Developing the Politics of Terrorist Identification

In the wake of a number of posts on Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, I am compelled to return to what prompted my interest in both collectives. At the time of the arrest of the Tarnac Nine, the French government was toying with a novel legal category: the ‘pre-terrorist.’ I’m sure many readers encountered Alberto Toscano’s writings on the subject in both The Guardian and Radical Philosophy. I was taken by these writings and interested in the creation and deployment of the ‘pre-terrorist’ category. This interest led me to read a number of books on the subject of terrorism: Jasbir K. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages, Robin Morgan’s The Demon Lover, Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism, Leon Trotsky’s Marxism and Terrorism, Alberto Toscano’s Fanaticism as well as many others. It was also at this time that I was beginning to think about terrorism in relation to cosmopolitanism. Thus, at the time I was reading books on terrorism I was reading books on cosmopolitanism that, at moments, dealt with the fact and possibility of terrorism: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Richard Faulk and Andrew Strauss’s essay “The Deeper Challenges of Global Terrorism: A Democratizing Respsonse,” Jacque Derrida’s Rogues, most recently Fred Evans’ The Multivoiced Body, and others.

In a conference paper that I delivered last spring I was mostly interested in the work that the category of ‘pre-terrorism’ does. In one sense, the ‘pre-terrorist’ provides a politics of identification to the State that exists along developmental lines. Not only is the pre-terrorist something like a larval terrorist, the pre-terrorist is a perverse citizen—a person who does not conform to implicit cultural and political norms. In this way, citing the Minister of the Interior of France on the justification for the arrest of the Tarnac nine on charges of ‘pre-terrorism,’ seems appropriate: “they have adopted underground methods. They never use mobile telephones, and they live in areas where it is very difficult for the police to gather information without being spotted. They have managed to have, in the village of Tarnac, friendly relations with people who can warn them of the presence of strangers” (1). Thus, the pre-terrorist also exists, for the State in negation. Positively, in the sense that to be able to identify a ‘pre-terrorist’ and arrest him or her negates the full formation of the terrorist. Negatively, in the sense that the pre-terrorist’s sole purpose is to negate state organization of life first through non-criminal acts and second through physical violence.

Here, I am pushed to think about the category of the ‘pre-terrorist’ broadly. Here, I think I am compelled to ask who is and can come to be identified as a ‘pre-terrorist’ and why? If, as the French state implies, that the identification and arrest of pre-terrorists exists along developmental lines, then it would seem as if any person or community of people that do not adhere to implicit cultural and political norms exist in potential threat of ‘pre-terrorist’ identification and as potential threats to state life. One problem with this entire schema, if you haven’t already declared it, is that it is thoroughly vague when it isn’t entirely particular. That is, the category of the ‘pre-terrorist’ could include anyone but only, at the time of identification, includes specific people and specific actions.

To my knowledge, the Tarnac Nine have been the only group of people arrested on charges of ‘pre-terrorism.’ If I am wrong, please let me know, I would love to have some more avenues through which to think pre-terrorism. Thus, the formation and implementation of a ‘pre-terrorist’ legal category is somewhat limited to its historical moment. Yet, it’s not as if certain political groups are not surveilled and infiltrated by the US government, and I’m sure the French government as well, on a regular basis. In this way, certain groups are identified as potential threats to state life, and increasingly, with the rise of domestic terror charges, identified as potential terrorist threats. Here, I am beginning to think about two less popular but no less active forms of terrorism: Animal terrorism and Eco-terrorism (if anyone knows of something like an explicit state identified Queer terrorism that I could connect with Puar’s book I would also love to be informed). While both types of terrorism are considered to be subsets of a larger terrorist category, I think both kinds of terrorism are treated in their potential for full terrorist formation. For both animal terrorism and eco-terrorism exhibit ‘perverse socialities,’ or, at least what we could call non-standard socialities or specifically anti-capitalist socialities and anti-cruelty socialities. It is my sense that part of what allows the state to identify animal terrorists and eco-terrorists is an implicit form development to which animal and eco-terrorist do not cohere.

Further, I am interested in making a connection between pre- animal- and eco-terrorism and the increased presence of something like Disaster Studies at the university level. I think that the very same developmental assumptions could be at work in the pedagogy and practice of something like Disaster Studies. Here, then, my thinking about ‘pre-terrorism’ as something separate from the existence and writings of The Invisible Committee and Tiqqun is almost non-existent, but impetus for the project is there and growing. Further, I do not think that concepts like those I have begun to deal with in previous posts are entirely separate from questions of pre- animal- and eco-terrorism. In terms of a fuller project, I would also like to connect practices of secession and communization to the perverse socialities that, to the state, warrant some kind of terrorist categorization.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Alberto Toscano, Animal Terrorism, Eco-Terrorism, Jasbir k. Puar, Pre-Terrorism, Tarnac Nine

