the same time, they are direct demands on our institution about what it means to educate and to be educated. Speech and pedagogy are the topography of struggle in the educational institution, and to ignore them is to not take one of the role of one of the largest ideological state apparatuses seriously.
However, I would also acknowledge that it contains its own flaws as a statement. The most obvious is that it collapses the particularities of the Grant case into police violence tout court. In a certain sense, this statement replicates the flawed thinking of the article that it responds to, except that rather than collapsing a multiplicity of forms of state violence into a homology, it takes one incident and uses it to define the phrase 'police violence.' Certainly, anyone who has been to a protest over the past year knows that police violence occurs on campus, but it's connections to a case such as Grant's is tenuous at best. (I think that there are forms of racialization that can be found to run through campus police violence and the Grant case, but that kind of analysis has to operate on a more complex level than simply declaring the events as the same.) There may be ways of connecting the prison with education, but this is a different logic than simply equating all forms of oppression with the swing of a police truncheon. The second is that symbolic solidarity protests are irrelevant. This is simply untrue. These actions can often serve to show support for our friends and often they become ways of showing that a particular struggle has wider relevance. Often, we're not very good at doing this effectively, but that doesn't mean that there aren't ways of accomplishing these goals.
As someone who has some sense of the traditional structures of composition, I'm tempted to end this with synthetic conclusion, but in some sense, that would be kind of dishonest. This is more or less a string of thoughts that connect to some conversations that I have had that I wanted to work through. I think I'll leave it at that.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Seeing Like a State and the logic of Capital: A Sort of Review
I came across this recently and thought it would be worth putting up for folks to take a look. I'm also in process of revising another paper dealing with the documentary, Night and Fog. It's largely a critique of Agamben (without naming him once in the article), but I need to turn the material on Derrida into not incomprehensible mush. In any case, here are my thoughts on the then somewhat recently published book by James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State.
I think it is worth remarking that James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is an analysis of not the state, but a very specific state, the capitalist state. This may seem initially suspect. After all, Scott doesn’t only focus on the state of high capitalism, but he focuses on the colonial state and the socialist state as well. These distinctions are based on the notion that the bourgeoisie is essential to the regime of capital, but recent Marxist scholarship has emphasized that the bourgeoisie is merely a mediator between the far larger forces of capital and the proletariat. In all the examples that Scott brings up, the desire of the regime is to create systems that are recognizable to the logic of exchange value. Perhaps more specifically, they live out a particular fantasy of creating a world in which the particularity of use value is vanquished by exchange. Scott argues that this fantasy is disastrous because society operates through structures of sociability that operate outside of the logic of exchange, a mutuality to use the language of anarchism. We need to first define the terms use value and exchange value as Marx uses them. Then move into the space of mutuality and show how this operates on a logic of mutuality. We will then look at the way the examples Scott draws on operate on this fantastic economy, one that operates more on an aesthetic then an empirical logic. The paper will end on a note of caution though, as the prescriptions that Scott presents are increasingly operating as a cultural dominant, albeit one that is creating stronger structures of domination, rather than lessening them.
I think it is worth remarking that James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is an analysis of not the state, but a very specific state, the capitalist state. This may seem initially suspect. After all, Scott doesn’t only focus on the state of high capitalism, but he focuses on the colonial state and the socialist state as well. These distinctions are based on the notion that the bourgeoisie is essential to the regime of capital, but recent Marxist scholarship has emphasized that the bourgeoisie is merely a mediator between the far larger forces of capital and the proletariat. In all the examples that Scott brings up, the desire of the regime is to create systems that are recognizable to the logic of exchange value. Perhaps more specifically, they live out a particular fantasy of creating a world in which the particularity of use value is vanquished by exchange. Scott argues that this fantasy is disastrous because society operates through structures of sociability that operate outside of the logic of exchange, a mutuality to use the language of anarchism. We need to first define the terms use value and exchange value as Marx uses them. Then move into the space of mutuality and show how this operates on a logic of mutuality. We will then look at the way the examples Scott draws on operate on this fantastic economy, one that operates more on an aesthetic then an empirical logic. The paper will end on a note of caution though, as the prescriptions that Scott presents are increasingly operating as a cultural dominant, albeit one that is creating stronger structures of domination, rather than lessening them.
