The Interpellator

I have been a homebrewer for about 2 years now. Also, about 2 years ago, Hilary, Scu, and I sat down and created a line of beers to commemorate some of our favorite philosophers. I am proud to announce I have finally brewed the first in the line to commemorate the life and work of Louis Althusser: The Interpellator! Tagline: “It Cures What Hails You”

Check out the label below (Marx on the left, Hegel on the right, of course!):

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, The Interpellator

P.S. – The New Sharon Van Etten

is incredible. “I’m Wrong” – the first track performed in this clip – in particular. Don’t cry. I warned you!

–HJM

Filed under: Love Letters, The Jam, I'm Wrong, Sharon Van Etten, Tramp

Unlikely Video Girl(s)

If you wait until the 1:00 mark, you’ll get a glimpse of fourteen year old Hilary, at a large outdoor music festival (I’m thinking it may have been Warped Tour, or perhaps some other sundry large, mid-to-late 90s punk/indie event. There were quite a few in the world of my adolescence). It re-appears a few times over the course of this video.

I received a link to this from an old and infinitely beloved friend, former housemate and general partner-in-trouble, who was trolling for Peter Broderick tracks (he’s worth giving a listen, if you haven’t – Portland-based, played on Efterklang’s Parades, which is a too-glorious album as far as glorious albums go) and found this footage. He shot it off to me, figuring it was a doppelganger. I watched it once. Rewatched it. Realized it was, indeed, myself; that I remembered a handful of those boy-faces surrounding me in that particular circle pit; that I could even assign a name to some of them, that I perhaps even dated one of them, but can’t remember, because the faces of some of those boys have blurred and become pretty abstract signifiers over the past 13+ years.

I sent the video off to my lifelong best friend, who was more than likely on the perimeter of that shot, somewhere to the left or right of the camera, singing along to whoever may have happened to be playing (was it Hot Water Music? The Bouncing Souls? It must have been a teenage favorite, as I seem to know all of the stop/starts, all of the vocal moments that deserve finger-points). He was definitely shaken up by it, as was I. But why? What’s so strange about it? What about it feels a little off-putting? I sent a link to MLA, who wrote back, in his typical and delightfully concise way, “Cameras are crazy.”

And that became a beginning, a way to sort out what was intensely affecting me. I was fourteen when this video was taken. A fourteen year old girl, the sort who walked through the world the way most fourteen year old girls do: feeling hyperbolically watched, intensively observed, and not at all because of a budding awareness of control societies and surveillance culture, but for reasons that have more to do with what Laura Mulvey has termed ‘to-be-looked-at-ness,’ the forceful injunctions we negotiate regarding the molding of our bodies to become objects of aesthetic and erotic consumption. Of course, these two phenomena (the commoditization of girls’ bodies and control societies) are interlinked, but my awareness of the former was infinitely stronger than the latter at that young age; I was infinitely more interested in feminism though I, of course, hated cops, security guards, and closed-circuit cameras the way any good punk does. Part of my resistance to the commodization of my flesh was my deliberate placing of it in the milieu of the circle pit; taking up space, refusing to understand my body as object and coming to inhabit it as a sort of weapon of counter-attack. The shitty thing was, growing up, that this often contributed to a sort of subcultural eroticization. Every punk girl has stories about groping and harassment in the sort of situation pictured here; it happened to me, too, repeatedly. An old story regarding our objectification in spaces of resistance.

And how, so many years later, I find in my inbox this (potentially feminist?) valorization of young punk girls; looped and spliced video footage of girls in the pit attached to a track entitled “Quiet Long Enough.” Which is, on the one hand, maybe sweet, and on the other, feels a little creepy. All those years ago, I was being taped? I was being watched and I had no idea, even there, even in that circle pit? The inner paranoiac yelps “I knew it! I knew it all along!” And now, here that moment is, anonymized and rendered a mythified (in the Barthesian sense) instance of feminine insubordination (look at these little girls, being pushed around and nevertheless insisting on disquiet!)

Strange, strange, strange.

–HJM

Filed under: Everything's Political, Gender Thangs, The Jam, Laura Mulvey, Myth, Peter Broderick, Quiet Long Enough, Roland Barthes, to-be-looked-at-ness

Prole.info The Housing Monster

Prole.info has recently posted their first publication of 2012: The Housing Monster.

The description feature on the website follows:
The Housing Monster takes one seemingly simple everyday thing—a house—and looks at the social relations that surround and determine it. Starting with the construction site and the physical building of houses, the book slowly builds and links more and more issues together: from gentrification and city politics to gender roles and identity politics, from subcontracting and speculation to union contracts and negotiation, from intensely personal thoughts and interactions to large-scale political and economic forces. What starts as a look at housing questions, broadens into a critique of capitalism as a whole. (152 pages, first printing in 2012)

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, prole.info, The Housing Monster