When Terrorists Moonwalk on TV

The above video features Khurram Sher, a would-be Canadian Idol, pathologist from Pakistan living in Canada, and accused terrorist. In retrospect, this is a brilliant moment of subversion. Sher, singing Avril Lavigne’s Complicated, competes for the title of Canadian pop-culture idol–a figure to be desired after, envied and adored. During, and ostensibly as part of his routine, he mimics and mocks iconic dance styles, claims to be savvy in the music catalogs of Hilary Duff and Avril Lavigne, and suggests that the judges democratize and vote for the song he should perform. While the show’s commentator treats Sher like Canada’s William Hung, Sher appears to be mocking the entire spectacle–especially through his song

I like, you the way you are
When we’re drivin’ in your car
And you’re, talkin’ to me one on one
But you become

Somebody else
‘Round everyone else
Your watchin’ your back
Like you can’t relax
You tryin’ to be cool
You look like a fool to me
Tell me

Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you’re actin’ like you’re somebody else
Gets me frustrated
Life’s like this you
You fall and you crawl and you break
And you take what you get, and you turn it into
Honestly, you promised me
I’m never gonna find you fake it
No no no

In any event, Sher’s arrest makes his performance all the more provocative, leaving us to imagine what the world would be like if Canada had somehow voted a ‘would-be terrorist’ into pop-culture celebrity. If only…

–MLA

——————————

It’s all about authenticity at the mall. –HJM

Filed under: Everything's Political, moonwalk, Terrorism

Secession Against Inoperativity

“All of our strength lies here: in a secession which cannot be recorded on Empire’s maps because it is neither secession from above nor from below, but secession from the middle.”
—Tiqqun, “Living and Wrestling” (Vivre-et-Lutter)

It is this statement that concludes Tiqqun’s “Living and Wrestling”, a short piece originally published in Tiqqun 2, translated by ALDMY. What is called secession from the middle, here, is contrasted to two legible forms of secession to Empire. Tiqqun writes, “Empire is well-armed for fighting against two types of secession that it recognizes: secession “from above” of the older ghettoes – the secession for example of global finance in relation to the “real economy” or of the imperial hyper-bourgeoisie from the rest of the biopolitical tissue—and the secession “from below” of the “no-go zones” –that of the cities, ghettoes, and slums.” Thus, secession from the middle denotes a third path, assumedly illegible to Empire, which, at the very least, confuses secession from above and secession from below if not begins to establish resistances not yet legible to Empire. And it is in this attempt that the conclusion to “Living and Wrestling” begins to think its introduction: “We have to invent a form of war such that the defeat of Empire will no longer be a task which kills us, but which lets us know how to live, to be more and more ALIVE.”

Here, I would like to address a point that Scu made as a result of my last post on secession and the commune. In what way does secession—here secession from the middle—speak to a Deleuzo-Guattarian practice of escape and in what way does it relate to and differ from Agamben’s notion of inoperativity? First, Deleuze and Guattari. Scu made it easy for me here; he gave me page numbers to reference as I respond. To contextualize the quotation from page 277 of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari claim that there are two major kinds of social investment, segregative and nomadic. It is the segregative kind that at least in part, on my reading, Tiqqun refers when they refer to Empire. However, it is the nomadic social investment that seems to be compatible with a notion of secession from the middle. A nomadic understanding of escape, or a schizorevolutionary understanding of escape, is what “breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles its machines and its groups-in-fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery—proceeding in an inverse fashion from that of the other pole” (277). Here, the other pole existing as the psychic and social investment in the family, civil society, and the state. Thus, what allows Empire to function as a segregative social and political milieu is, if we follow Hegel, predicated on the state. In other words, even as Empire does not operate through a center of command, its sovereignty being unable to pinpoint in or as a unity, it maintains the social and political investments necessary for state life.

In this way, secession cannot escape Empire. Secession does not refer to a space in which Empire is not. Rather, secession refers to the creation of socialities and worlds, within Empire, that allow for their flourishing. It is in this sense that the commune seems to function as a Deleuzo-Guattarian escape, as “what does not merely consist in withdrawing from the social, in living on the fringe: it causes the social to take flight through the multiplicity of holes that eat away at it and penetrate it, always couple directly to it, everywhere setting the molecular charges that will explode what must explode, make fall what must fall, make escape what must escape” (341). It is in this sense that I understand, for The Invisible Committee, the living of and the practice of the commune as “what will displace the institutions of society: family, school, union, sports club, etc.” (102). On my reading of Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, secession is an active resistance that does not attempt to escape its ‘perversity’ but attempts to live it and fight for it.

Here, I am weaker in my Agamben, but I am going to give it a try. From what I understand, Agamben’s notion of inoperativity, or valorizing Shabbat over labor, is a process that follows in his line of thinking on Tiananmen in The Coming Community : “whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging in itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear” (87). Here, whatever singularity, desiring to appropriate its own being-in-language, seems to enter into a practice of escape from State imposed socialities. In other words, whatever singularity escapes State imposed identity so as to seek after its authentic being. Inoperativity, or Shabbat, seems to function in this way as well. Where inoperativity is not an escape into inertia but a practice in which the how of a singularity replaces its what, inoperativity does seem to be an escape to somewhere else. That is, inoperativity seems to be a practice of escape in which one disavows oneself of State imposition totally by appealing to a more primordial practice of one’s being. I guess inoperativity is somehow an escape into being. Thus, for Agamben, inoperativity or Shabbat, leads to first a peaceful escape from identity and then its violent return. However, maybe, somehow, inoperativity will at some time and some point fully resist State imposition.

