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

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

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:

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

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

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

–MLA

First, a new issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies is now out: Art & Anarchy

The following is a set of books forthcoming in 2012 that are on my list to buy:

1. Ontology of Production: Three Essays by Nishida Kitaro, Edited/Translated by William Haver

2. Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by Tiqqun

3. HumAnimal by Kalpana Rahita Seshadri

4. The Administration of Fear by Paulo Virilio, Translated by Ames Hodges

5. Dictatorship by Carl Schmitt

While I don’t want to flood you with more Occupy news/whatever, the Social Text Blog reportage to look into.

George Caffentzis has a great article up at the Edufactory Collective site on Plato’s Republic and Student Loan Refusal

And finally, here is a song form the forthcoming Mumford and Sons Album, “The Ghosts That We Knew”

–MLA

I confess I take pleasure in seeing humanists sputter and protest. In that respect I am faithful to my upbringing. Every good Southern Protestant’s eyes narrow at the words “secular humanism.” It’s a reflex. Many of us have forgetten the cause of this physiological manifestation of suspicion, but there is one: the point of secular humanism is to do away with God.

Now, there have always been people who’ve done without God. They’re called sinners. They have no morals; they smoke and drink and dance and cuss and make a mess of their lives. Therefore they’re easy to pick out of a crowd and teach children to avoid. Secular humanists, though, are another animal. They are insidious, because they do without God and still act like moral, upright citizens. You can’t pick them out of a crowd; they might turn up anywhere; and no matter how well you raise your children they might end up taking a secular humanist as a role model. (This is why you hope your kids will go to the community college or the voc/tech school rather than the private university, even the church-affiliated one). Secular humanists set man up in place of God; they make man the repository and foundation of all values. Secular humanists are idolators. So say my forebears. And so say I. No point in setting up yet another God. Besides, I figure if you’re going to reject Jehovah, you at least ought to get to drink and cuss and dance. What’s the point of atheism if you’re still saddled with morality?

- from Bodies & Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization, which you should probably read if you haven’t already, because it’s stellar.

–HJM

MANARCHIST RYAN GOSLING.

‘Nuff said.

–HJM

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

–MLA