Wall Street is War Street

DESTROY THE MUSEUMS. OUR STRUGGLE CANNOT BE HUNG ON WALLS. A NEW SPIRIT IS
RISING. LIKE THE STREETS OF WATTS WE BURN WITH REVOLUTION… October 10, 1966.
A handful of young guys and girls, having stalked up from New York’s Lower East Side scattering leaflets calling for the closure of the Museum of Modern Art, are stopped Just outside the Museum entrance by a whole phalanx of cops and crashbarriers. The story had leaked, and the cops, on the ball as ever, had sensed a new and very real type of threat months before anyone else: the cops at least have got it clear Just whose side Art Is on… The Director of the Museum (largest collection of Dada in the world) out on the steps, wringing his hands, almost in tears, only too anxious to please: “Why are you doing this? We haven’t done anything…” The group, unheard of before this, called BLACK MASK… Next, early one morning, black balaclava hoods pulled down to their eyes, cracked rictus skulls skewered on stakes, BLACK MASK, swollen to 15, marched from Canal Street down Lower Broadway to Wall Street. Throwaways reading Traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers… Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange at death… WALL STREET IS WAR STREET… The cops and the overdressed corporation errandboys plain dumbfounded; the only people to get really uptight were, predictably enough, alas, a group of straight proles who showed up… A relative flop, all in all. Too much sub-Committee of 100 stuff – Grosvenor Square = Genocide Square, etc. In fact all BLACK MASK’s early experiments with Provo-type tactics were far more trenchant and original when applied to the culture scene. It was official ‘experimental’ art rather than official leftwing politics that they’d broken out of. And they loathed its guts…

From Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Black Mask, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker

New Article on Homonormativity and Suicide in ‘LGBT Issues in Philosophy’

Folks!

A full version of a paper I delivered at this past fall’s Feminist Ethics and Social Theory conference is in the just-released ‘LGBT Issues in Philosophy’ newsletter (one of the handful of American Philosophical Association newsletters). The whole newsletter is worth checking out – I’m excited, in particular, to have a look at Nathaniel Coleman’s piece on racialization, bottoming, and HIV (‘What, What in the (Black) Butt’) and Ellen Feder’s short piece on the connections between prenatal dexamethosone treatment in instances of infants with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) and homophobia. You can find those, as well as my essay (‘What If It Doesn’t Get Better? Suicide, Negative Affect, and the Outside of Homonormativity’) here.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, homonormativity, LGBT Issues in Philosophy, Negative Affect, queer, Suicide

A Post of Links

First up, Jason Read has posted a review of Balibar’s Citoyen Sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique. The review interrogates Balibar’s argument that Hegel can and/or should be situated as a ‘transindividual’ thinker in the company of Simondon and Spinoza. Interesting for sure, but also interesting is the reemergence of Hegel in radical thought. As the Scu put it the other day, Hegel is the new Spinoza.

Anarchist Without Content has a string of new posts up, all worth checking out.

Heems of Das Racist has released a solo mixtape. Check it out here.

This is more of a question than a link, but I am interested in knowing why it is that Infoshop hasn’t been updated since January 2nd–anyone know why this is?

Finally, if you have been wondering what Dave Chappelle has been up to lately, check out this string of videos from his 2011 Comedy Jam performance:

Filed under: Everything's Political

Revolutionary Intercommunalism

We are not mechanical Marxists and we are not historical materialists. Some people think they are Marxists when actually they are following the thoughts of Hegel. Some people think they are Marxist-Leninists but they refuse to be creative, and are, therefore, tied to the past. They are tied to a rhetoric that does not apply to the present set of conditions. They are tied to a set of thoughts that approaches dogma . . . . If we are using the method of dialectical materialism we don’t expect to find anything the same even one minute later because “one minute later” is history. If things are in a constant state of change, we cannot expect them to be the same. Words used to describe old phenomena may be useless to describe the new. And if we use the old words to describe new events we run the risk of confusing people and misleading them into thinking things are static.

–Huey Newton, To Die for the People, pages 25-26

I think the quote above is compelling for several reasons. On the one hand, Newton cites the above quote in his dissertation, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America, as the theoretical ground for one of the BPP’s most important tactical concepts: revolutionary intercommunalism. On the other hand, it *almost* rhymes with so many contemporary post-Marxist theories of resistance. Where the BPP asserts creativity, or a kind of active expression of resistance, the unity formed by a platform or party politics operates contingently at best.

More BPP propaganda!

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, BPP, Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Intercommunalism, The Black Panters

Jeffrey Bell Interview at 3:AM

I’m loving it, particularly given that I’m teaching Latour and Deleuze pretty much back-to-back this semester.

An excerpt for you, on his concept of ‘substantive multiplicity’ and Badiou’s contra-Deleuzian reading of Spinoza:

Badiou believes that Deleuze’s metaphysical commitments – to Spinoza in particular – do leave him unable to account for novelty. Every thing is just a fold and extension of everything that precedes it and hence nothing emerges that is not in some sense prefigured within that which came before, and therefore it is not truly new. By contrast, Badiou argues for events that rupture with what is, they are the void and null set that cannot be placed within any situation. The problem then is to account for how such events become effective, how they come to transform the way things are. This is where Badiou calls upon the fidelity of the subject who answers the call of the event and thereby effectuates its potentialities within the world. My argument for the notion of a substantive multiplicity avoids the necessity of calling upon a loyal subject to effectuate novelty while at the same time not sacrificing the radical nature of the new as that which cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, that which preceded it. The argument to make this case consumed many pages of my book, but in short the substantive multiplicity does not determine the new for it is only as actualized, determinate modes (following Spinoza) that this substance is determinate and determinable in the first place. This reading, I argue, fits well with what Spinoza actually says and avoids some of the problems that plague Badiou’s reading of Spinoza.

Nice, nice.

–HJM

Filed under: Love Letters, The Jam, 3:AM Magazine, Badiou, Deleuze, Jeffrey A. Bell, Spinoza

I am so proud to say that I have adopted a new cat! Her name is Rosalie and she is a year old.

Rosalie is now partners with Roscox, who is 2 1/2.

–MLA

Filed under: The Jam, Cats