I could be wrong in my analysis above, but the feeling I get from what Agamben is proposing is an escape into meditation and chanting—really, an escape in a religious sense. And even as Agamben employs the term Tiqqun in some of his writings, I get the sense that the collective under the same name would not fully identify with Agamben’s understanding of its practice. For, when they claim that secession inaugurates a form of war that lets us know how to live and to be more alive, I don’t get the sense that they are waiting for the state to appear and impose on its meditation session. The living and practicing of the commune or a radical solidarity of an ‘Us’ (see here) actively penetrates the State, dissolves portions of it, and attempts to radically redefine its presuppositions.

Filed under: Everything's Political, Agamben, Deleuze, escape, Guattari, inoperativity, Secession, Tiqqun, war

The third task of identity politics…

For years, when I thought identity politics, I didn’t think class. This is not to say that class wasn’t present in my thought, but it wasn’t named as such. Part of this is about being working-class, and channeling all political concerns through nothing short of a hatred of class-systems which, historically, often became conflated with (I’ll say it) a simple hatred of the rich themselves. This class-hatred formed the very fabric of my orientation toward politics and, well, modes of living, but like most things that are most fundamental, it existed as simply present, taken-for-granted, unaccounted for. I felt, deeply, the sentiment expressed by Mother Jones, and quoted on that ol’ Ani Difranco/Utah Phillips collaborative album, about encouraging laborers and the poor the position themselves at the doorsteps of the wealthy in order to “shoot or stab them upon leaving their homes.” Utah followed it up, on record, with “well now, I’m a pacifist, but I appreciate the sentiment…” Despite this, I didn’t think of what I understood as “class politics” as the fount of the foment of identity politics. This is, of course, because for a “third-wave” feminist teenager/post-adolescent in the southern U.S., it simply wasn’t. My access to Marxist thought was mediated through the the writings of black radicals, riot girls, women of color, and reams of feminist critique that, while often centering on the necessity of intersectional thought, made “labor politics” seem like a beret-wearing white-boys club stuck with its collective nose in the formulas that comprise so much of the Grundrisse. Embarassingly enough, this attitude came with me to grad school wherein, during my first week, I was invited to participate in the long-running Materialist Workshop at Binghamton University, and I went “eh, whatever. Marx wasn’t a feminist” and refused to go.That said, encountering an analysis that critiques identity politics, but begins its critique with the figure of the worker (rather than the woman, the queer, the racialized, the colonized – again, the litany) was compelling. For folks who cut their political teeth on Italian workerism, I’d imagine this wouldn’t be the case. Alas, me is not those folks.

In Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri enumerate and expound three tasks for identity politics. I’ve written on the first two, in detouristic fashion, in this post. The third runs as such, quoted at length:

a third political task is necessary in order to support the first two tasks, keep the rebellious function of identity moving forward, and carry identity politics toward a revolutionary project: to strive for its own abolition. The self-abolition of identity is the key to understanding how revolutionary politics can begin with identity but not end up there…the revolutionary communist tradition gives us perhaps the clearest example for understanding this paradoxical proposition. The proletariat is the first truly revolutionary class in human history, according to this tradition, insofar as it is bent on its own abolition as a class…the primary object of class struggle, in other words, is not to kill capitalists but to demolish the social structures and institutions that maintain their privilege and authority, abolishing too, thereby, the conditions of proletarian subordination (332).

What does it mean to strive for the abolition of identity? A part of me cringes. A large part. I think of all the embattled and terse spaces/nomenclatures I’ve inhabited, I’ve had placed upon me, and those I struggled to rework, reclaim, to affirm as positivities. And then I think, moreover, that regardless of these reclamations, I still have to grapple with these ID’s, in their violent and subordinative valences, in the daily. How do I then find it a politically desirable to work for the abolition of these ID’s when I’ve spent so long within the space of and building upon a set politics that places them centrally? This third task seems, at first, commensurable with erasure of self.

Things get more complicated, though. I also have an empathic connection with this injunction, because, the thing is, living in relation, living engaged deeply with other folks, has already undone so many of these identificatory points – chief among them, that of dyke. And not for a movement into a privileged realm that dictates the disavowal of these reclaimed/repurposed identities, but for a more textured, variegated erotic and political life. Now, one of my primary political tasks has become the creation of existential space for more complicated erotic relationalities, more gender, more of the time, more difference, more of the time more attempts to get closer to each other’s complicated realities more of the time. More complicated, sensorial, and felt ways of engaging – in other words, committing to the space of encounter, rather than filtering encounter taxonomically (within the dictates of categorial identity) about who to engage and how to engage them.

