P+M Citing Jodi Dean Citing Doug Henwood

Jodi Dean has posted this reflection on the Occupy Wall Street protests by Doug Henwood. I think that Henwood really gets at some of the points/concerns I was sketching out the other day in this post. It’s good to see some critical reflection/analyses of a ‘protest movement’ that seems to be concerned with remedying the problems of liberalism and capitalism with hyper-localized forms of liberalism and capitalism.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Occupy Wall Street

A Post of Links

First, this is a podcast of Jodi Dean that Scu sent me about a week ago. While I think that the section on communicative capitalism is very smart and very good, her analysis of anarchism is wanting; her idea of anarchism seems to rely a bad caricature of John Zerzan, undergirded by old tomes of Bakunin.

A couple of weeks ago I linked to a few pamphlets by tom nom(a)d. I will relink to them here as the first, second, and third are now available for download. A Primer To Police Crowd Control Tactics and Frameworks, Against Pacifist Linearity, We Give A Shit: An Analysis of the Pittsburgh G20.

If you haven’t heard it yet, Das Racist has a new album out Relax. Check it out.

This morning I started reading David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity. I also ran across Stuart Hall’s interview with David Scott from Bomb magazine, 2005. It is excellent and maybe even more salient in 2011.

I also just ran across Not Yet Dead, and they have an excellent downloads section at their blog.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Links

I Want a Dyke for President

I’m about to head up to a magical place north of Chicago for the Feminist Ethics and Social Theory conference, which promises to be amazing. I’ll be delivering a paper entitled “What If It Doesn’t Get Better? Suicide, Negative Affect, and the Outside of Homonormativity.”

Here’s the abstract:

This paper takes a close look at the implicit politics of hope extant in theIt Gets Better video project, conceived in late 2010 as a queer youth suicide prevention effort following the rash of heavily publicized suicides of (mostly white, male) gay youth that were allegedly elicited by extensive peer-group bullying. Situating the video project as an instantiation of what Ann Cvetkovich has called an “archive of trauma,” I interrogate the unintended affective work done by this archive as it solidifies a counterpublic around queer trauma, paying attention to the homonormative tendencies implicit in this collective promise of a better future. Building upon the work of German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch on anamnesis and utopia, I conclude with a call for the necessity of a radical queer utopian imaginary as a necessary correlative to promising queer youth a better future in good faith. I position this task as one that can be fruitfully taken up by feminist philosophers committed to social justice, intersectional theorizing, and issues of livability and survival.

Unbeknownst to my self while drafting this paper some months back, Jack Halberstam weighed in on this topic in a similar vein by way of a Social Text blog post (that, brilliantly, claims certain kinds of bullying as queer, resistant, and productive – bashing back, as it were).

As a placeholder, and promise of a full report upon my return, here’s a utopian, deeply ethical future vision courtesy of Zoe Leonard:

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Jam, Ernst Bloch, Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, It Gets Better, It Gets Worse, Jack Halberstam, Social Text, Zoe Leonard

Watching Protest on Television

Earlier this week I linked to the Occupy Wall Street live stream. I guess live stream here should be in quotation marks as whomever filmed and posted live footage from the protests uploaded the footage in shorter form. Also, there were activisty commercials that played in-between each segment, which was disconcerting to me. Anyway, I think a healthy suspicion of a protest movement inspired by Adbusters is of necessary order.

I wasn’t glued to the live stream of Occupy Wall Street like I was to those broadcasting protests across the Middle East earlier this year. I am sure it was the same for many of you–you might not have even watched the live stream at all. But what I did see of the live stream was interesting, like an absurdist play is interesting, but also comedic and tragic. I recall one segment in particular. An enthusiastic young man was talking to the camera person about how he just arrived from several circles where individuals spoke about ‘the problem,’ and its possible ‘solutions.’ I had to infer and impute a number of slogans that I read via CNN or Adbusters so as to come to some understanding of what ‘the problem’ was. Something like a dissatisfaction with Wall Street, with global capitalism, with capitalist sovereignty, something that setting up a Tarhir Square in downtown Manhattan would begin to resolve. When he finished speaking he declared that a march was happening that very minute and took off by himself, declaring the immanent march through a megaphone.

The spectacle of this guy, or, the spectacle he was attempting to create and spread, is not what left an impression on me. Rather, it was the language he utilized to diagnosis the problems of capitalist sovereignty and how to effectively treat it. I am sure many of the people that read this blog know someone, or maybe you are someone, that works/worked for some kind of non-profit. On this assumption, I am sure you are familiar with the ‘professional activist’ archetype that so many young non-profit employees emulate, simulate, etc. There is a language, indeed an entire culture, that is assumed in this non-profit world that is expected of these young professional activists that is thoroughly enmeshed with the coarticulation of capitalism and liberal democracy–this is precisely the language and culture that this young man was relying on to diagnose and treat the woes of capitalist sovereignty. It was a language and a culture that was identifiable throughout these segments, they are still up if you are interested in seeing them by the way.

