Intellectual Violence

As both real life and physical debate continues outside our small group of thinkers to extend to conversations we end up having between us, with other people, or in other seminars, I cannot but reflect on the ways the experience of this course has sharpened and reframed my notion of violence, at the same time, raising awareness in me on issues that up until now I had dealt with only on the surface. I believe each one of us to be taking away something different and at the same time special and precious, but in the form of a more cohesive summary, allow me the couple of points that will follow. 

In the realm of the symbolic, what went critically unexamined were the notions of intellectualization and political correctness, derivative one could argue, of a subcategory that one may call "intellectual violence". There are many possible forms/paradigms to conceptualize intellectual violence, including copyright violation and accessing information, hate-speech and systemic violence veiled by political correctness, or even worse, political correctness turning us into a-political agents. But beyond these or other examples one can bring up, I want to mention two instances that came up in the past two days.

First there was a discussion between Jinna, Elise, Alex and I prompt by the usage of language and how one speaks reveal (or disclose) his/her class and social background: the prerogative of a "pure", "clean" language that becomes the "official" over dialect, slang and any other form of hybrid language grounded in the grassroot. An oppression regarding self-expression of rural, downscale and colonized subjects alike. 

Following a couple of lecture's I've attended the past few days, a second example which came up and that to me is imperative to consider is the irrefutable and indisputable dominance of a western-centric anthology of concepts which are repetitively recycled and overused in our effort to describe the world or project a future vision for it. Coincidently, such terms also happen to be, on the one hand, antiquated, on the other, bankrupt. Meaning that their non-refined, non-updated usage serves only to highlight how we are constantly trying to talk about the future by using the past. A tactic that renders our mission impossible. 

My critique towards both lecturers was of their constant use of the term "democracy". Mind you, both liberal Marxists in my understanding. The first guy was talking about America's diplomatic and military interventions in the geopolitical reconfiguration of the Middle East, the latter was discussing the realization of socialist utopias within the current capitalist system; or a synergy between them that could transform the system into a more democratic one. Now, my problem is the following. Democracy is repeatedly evoked to stand either as an ideal or as an example. Not only is there never an effective critique upon the ideal itself, just to consider whether such a model of governance continues to be the ideal one considering what are its limits or origins for that matter (think Ancient Greece: democracy over there was practice by a certain elite: the People were essentially the upper class, free men of Athens: slaves, women, non-Athenians excepted.) Secondly, by referring to democracy as a paradigm of how well the western world is working, we are shutting ourselves from a most important criticism, that in fact, democracy is not working in the West, our system of governance is as corrupted as in the most authoritative states.

I liked how Billy worked through it in his email:

democracy seems more meaningfully the ability to summon dictatorship and produce bourgeois subjects. to say that things are ‘thin’ or ‘deep’ democracies is interesting, too, mostly in that it returns a (incredibly pathetic) agency.

Intellectual violence in this case has something to do with scholarship's resistance to either challenge or doubt it's own sensibility. It also links in a direct way with the discussion we had in class over institutionalizing cultural products. They are acceptable as long as they originate from or are destined to belong in the mausoleum of art museums and universities. Indeed, there is something very problematic and in fact very dangerous going on. I believe that the mission of young intellectuals must always be Nietzschean, by that, I mean nihilistic. Our aim of course is not to rediscover the wheel but neither is it any longer wise to appropriate the same vehicles. We must kill our idols and their values must die with them. Our era is accused of not being able to produce anything original; how can we, when the monsters of the past lurk over our necks so persistently? When we refuse to let go, say no, and make way for our own routes?

Our revolutions will lead to new democratic dictatorships unless we are willing to change our agenda, redefine our concepts, sharpen our criticism and stop looking up to the old order of things as the only way to go about our business. Radical scholarship needs to be removed from the sidelines and the institutional coercion that keeps it there. Intellectuals have a responsibility, first and foremost to speak up and speak loud, or else they become the very hypocrites that will have to go down alongside the filthy rich and the murderers. 

Levi's Guilt

 Please follow the link for a sneak preview: http://mubi.com/films/532

As a future reference to any interested party I would like to suggest Pasolini's 1975 controversial film Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom based on a book of the same title by the Marquis de Sade. 

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious final film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, has been called nauseating, shocking, depraved, pornographic . . . it’s also a masterpiece. The controversial poet, novelist, and filmmaker’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s 18th-century opus of torture and degradation to 1944 Fascist Italy remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in. —The Criterion Collection

Salò stands, in my opinion, at the intersection of many of the "typologies of violence" we have discussed throughout the course, and from this point of view it provides a complex and hybrid ambiance for an understanding which is plural, interdisciplinary, and informative of possible overlaps between genres of violence. 

The movie provides us with a context within which to examine the relationship between the physical and visible coercion on bodies versus the subjective violence, which according to Zizek, is violence which is performed by a clearly identifiable human agent. Or to identify, as we may at 02:25, the overlap between ideological and symbolic violence: "I think that we Fascists represent the only true complete anarchism on earth once we have taken control of the state. In fact the only real anarchism is that of power." The movie is  difficult to watch, but what we name controversial, is in fact the dialectics of violence entering into a debate with one another. Here in we shall find the true gender of the State: it has the head of a man, the body of a woman - a mythic creature in its own right - a sadomasochistic entity fed by gross pain. But its violent behavior, as it alternates between the ethical, the everyday, and the disciplinary; produces the structural violence, on the one hand, the liberational violence, on the other. 