As I do this, then, I shift, move, become something else – and this is maybe what it means to seek the abolition of identity. I didn’t will it, though, I didn’t strive for it as a product of political struggle; rather, the method, the political ethics I try to work with and through, are gradually accomplishing this abolition, on an intimate, perhaps even molecular level. This doesn’t mean I’m not posited, positioned, or interpellated, nor that I find these positings more or less comfortable, but it means life-trajectories have learned me well that I’ve got to be dispossesive about this concatenation we call identity.

To get closer to the singularities that we, indeed, are, to live and work in a deeply convivial way, to not fuck each other over, to learn from one another, to transform one another, we need to think through identity politics, toward singularity.

–HJM

Filed under: Uncategorized, Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri, Identity Politics, queer

Secession and the Commune

In a previous post, I started to outline my thoughts on Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee. Here, I would like to begin develop those thoughts, somewhat, by focusing on the commune and processes of communization.

Proposition VI of The Invisible Committee’s The Call refers to these processes directly: “On the one hand, we want to live communism; on the other, to spread anarchy” (33).

Here, for The Invisible Committee, “the communist question is about figuring out our relation to the world, to other beings, to ourselves. It concerns the elaboration of the interplay between different worlds, about the communication between them. Not about the unification of global space, but about the institution of what is perceptible, that is to say the plurality of worlds” (34). Further, “the overthrowing of capitalism will come from those who are able to create the conditions for other types of relations . . . Communism is not made through the expansion of new relations of production, but rather in their abolition” (36). Here, communism, for The Invisible Committee is unlike what has historically been called communism. It is also unlike the formation of a state apparatus. Communism is not, then, a political party competing for power amongst others or a plan for social unification. It is on this point that they pick up on in The Coming Insurrection. Here, communism—the process of communization—is fomented by the formation of a radical solidarity exhibited in the commune. “Communes come into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path. The commune is perhaps what gets decided at the moment when we would normally part ways. It’s the joy of an encounter that survives its expected end. It’s what makes us say ‘we,’ and makes that an event” (101). Further, The Invisible Committee positions the commune, or what they call the multiplicity of communes, as what “will displace the institutions of society: family, school, union, sports club, etc.” (102). Thus, the continuous formation and interrelation of communes is the simultaneous play and joining together of groups and bodies and the acting out of those groups and bodies. “The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality. An insurrectional surge may be nothing more than a multiplication of communes, their coming to contact and forming ties” (117).

In the concluding propositions of Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War, the process of communization—the commune as a movement of radical solidarity—is imagined as the formation of an ‘Us.’ For Tiqqun, “All those who cannot conjure away the forms-of-life that move them must come to grips with the following fact: they are, we are, the pariahs of Empire” (174). Thus, the excesses of Empire, for Tiqqun, are those with whom solidarity can be formed and shared: “Us—it is neither a subject, nor something formed, nor a multitude. Us—it is a heap of worlds, of sub-spectacular and interstitial worlds, whose existence is umentionable, woven together with a kind of solidarity and dissent that power cannot penetrate; and there are the strays, the poor, the prisoners, the thieves, the criminals, the crazy, the perverts, the corrupted, the overly alive, the overflowing, the rebellious corporalities. In short, all those who, following their own line of flight, do not fit Empire’s stale, air-conditioned paradise” (174).

It is through these processes, then, that I am reading acts of secession in both The Invisible Committee and Tiqqun. In other words, dropping out or seceding does not refer to an apathetic life style or a simple choice, the choice to play anarchist dress up or to simply try on radical politics. For The Invisible Committee and Tiqqun secession seems to already require certain reductions and exclusions by the state, empire, and capital and concomitant acts of resistance resulting from multiple oppressions. Processes of communization, formations of an ‘Us,’ and the heap of multiple, interstitial worlds whose existence is one of oppression and resistance, then, offer a practice of solidarity that, for those that comprise it, cannot be avoided but also refuses to be reduced to the status of excess.

What is interesting, and, on my part still requires much more thought, is the way in which this kind of solidarity also resists the multitude. Proposition 63 from Introduction to Civil War does give us some hints, however: “Empire is scarcely thought, and perhaps hardly thinkable, within the western tradition, that is, within the limits of the metaphysics of subjectivity. The best THEY have been able to do is think the surpassing of the modern state on its own grounds. This has spawned a number of unsustainable projects for a universal State, whether in the form of the speculations on cosmopolitan right that would establish perpetual peace, or as the ridiculous hope for a global democratic state, which is the ultimate goal of Negriism” (159). However, even as I am trying to work out The Invisible Committee and Tiqqun’s writings in relation to discourses on cosmopolitanism in a current conference paper, further thinking on this point will have to wait for another post.