But this was the comedic/tragic part of the live stream. Right, that much enthusiasm and energy was expended in some kind of attempt at revolution while simultaneously employing the very language and logic of oppression that was being protested against. The question I asked myself watching this guy was, why doesn’t he seem to understand that capitalism and liberalism are not going to revolutionize the crises of capitalism and liberalism? As this ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement spreads, as those denizens of San Fransisco would love it to, if in fact it spreads, I think this might be constant question to some of us who bother watching the live streams as people vocalize their discontent on the basis of this platform. Also, I guess by way of a side note, it was interesting to see this guy talk and think about some tweets shared between two Goldman Sachs employees during the protest: “A#1 (on protesters): I was going to make a sign… Goldman Sachs: Win, cheat, or quit. We don’t fucking lose – ever. A#2 (laughs): Or… ‘Get rich and buy your own shit. Protests and riots are for pussies. #occupywallstreet.”

In any event, Jodi Dean seems to be up on the media coverage.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, activism, Adbusters, Jodi Dean, Occupy Wall Street, protest

Review of The Sexual Politics of Meat

Hilary’s review of Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat is out, here, in the newest volume of the Journal of Critical Animal Studies. Check out the entire issue of JCAS here–it looks great!

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Carol Adams, ecology, feminism, Journal of Critical Animal Studies, The Sexual Politics of Meat

Occupy Wall Street Live Stream

Here

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, wall street

Mustaches

Folks! I’ve officially entered the world of blogging-as-pedagogical tool. The inaugural post, on Catherine Opie, queer portraiture, and mustaches can be found here over at gndr335fall2011.wordpress.com.

For folks so inclined, you can access the reading schedule for the upper-level Gender Studies course I’m teaching (‘Explaning Sex and Gender Differences’) there as well; you can read along, or pick and choose from the list as you like. All good material, I promise.

The participants in the course are whip-smart and funny, so you can look forward to some great writing over there this semester, courtesy of them. And maybe, sometimes, myself.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, gender studies, pedagogy

What is this Story?

Lately Hilary and I have been talking quite a bit about processes of objectification. She is currently reading Objectivity by Lorraine J. Datson and Peter Galison. I am becoming increasingly annoyed with much of the self-aggrandizement and self-importance of OOOIII, coming up next week. As a side note, who knew that philosophers would be so keen on franchising an emerging disciplinary movement?

Anyway, who knew Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman, directors of If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, are Habermasian? Prior to If a Tree Falls, Curry directed Street Fight, a documentary chronicling Cory Booker’s 2002 campaign against Sharpe James for mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Street Fight is a great documentary, but it unfortunately overshadows his latest directorial effort by miles. On the one hand, If a Tree Falls, largely focused on Daniel McGowan’s history and the events leading up to his prosecution in 2007, is disappointing on just about every count. On the other hand, the documentary is palatable to a large audience in a ‘let’s take back politics and initiate a good old fashioned democratic conversation’ kind of way–which has merits of its own. I just finished watching the documentary. The ‘special features’ portion of the DVD was actually more informative than much of the documentary itself. However, it is in the ‘special features’ portion that Curry and Cullman refer to the documentary, and their motivation for the project itself, as a ‘cautionary tale.’ Over and again in the Q&A session featured in the special features, both directors retreat to an ‘objective’ stance when referring to the politics of McGowan or the Earth Liberation Front. Indeed, the cautionary nature of the documentary is taken by both directors as a triumph in objectivity as people interviewed in the documentary from both sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. agree that it tells ‘real’ story.

Unfortunately, this desire for carving out an objective space in the discourse on Eco-terrorism is dominant among those documenting arrest and prosecution of so-called Eco-terrorists. Will Potter, author of Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege is guilty of similar desires and maneuvers in the construction of his own analysis of and reaction to the rise of eco-terrorism. And again, following Potter, Curry and Cullman refuse to think something like eco-terrorism in relation to either a history or tactics of violent resistance in the U.S. Again, I can understand why one would be tempted to compare the arrest and prosecution of eco-terrorists to the arrest and prosecution of communists in the 1930′s, but this comparison fails precisely where terrorism becomes the justification for arrest and prosecution. In either Green is the New Red or If a Tree Falls, the reader/viewer is not presented with any substantive account of violent resistance in the U.S. comparable to a group like the E.L.F. No mention of the SDS, no mention of the Black Panthers, no mention of the Weather Underground, and in the case of Curry and Cullman, no mention of the ALF. Even further, in either case, there is no substantive account of the ways in which eco-terrorism represents a mutation in the way terrorists are identified and arrested post 9/11. This is to say, there is no mention of the processes of racialization or sexualization that create a terrorist, and therefore deviant and criminal, body.

While I think the effort around these projects is admirable, both Green is the New Red and If a Tree Falls signify a drastic need for the discourse around eco- and animal terrorism to change in a way that takes radical histories and tactics of resistance seriously while also considering eco-terrorism’s relation to the racial and sexual violence of terrorist identification and prosecution.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Eco-Terrorism, If a Tree Falls

Binghamton Under Water

If you watch the news, you might have seen that Binghamton, really much of upstate New York and Eastern Pennsylvania, is under water. I am now displaced as where I live required evacuation, I will not be able to attend the Revisioning Terrorism conference at Purdue.