Karl Marx opens Capital by creating an essential distinction between use-value and exchange value. Its particularity and immanence define use value. “Use-values are only realized in use or in consumption.”[1] A book is read, corn eaten, a play watched. The way that the object is consumed is unique. One could imagine an object imbued with a use value in any number of different ways. For instance, one could own a book to read it, or to use it as a prop in order to prop up a short end of a table, or perhaps even to accumulate a sense of prestige for the owner or as an aesthetic object. One could imagine a system of exchange based on this. However, it would be so complex and provincial as to be unrecognizable to anyone outside of its logic.
Exchange value is, on the other hand, the primary logic of the capitalist market. It operates on creating a third term in order to create a recognizable system of exchange in which every item can be made equal to any other object. There is a sort of common sense to this definition. It is after a sort of second nature at this point. However Marx points out something haunting this creation. Marx points out the following about the nature of exchange value.
“If we then disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labor. But even the product of labor has already been transformed in our hands. If we make the abstraction from its use-value, we abstract also from the material constituents and forms which make it a use-value. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished…. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labor…”[2]
The cautionary note in Marx’s explanation has a strong resonance with Scott’s work. Marx points out that a profound violence is being done to the object (in this case, the commodity). It is being stripped of all of its recognizable attributes. What is left is, extinguished of it ‘sensuous characteristics’, homogenous, and is left with an only ‘phantom-like objectivity.’ We can recognize something similar in the way that Scott describes the various structures of planning. Forest planning of Germany leaves out the complexities of the forest’s ecosystem. The high modernist city operates on the logic of isolated functions rather than recognizing the dense, complex, and overdetermined structures of the street life of a city, and the modernist agricultural planner ignores the dense structures of knowledge developed in the systems of earlier modes of agriculture.
All of these structures being ignored are structures of what might be called mutual aid, using Kropotkin’s language, or to use the term that Scott himself employs, Metis. Whatever term you use, this emphasizes on a knowledge produced through practice, a practice of the body and the complex interactions and negotiations of small social structures. Scott emphasizes that these interactions are themselves political, and frequently have their own structures of domination contained within them. An interesting example is the battles over the measurements that occur between lords and bondsmen. But these systems have a logic to them that is recognizable to the participants that are not as accessible to the outside eye. Scott’s example of the medieval city is an excellent example. It is produced through patterns of use that occur in the city over time. For instance, streets are frequently footpaths that have cobblestones added to them. These structures, which are produced through constant negotiations, are unrecognizable to outside forces.
Scott shows how these high-modernist plans are almost inevitably an attempt to destroy these forms of unintelligibility. This is primarily accomplished through a structure of simplification, a reduction of complex interactions to something that can be placed on map. Scott points out that these structures can take on a positive role when counter by forms of popular counter-power, but when those structures of popular counter-power are destroyed, high modernist planning can become disastrous. I would argue that these disastrous moments are precisely the moments that the state authorities try to enact the fantasy of capital, the destruction of use value in favor of a universal exchangeability. These fantasies take on an aesthetic form where the map, the chart, and the diagram map on perfectly with daily life.