Filed under: Everything's Political, Communism, Communization, Hardt and Negri, Secession, the Commune, The Invisible Committee, the multitude, Tiqqun

Shame, Poverty, and Enough

Today I thought of an old article in Make, by Dean Spade, from the way, way back (circa 2002) entitled “More Gender, More of the Time”, that I found (and still find) extremely useful. Having been asked to think a bit about Hardt and Negri’s assertion that the third task of identity politics (see this recent post dealing with the first two) is to “strive for its own abolition” (Commonwealth, 332), I immediately thought of this piece by Spade as relevant, but in some important tension, with the line of H+N’s argument.

More on that soon.

I came across a new project that Spade is involved in, a web journal entitled Enough: The Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism, and more particularly an article of his on his recent (enormous) class shift upon being hired as a law professor at the Seattle University School of Law — how this has affected his practices of wealth redistribution, what sedimented traumas and political quandaries it places him squarely in the maw of. It made me think of a recent post over at K-Punk on work, non-work, and the shame coincident with unemployment. All of this is particularly poignant at the moment, having spent the past year finishing the diss and entering the academic job market, receiving streams of rejection and alternating between sharpening arguments against the current composition of the US educational system, dreaming up alternative educational projects with friends, sorting through my extreme fear of poverty that stems from spending much of my life on the brink of it, or in it, allowing each rejection to sediment this fear and the coincident shame and sense of worthlessness that the job market is so adept at circulating amongst poor and working-class folk. All of this has, of course, been compounded by having necessarily taken a job making espresso to make ends meet.

Mark Fisher writes of his advanced degreed unemployment that he

was convinced that an absolute ontological gulf separated me from Work. Work – which, like “being in a relationship” – would automatically confer on me the status of being a Real Person. But the horrific irony was that one couldn’t achieve this status. You couldn’t become a Real Person by getting a job. It was the other way round: only Real People could get work. Being unemployed wasn’t a cause of shame; rather the sense of shame which I carried around as if it was the core of my being was what prevented me getting a job.

I hear that.

All of this is just to say: check out the above articles, and Enough more generally.

–HJM

Filed under: Uncategorized, Dean Spade, Enough, k-punk, Mark Fisher, shame, work

Totality and Relation: Eichmann was Really a Hipster

It may be said in passing that there was no difference of nature between Eichmann, who identified himself completely with his criminal function, and the hipster who, being unable to come to terms with either his fundamental non-membership to this world, or the consequences of a situation of exile, throws himself into the frenzied consumption of signs of belonging that are so expensive in this society.
—Tiqqun, The Theory of Bloom

At moments reading Tiqqun, and if I may be so bold as to group Tiqqun with the writings of the Invisible Committee, is like reading the collective diary of the ‘little rascals’ minus the rampant racism. Yet, I identify with these writings and am intent on considering these writings with a priority that is not matched by much else currently. Like any other writer or group of writers, Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee announce their growing pains in each publication, the quotation above being one such example. Even so, and maybe as a result, they have an overwhelming appeal among young and would-be anarchists, vanguardists, and saboteurs. Increasingly there is much debate (here and here for example) about the vogue and cooptation of their writings and (I can’t imagine for the life of me why) the proper political engagement that is to be taken from their writings. Further, it is yet unclear if and how seriously Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee are being taken up in philosophical circles, and while there is a definitive overlap, philosophical legitimacy is not the issue here

I have to say that the opening quotation is misleading. I am not, here, intent on positioning Eichmann as the grandfather to contemporary hipsterdom, drawing a comparison between hipster culture and the Nationalist Socialists, or following the machinations of a certain angsty, underdeveloped Adbusters article. And while the quotation above is not in any way a very profound thing to say, it does say something interesting about totality and relation. For Tiqqun, two intimate and interrelated forms of totality are at work above. First, Eichmann the banal, reduces himself to his ‘criminal function.’ That is, Eichmann reduces his actions and practices to the necessities of his role in a totalitarian regime and thus his function to powers out of his jurisdiction. Second, the hipster reduces him or herself to practices of blind capitalist consumption and is thus thrown into something akin to a Deleuzo-Guattarian despotic signifying regime. In other words, even as the hipster constantly attempts to modify his presentation and representation, ostensibly acting of her own volition and refusing any static identity, corporations, stockholders and superficial desire ultimately dictate her presentation and representation. Thus, the multiple relations of both Eichmann and the hipster (or any body similarly reduced) come to be preceded and circumscribed by this reduction, by the totalization of their ‘form-of-life’, and, on a different register, refuse a ‘free play’ characteristic of every ‘form-of-life’ (See part 1 of Introduction to Civil War minus the hipster argument).

It is on the basis of these claims that secession becomes a dominant theme in the writings of Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee. And it is thus on the theme of both consumption and secession, and how it is that they presuppose a certain kind of agency, that I am beginning to have problems with their writings. However, it is arguments like the one above that draw me to Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee. For, more than their analysis, Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee posit such reductions and the philosophies that find their basis in them in the practice of everyday life. In the same way, they begin to think resistance in the practices of everyday life. Here, the totalizations described above come to precede relation but are not constitutive of it. In other words, even though ‘forms-of-life’ have the capacity to become circumscribed and totalized, this is not one’s teleological misfortune, final form, or primordial operation.