Violence's ability of shape-shifting as stated by Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois (2004), is explored by Pasolini in the same spirit, only that in his work art is celebrated for it's ability to attack and expose violence by turning a mirror upon itself. The exaggeration is so intense that the reflection we get is an amorphism. Devoid of form, violence is to be understood as plural, non-linear, subjugative; transcending and traversing the isomorphic habitus.   

Judith Butler's contribution through her reading of Primo Levi's account of the year he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz, offers another insight to our own effort of making sense: inside Auschwitz prisoners were convinced of a guilt designating their common fate. A guilt over a crime that was never committed, never defined, and never stated. I believe that to be a condition set inside any form of abusive relationship, whether we are examining couples of race, gender, sex, class, ethnicity etc. Or if you like, guilt, is power's toe. 

Can there be such a thing as a non-pervasive, non-corruptive power? What happens to our agency under submission? Violence has been presented as a prerequisite of order and balance and Salò gives us a glimpse of what that world looks like when all genres of violence are densely concentrated. What would the opposite world look like? A non-violent world implies the eradication of all forms of power as well. For sure we would call it a Utopia. Linguistics aside, what would it look like? As creative minds we are much more adept to imagine spaces of Armageddon, but we lack the skills to envision inclusive spaces of Paradise: we are torn by our self-righteous ethics and our rivalry gods. Is it perhaps that our awareness, our consciousness and our sensibility are founded on victimage? Are we not, after all, permanently attached to a food-chain standing, as we do, between the mightier and weaker?

< I <.... the fish eats the fish eats the fish ad infinitum... And when we yield to this logic we surrender our will, that is to say, our power. The order that results out of violence, is the order of a conditioned agency: we make sense of who we are through the restraints applied upon us. From this point of view, it matter's little if we live in a liberal democracy, in a fundamentalist autocracy, in a military oligarchy. We are divided only by our ability to comprehend and take on different types of power, and therefore, exercise different forms of violence on each other. 

Peace as Euphemism

Pay close attention, his talk, is to say the least despicable: arrogant, homophobic, racist. The institutions he employs, either directly as allies or indirectly as prototypes of mimesis for a systemic organization of what he is essentially envisioning as a Bureau of War; are an extent of the very same forces that continue to bring down the world, create inequalities and prolong the gap between the richer and the poorest: NATO, UNSC, G20, ICC... Please! Barnett's vision remains the panamerican RAMBO even if it is an older, maturer, botoxed Stalone with a dissociative identity disorder.

What a schmuck. I can't believe he was applauded by all those pro-military dick-geeks in there and the bunch of commentators on the thread that developed below went as far as to argue whether his vision is feasible or not, even those who argue against it only because it's drying up the country's resources. This has been the most uncritical thread to develop under a most important issue presented as a comic relief by the semi-authoritative Barnett. What a caricature of liberal democracy at its best: "we're gonna fuck the world with it's consent and we're gonna place more of those institutions funded directly by the interests of the world bank, the weapon industry, oil companies and what not."

Renee Richards Documentary - NYTimes.com Search

Renee Richards Documentary - NYTimes.com Search
There was an article in the NY Times a few days ago, on April 20, 2011, in the Arts section to which I would like to call your attention, as it beautifully illustrates the problem that Judith Butler is articulating in her book, "Aganist Ethical Violence". This recent article in the NY Times, is announcing a new set of films about sports figures in the Tribeca/ESPN film festival. One of the films is about a transgendered person named Renee Richards.
In Wikipedia, Ms. Richards life is summarized, in facts figures, data from tennis tables and is a relatively straight forward account and it cites two autobiographical books in 1986, and 2007. Ms. Richards is also a person who fought for her rights to be judged as a woman when she entered won a legal decision that disputed her right, after her successful operation to play in the US Open in 1976.
Ms. Richards is facinating to many people for many reasons, and just one of these reasons is surely because after her successful sex change, she became a pro tennis star on the woman's circuit. But although "society" here represented by the "NY Times", is facinated by Ms. Richards, it has not always been kind, or even accepting, but rather has displayed a very harsh judgement of this courageous and daring person, the subject of this new sports documentary. The link at the top of my post here links to the recent article about the new sports documentary.
The manner in which the NY times has treated Ms. Richards in at least one time in the past, can be seen in a feature article from 2007, called, "The Lady Regrets" and the link to that article I have included at the bottom of this blog post. This article reflects a very harsh judgemental attitude on the part of the author, and I am also going to assert that the judgement is leveled also by society, because it was published by the NY Times. This harsh judgement is unethical and also violent and I believe this judgement comes from an assumption and demand that
Ms. Butler is challenging in her book, in the chapter called, "Giving an Account of Oneself".