Knock on wood or pray to your god that my apartment isn’t under water.

–MLA

Filed under: The Anti-Jam

Terrorism, Purdue, and Long Road Trips

In a couple of days I will embark on a trip to the middle of the country, first and foremost to see my partner and deliver her her beloved cat Prisstina. Second, to head to Purdue to give a paper titled “Producing the Spectacle of Terror: The Rise of Eco-Terrorism and the Ideology of the ‘Green Scare.’” The title of the paper is only somewhat misleading, but I wanted to post the introduction, well I guess really the first couple of pages here before I go. Enjoy!

San Francisco Bay area collective Retort, writes in their 2005 Afflicted Powers: Capital and the Spectacle in a New Age of War, “we do not believe that one can destroy the society of the spectacle by producing the spectacle of its destruction” (34). It is with such a claim that Retort simultaneously works to condemn the suicide bombings of September 11th, 2001 and thinks neo-imperial power at its concrescence with the flows of transnational capital. Indeed, they remain true to Debord’s theorization of the spectacle as “a social relation between people that is mediated by images,” but a social relation that remains a ‘domain of delusion and false consciousness,’ a visible negation of life that can result in nothing other than an economy dominating social life itself (2). It is thus with this claim that Retort foments a direct offensive against Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism, particularly, the moments wherein Baudrillard identifies the spectacle as constitutive of the absolute or pure event: “the spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us” (30). For Baudrillard, it precisely the symbolic violence of the 9/11 attacks that is generative of a debilitating power, a power that establishes the conditions of possibility for the image to precede the real, for the potential collapse of capitalism and subsequently Western society, to precede and fundamentally disrupt the means by which it persists. This is to say, where Baudrillard understands the relationship shared between terrorism and the spectacle as productive of the conditions under which we can imagine the imminent dissolution of state power and transnational capital, terrorism is recreated in the powers that would guard against this dissolution. This is a victory of the September 11th attacks for Baudrillard, an ‘uncontrollable unleashing of reversibility,’ the impossibility of drawing a distinction between “the crime and the crackdown” (31). Thus, terrorism, for Baudrillard, puts an end to liberal democratic and economic projects as it results in a kind of police-state globalization, in total control, and terror based ‘law-and-order’ measures (32).

But behind Retort’s condemnation of the spectacle utilized as a form of resistance to state power and to transnational capital is a simple claim, one complicates Baudrillard’s analysis of the attacks on the twin towers as it seeks to carve out an objective space within its discourse. Simply put, where Retort claims that one cannot destroy the society of the spectacle by producing the spectacle of its destruction, the phenomenon of terrorism is neither equitable nor reducible to an anti-statist or anti-capitalist tactics of resistance. I could restate this claim. To borrow a phrase from Will Potter’s Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege, Retort seems to want to be able to claim that ‘activism is not terrorism.’ So what we have between Retort and Baudrillard is a philosophy of terrorism and the spectacle at two poles. On the one hand, Retort maintains objectivity, or the ability to condemn acts of terror and draw a distinction between terrorism and anti-statist, anti-capitalist forms of resistance: the global demonstrations against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 being the privileged example of the difference in Afflicted Powers. On the other hand, following the September 11th attacks, Baudrillard denies the ability to parse discreet and objective differences between crime and terrorism at any level, whether it be at the macropolitical level between terrorism and state power, or recapitulated at the micropolitical level, between something like activism and terrorism. Indeed, state terrorism acts as a mechanism through which a categorical distinction between activism and terrorism becomes blurred.

Separate from each other, I don’t think either theorization the September 11th attacks allows for a substantive theorization of the responses to terrorism, or, maybe more accurately, to potential terrorist threats, in the United States subsequent to 9/11. If Retort’s theoretical shortcomings lie in retaining an objectivity that remains impossible to parse, Baudrillard’s lie in an all too easy erasure of the processes through which terrorism establishes the conditions of possibility for socio-political, economic, and juridical dissolution. Here, then, I would like to think the coimplication of Retort and Baudrillard’s theorization of the spectacle and terrorism as a means of interrogating the discourse around Eco- and Animal terrorism in the United States. More specifically, I would like to think the identification and prosecution of eco- and animal terrorists as, following Jasbir Puar, an extension of the racist and homophobic techniques of terrorist identification that persisted post 9/11. This is to say, I want to consider some of the actually existing processes through which the ‘crime and the crackdown’ become impossible to parse as well as the desire to maintain some kind of categorical distinction between terrorism and the ever expanding list of activities and subjectivities that become criminalized and codified as terrorist. So if it is the spectacle, the image that precedes the event and the power of symbolic violence that is both an inadequate tactic of resistance to state power and transnational capital and the basis from which the state justifies its new and preemptive responses to potential terrorist threats, I think it might be beneficial to think the way in which the spectacle of terrorism is framed and utilized.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Animal Terrorism, Eco-Terrorism, Green is the New Red, Jasbir k. Puar, Jean Baudrillard, Retort, Terrorism, Terrorist Assemblages