That is how the classical definition of politics spreads the desert: by abstracting humans from their world, by disconnecting them from the network of things, habits, words, fetishes, emotions, places, solidarities that make up their worlds, their perceptual worlds, and that gives them their specific substance.
—The Invisible Committee, The Call

‘WHAT AM I,’ then? Since childhood I’ve been involved in the flows of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions, nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, gazes, songs and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don’t form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges—at certain times and places—that being which says ‘I.’ Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are.
—The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

Thus, Eichmann and the hipster neither are mere victims of circumstance nor are they mere victims of totalitarian regimes. On Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee’s account, Eichmann and the hipster seem to be practioners of totality with the capacity to act otherwise. Admittedly, I think their ideas require a lot of work and reimagining. I think that the growing pains will continue, if not by them then by their heirs. Yet, as some kind of heir to these writings, there is one critique of both Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee that I understand to be both myopic and fatal to what they propose.

Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, to my reading, do not posit a program for revolution. And this is something that I consider to be a strength. Unlike figures like Badiou or Zizek, Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee are not interested in a kind of revolutionary practice that either employs the masters’ tools or relies on the pendulumic swing of the dialectic. In other words, even as they assume some kind of universal agency in the practice of secession, Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee do not take history and practice to be finalized by the totalizations described above. Here, the arguments that beg for such a program, or claim that this is somehow a fault in their thinking, are missing what I understand to be a primary point made by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee. While secession, or dropping out, does at moments refer to endless summers, getting high, or taking that permanent Into the Wild backpacking trip you’ve been dreaming about, secession operates as something else.

I think I am drawn to Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee because they prompt questions that I consider to be both radical and practical. ‘What does it mean to disengage when capitalism is thorough and reductions, like those above, are constantly imposed in varying degrees of intimacy?’ ‘What does it mean to think resistance when an absolute break from capital or totalitarian regimes is impossible?’ ‘How are resistance practices already extant in the practice of everyday life?’ On my reading, this is what secession prompts me to think. Secession is a ground on which to begin to think resistance and everyday life together in a way that does not sacrifice actions to the dialectic, standardize their operation and function, or collapse into an idyllic anarcho-primitivism. And even as Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee seem to cast a long dark cloud of Eichmann clownishness and hipsterish vacuity onto most of what people think and do, they offer an explicitly politicized practice of intellectual, and arguably academic, engagement that is admirable even if a little young in its development.

Filed under: Everything's Political, The Jam, Badiou, hipster, The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun, Zizek

Queer In-Coherence

There is a lot to love about the anthology Self-Organizing Men, edited by Jay Sennett and published on the equally lovable Homofactus Press, dedicated as it is to copyleft, class-differential access, and most importantly building a roster of tomes that deal with extremely important, often under-researched and under-discussed facets of queer lives, refusing to minoritize the thinking and writing of transfolk, queers of color, those of us poor, working-class, femme-y — you know, the queer queers, which is only another way of saying those of us doubly estranged from both hetero- and homo-normativity.

But I’d like to write on one notion that I found sketched in broad outline in this volume that I think is a particularly promising addition to the queer epistemic tool-box, as it were. And this is Bobby Noble’s notion of in-coherence, developed in the essay “‘Trans’? ‘Butch’? ‘Man’?: Of the Political Necessities of Trans-Incoherence.” By way of elucidation, Noble writes on the topic of pluralizing our comprehension of trans subjectivities in the context of a glossed-over inclusion within LGBTQQI politicking that “the ‘T’ is forced to carry differences amongst trans-folks themselves, differences which mark the way we are positioned by other facets of our selves relative to power. Instead of assuming commonality or coherence, I suggest we need to actively seek out difference or in-coherence instead, all the more so if we are white. This means, as a start, not assuming or depending on commonality” (161). If this sounds an awful lot like a rehashing of an insistence on the necessity of intersectional thinking, that is because, in part, it is, at least as a conceptual inheritor of the importance of what a dear friend and interlocuter calls “the litany” — race/class/gender/sexuality/etc. But I’d like to mark its distance from a simple reiteration of the necessity of thinking through “the litany.” In order to do this, I’ve got to (or maybe just want to, as it’s occupying a whole lot of brainspace lately), make a detour through what Hardt and Negri have to say about identity politics and the distinction between emancipation and liberation in Commonwealth.