This relates to an emphasis on the instrumental reason of rationalism. This rationalism turns the structures of bricolage into its irrational other, making the forms of revolt against its plan into modes of pathology, rather then modes of insurgency and counter-knowledge. The high modernist project is always constructed against an outside that is read as superstitious, authoritarian, and ignorant. They attempt to destroy those pathologies through the plan. In this, it becomes a plan for itself, rather than a plan in the service of use. As Scott points out,
The centralizing effects of Soviet collectivization and ujamaa villages were perfectly obvious. So are those of large irrigation projects, where the authorities decide when to release the water, how to distribute it, and what water fees to charge, or of agricultural plantations, where the workplace is supervised as if it were in a factory setting. For colonialized farmers, the effect of such centralization and expertise was a radical de-skilling of the cultivators themselves. (Scott 286)
These structures of domination thought of themselves as taking on a scientific reason as well as an empiricist engagement with daily life, but these projects are primarily created on an aesthetic image of the world, rather than an engagement with its materiality and practices. Let’s return to the image of the forest that was created in the 19th century by the German State. In its efforts to clearly demarcate and measure its resources as well as expand them, it transformed the dense structure of the forest into recognizable rows of trees. What’s more, it stripped away the density of diverse species to create a monocrop system of coniferous trees. It reduced a complex system to the logic of the exchange value of a commodity, a reduction to yards of timber. But the ‘pests’ and ‘underbrush’ that was so hated by this logic was crucial to the continued viability of the forest, and after catastrophe, the state had to introduce those elements back into the forest through artificial means.
The centralizing effects of Soviet collectivization and ujamaa villages were perfectly obvious. So are those of large irrigation projects, where the authorities decide when to release the water, how to distribute it, and what water fees to charge, or of agricultural plantations, where the workplace is supervised as if it were in a factory setting. For colonialized farmers, the effect of such centralization and expertise was a radical de-skilling of the cultivators themselves. (Scott 286)
These structures of domination thought of themselves as taking on a scientific reason as well as an empiricist engagement with daily life, but these projects are primarily created on an aesthetic image of the world, rather than an engagement with its materiality and practices. Let’s return to the image of the forest that was created in the 19th century by the German State. In its efforts to clearly demarcate and measure its resources as well as expand them, it transformed the dense structure of the forest into recognizable rows of trees. What’s more, it stripped away the density of diverse species to create a monocrop system of coniferous trees. It reduced a complex system to the logic of the exchange value of a commodity, a reduction to yards of timber. But the ‘pests’ and ‘underbrush’ that was so hated by this logic was crucial to the continued viability of the forest, and after catastrophe, the state had to introduce those elements back into the forest through artificial means.
Capitalist modernity has been a history of these disasters. Although Scott rightly emphasizes the catastrophes that have occurred within the space of post-revolutionary regimes and within late colonialism, we can find the same catastrophes in the dust bowls of the United States and the potato famine in Ireland. The difficulty seems to be in misrecognizing the ‘phantom-like objectivity’ of exchange for reality itself. Analogously, the simplifications of the map and the diagram are taken for the object itself, or perhaps better put; there is a desire to annihilate the object in favor of the model. But as Scott points out, the catastrophic nature of this can be seen in the everyday battles of the class struggle. “In a work to rule action, employees begin doing their jobs by meticulously observing every one of the rules and regulations and performing only the duties stated in their job descriptions. The result, fully intended in this case, is that the work grinds to a halt, or at least a snail’s pace. The workers achieve the practical effect of a walkout while remaining on the job…” (Scott 310) The plan without everyday life, without mutuality/use value/metis becomes a catastrophe; however, in most of the cases that Scott discusses, the catastrophe leads to mass death.
I would like to end on a bit of a cautionary note though. As Virno notes, the structures of what Scott calls metis, and what Virno calls “virtuosity”, however Virno points out that this new logic of performative virtuosity leads to the dialectic of dread and refuge in a new economy of domination.[3] The descriptions of metis that Scott gives can be equally valid as descriptions of new management techniques as well as modes of anarchist insurrection. One wonders if Scott has managed to accomplish what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri see in the work of post-modernist work. “The danger is that postmodernist theories focus their attention so resolutely on the old forms of power they are running from, with their heads turned backwards, that they tumble unwittingly into the welcoming arms of the new power.”
1. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 126.
2. Ibid., 128.
3. Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004)
4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 142.
1. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 126.
2. Ibid., 128.
3. Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004)
4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 142.
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