They set what they call “two positive tasks for identity politics,” which is, I think, their way of (rightly) guarding against a tendency to read their co-authored work as forthrightly and rather flatly “anti-identitarian,” rather than cognizing the deep engagements that run behind rather informed assertions regarding certain dead-ends, tamings, or failures to radicalize manifested in the multiply divergent realms hastily, too hastily, short-handed by “identity politics.” So what are these two tasks? The first: “to combat blindness and make visible the brutally real but too often hidden mechanisms and regimes of social subordination, segmentation, and exclusion that operate along identity lines. Making visible the subordinations of identity as property implies, in a certain sense, reappropriating identity” (329). Us queer queers are certainly task-masters of this first injunction — molding, mutating, and reshaping our selves in community, constantly revising our affects and ways of relating, in ways that are reductively glossed over by saying we’re, in this process, only being “true to ourselves,” when really, I think, we’re being true to our visions of possibility that struggle against so many foreclosures, so many chastisements and violences, so many accusations that what we do is un-’natural,’ impossible, or both (the latter on account of the former). This is nothing if not reappropriation, queer bricolage that seeks to make visible these “mechanisms and regimes of subordination,” what Bikini Kill has called, better, the walls that say you can’t. So, we are on relevant terrain with Hardt and Negri, here. What of the second task of identity politics, then? Particularly when many movements often “begin and end with the first task, sometimes combining it with pallid declarations of pride and affirmation” — that is, declarations of surely premature entrance into the political fullness of a given assignation that is, as it were, uncritical of this entrance into political fullness, an entrance that too easily becomes an excuse for ignorance of both other identitarian struggles as well as the circumscribed limits of this embrace of political intelligibility. So, the second task, then, which is also the really fun (and infinitely sexier) part: “to proceed from indignation to rebellion against the structures of domination using the subordinated identity as a weapon in the quest for freedom” (330). This is where the distinction between emancipation and liberation becomes important, for the banalities of pride and corporate accommodation come ready with the former, while this second task is the liberatory part, and also the part where we are no longer able to rely on affirmation of commonality, togetherness, and easy intelligibility because rather than affirming a taxon of identity (even one that is no longer entirely maligned, but rather newly accommodated) we are, here, as we utilize what we’ve been called, the nomenclature we’ve taken on and twisted, as a “weapon in the quest for freedom,” we are, in this quest, becoming something else, collectively and subjectively. Something we’ve never been before, as we’re creating situations and possibilities afresh, pushing through and past circumscriptions and foreclosures. It is in this process of liberation, then, queer or otherwise, that we need to insist on the okay-ness of in-coherence, to hold off and defer unitarian descriptions or inclusions, as they too easily become dangerously recursive.

This is what makes Noble’s insistence on being all and neither ‘butch,’ ‘trans,’ and ‘man’ compelling. For, in the commitment to queer radicality, we are marked by both a multiplicity of nomenclatures that shift according to situation but also (and perhaps more importantly) marked by our intense love affair with what we are becoming — that which we can’t prefigure, and wouldn’t want to if we could.

Hardt and Negri write that “whereas emancipation strives for the freedom of identity, the freedom to be who you really are, liberation aims at the freedom of self-determination and self-transformation, the freedom to determine what you can become.” If this process of autonomic transformation is to remain accountable to other folks, to other political projects, we need to focus not on the sense we make to each other, but on the sense we don’t make, while still being together. This attention to difference is not identitarian navel-gazing, nor a banal (liberal) embrace of a stolid multiplicity, not these things at all. Rather, it is an essentially radical commitment to grappling with opacity and refusing easy parallelisms and translations in the interest of refusing staid and constrictive reifications.

Ups to In-Coherence!

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Jam, Bobby Noble, Hardt and Negri, Homofactus Press, Jay Sennett, Self-Organizing Men

Stengers on anamnesis: An Intrablog dialogue

All in all, “naked and universal man” is found nowhere except in the practice of the philosopher who has actively purified humankind of any attributes judged to be secondary, mere obstacles to the requirements of universality that, or so it would appear, identify philosophy, and are therefore unworthy of imposing obligations upon it (181).

Appearing in the 15th chapter of Isabelle Stengers’ Cosmopolitics I, the quotation above is both a critique and a ground. Here, it functions as s critique insofar as acts of purification and universalization establish methodologies that then, for Stengers, become the monolith of a discipline—the institutional faith of a discipline that works to exclude other methodologies and knowledges. It works as a ground in a more complicated manner. Taking acts of purification universalization, and further the acts of faith that substantiate the method, to be the given state of academic practice, Stengers attempts to think otherwise. Thus, it is on this presupposition that Stengers puts forth a practice of remembering, an ‘anamnesic approach’ that would simultaneously address the disciplinary faith and valorize minor histories—invoke the dominant history of the method in order to think its exclusions, to take historical context, political practice, and those attributes considered secondary to be constitutive of disciplinary knowledges and practices.

Rather, the approach is one of anamnesis, here defined as the voluntary evocation of the past. For, if the past has been forgotten, there has been no disguise but rather the intent—then the habit—to forget. This is shown by the fact that the texts to which we should return remain perfectly readable, and we could even say that their readability is disturbing . . . As a voluntary evocation, anamnesis reflects an approach that is far from neutral. It is a question of establishing, in the present, obligations whose deliberate rejection becomes—based on this reading—part of the identity of twentieth century physics. (182)

Here, an anamnesic approach is, for Stengers the possibility of (re)addressing the past within a larger historical and methodological context so as to both question practices of habitual forgetting and investigate the lines of flight constitutive of and always present in a dominant methodology. In this way, Stengers is careful to assert that an anamnesic approach “is not a denunciation or deconstruction” (183). For “anamnesis is not a critical deconstruction because it does not belong to the register of solution or explanation. It belongs to the very continuation of an event whose heirs include everyone who believes that the ‘neutrino exists’ (including me)” (184). While Stengers, here, is referring to a specific debate within the history of physics (hence the neutrino), it can be utilized by any set of practices within a methodology or a discipline that are responsible for the formation of a concept. Thus, Stengers presents her readers with a practice of anamnesis that remains an open circle rather than an eternal return. For, to establish a practice of constructing knowledge that does not presuppose its own ends or offer an explanation or solution that would concretize a concept—make it a fixed object of knowledge—is to also remain open to any number of possible futures that a problem presents. In this way, Stengers does not attempt to relativize disciplinary knowledge and practice. She does not throw constraint out the window or responsibility to the wind. Rather, Stengers voluntarily invokes a practice of anamnesis to “shift attention from visions of the world and the great metaphysical questions that claim to be valid for each and every one of us, to the singularity of what ‘matters’ here and not somewhere else . . .” (62). To undermine the perpetuation of the present and lift the barricade that habitually forgets the heterogeny of knowledge.

In this way, as HJM has reminded me, Stengers picks up in the tradition of Bloch, but only after a rejection of anamnesis has been made. In other words, like the method that Stengers proposes, it is only after the refutation and proposed bankruptcy of anamnesis that is possibilities are readdressed and its practice reimagined. It is Stengers anamnesic approach to anamnesis, if you will.

Filed under: Everything's Political, The Jam, anamnesis, Cosmopolitics, Ernst Bloch, futurity, Isabelle Stengers, philosophy

Bloch on anamnesis

Philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge.

These words appear near the inception of Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope — a reckoning, a dare, a taunt, a pragmatic assertion regarding the possible obsolecence of a purely or strictly anamnetic approach to knowledge. Anamnesis, for Bloch (by way of his reading of Plato), denotes knowledge conceived as always (and only) re-remembering, past-invocation, eternal return. An entrenched belief in knowledge as anamnesis, then, is not only (as Nietzsche would have it) a truly terrifying thought, but one that must (contra Nietzsche) be refused wholesale. Within the Marxian register of Bloch’s thought, anamnesis is a truly terrible notion, a block to revolutionary desire, a block to radical intending, a barricade to the enactment of praxis guided by utopian impulses, for anamnesis renders the notion of utopic hope impractical, if not wholly unintelligible.

Turning away from anamnesis, then, means turning towards a recognition of “the being of a Not-Yet-Being” (140). We can index this recognition in more contemporary and immediately relevant terms, however: the recognition of the being of a yet-to-be-determined, Not-Yet-Being (all these yets!) is another way of saying that (sans yet) other worlds are possible. Otros mundos son posibles. That is, we are not condemned to despair, nor to banal acceptance of some sort of embourgeoised samsaric disposition towards the being-in-the-world.

This rejection of anamnesis is a fundamental one for Bloch, informing his arguments against Freud, Jung, and Heidegger alike. These critiques are one of the fabulous pleasures of reading Bloch; moreover, they’re also where his thought resonates as strikingly contemporary. In his critique of Freud, for instance, he presages not only the radical interventions made by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus regarding the capitalist curtailment and familial short-circuiting of potentially liberatory desires, but adamantly proclaims the necessity of rejecting patriarchal-despotic overcoding of our feelings, our aims, our intentions in order to begin to hope, to shape an alternate future not consigned to a stale rehashing of already-familiar foreclosures, recitations of myriad subjective and communal verbotens. In this proclamation, he is not only in deep dialogue with the revolts and insurrections of his time, but iterating a set of political injunctions that I’ve been hearing, in one form or another, throughout my life – reading the works of the Situationists, conversing in queer community, in feminist praxis, in decolonial projects. It is this set of resonances, this sense of intimacy, the immediacy of sensed fellow-traveler-ness that makes an engagement with Bloch so gratifying.

There are other details I’d like to talk about – the overlaps of his critique of Heidegger’s emphasis on anxiety and boredom with Tiqqun’s (similar) taking-to-task in Theory of Bloom (which MLA is currently reading); the way his refusal of nihilism in favor of materialist positivity echoes certain sub-cultural trajectories, where an ostensibly subversive embrace of the nihil (think Edelman’s No Future, but also the Sex Pistols track where he gets his title) is cast aside for an embrace of DIY action, posi-core performance, intentional community building that emphasizes the centrality and importance of the radical project over and against the phenomena of drunk-crust-punx or an embrace of a concept of sex as self-shattering, self-annihilation. More on all that later, I promise—right now, it’s time to grill some tofu.

–HJM

Filed under: Love Letters, The Jam, anamnesis, drunk punx, Edelman, Ernst Bloch, Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche, Tiqqun