Here Ms. Butler is aiming to develop a better ethics that would inform normative discourse, than the one that we currently have, and that was operative in the NY times feature of Ms. Richards in 2007, when Ms. Butler says,
"It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves. The recognition that one is, at everyturn, not quite the same as how one presents oneself in the available discourse might imply, in turn, a certain patience with others that would suspend the demand that they be self-same at every moment." In that piece,
"The Lady Regrets" (NY T2007), there is not much patience on the part of the author when she says, "one ...has the uneasy sense of the impatient male surgeon trapped in her body trying to break out."

The problem that Judith Butler works to articulate, is illustrated when we look at these couple of pieces featured at different times by The NY Times. Here that that bastion of normality, and the great judger of all things under the sun, the NY Times represents what
Ms. Butler calls "available discourse" and means for this blog post anyway, the normative voice of our society that Ms. Butler is challenging in her article.

I feel and think that the feature,
"The Lady Regrets" is very acidic in it's judemental tone. In it's acidic tone resides the judgement, and therefore the violence against Ms. Richards. It is this that is unethical and according to Ms. Butler's challenge, is also inherent in normative discourse as it is and which Butler decries and calls into question.
I think the author of "the Lady Regrets" and also, society, in the sense that the NY Times published the article and cast such an aspersion toward Ms. Richards with this cutting tone is because their is too much of a demand that
"we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same", which Judith Butler postulates is not at all the best ethics. Ms. Richards clearly defied that demand by society when she first went through her sex change, but then flaunted it by becoming a pro-women's tennis star!

The main argument in "Against Ethical Violence", as I understand it, is that "normative discourse" or mainstream pundits, that is the persons who are able to speak with some position of authority and credibility in our society, such persons as, sociologists, journalists, and a plethora of others who can be considered "the speakers of officialdom", do not really "allow" a person, that is "the subject" of this normative discourse to be changeable. Furthermore, this normative discourse is inherently violent and the violence comes from an inherent presumption that one should be an unchanging person, and one should be able to give an account of oneself that adds up to a coherency that is actually unrealistic as it is inhuman. It is a "condemnation, denunciation, and excoriation." (pg 46 Butler). and further,
condemnation becomes the way in which we establish the otehr as nonrecognizable or jettison someaspect of ourselves that we lodge in the other, whom we then condemn." (same, pg 46)

If one were allowed more of one's humanity, Butler seems to say, and if one were to be a subject, in the way that Renee Richards became a subject of normative discourse when she had a successful sex change and became a successful Pro Tennis Player in the Women's Circuit, than one would be permitted, and allowed and granted a much greater set of circumstances, attitudes, presentations, actualizations, than what is approved of by society in normative discourse.
Perhaps the new documentary on Renee will suspend judgement, at very least and will...
allow us, and give us each the opportunity to know something about ourselves even if it is to admit what we do not know about this other unique person Renee, and therefore ourselves, from this better ethical standpoint that Ms. Butler is promoting when she says...
"to know oneself as limited is still to know something about oneself, even if one's knowing is afflicted by the limitation that one knows."(pg 46 same)

One might be allowed to be seen more as a light-filled collage of possibilities, wherein any one or many of those actualities might be actualized at any instance. One person, "subjected" under a different set of ethical assumptions than the ones in vogue in our present day, might allow a greater range of reality-of-humanness to be actualized then, and not killed, by a killing opinion that is inherently violent, limited, and currently normative. One such as Renee, would be welcomed and allowed the greater range of possibilites, of light-filled possibilites, than one, such as she, or you, or I can ever/could ever account for, in any discourse, and in this opening to lightto be more of a light-filled complex of presentations, incompletely projected from any body-habitus- than our discourses might be more inherently ethical.

Unfortunately, as this feature from 2007 demonstrates, these normative discursive-functioning voices, have a way of boxing their subjects in a way that is unethical, but the normative ethics typically goes un-noticed, and these judging voices are often presumptuous and violent in their positions.
It is futile enough to "give an account of oneself" as Butler rather laboriously articulates, by using the concept of opacity, in relation to oneself, on the one hand, and the nature and various genres of description which poses inherent problems which we run aground due to our humanness and also the laboriousness of epistemological discussions in general.

What can we know, let alone, what can we describe, and what kind of accounts can we make of ourselves? And when we do give accounts of ourselves, who judges these accounts? There are ethical questions inherent within our accounts, as well as the dubious nature of accounting for just about anything, even something as apparently simple as a lemon. But how hard is it to account for oneself if you were the incredible daring, courageous, intelligent person that Renee Richards, is and was!
Ms Butler describes what I think Sarte was getting at, when in his tomb,
"Being and Nothingness" he speaks of the human ability to only be able to a part of a lemon, when we are viewing a lemon, due to the three dimensional, actual shape of a lemon.
The documentary that is being noticed here, called, "Renee", Eric Drath, hopefully is less judgmental than another NY Times article which is called, "The Lady Regrets" shamefully has taken a sniping and hostile evaluation of Renee. The normative and mainstream ethics which presumes to judge Renee harshly as rather unsatisfied in the article from 2007, takes the position that Butler would call unethical because it demands that subjects be "self-same every minute."
The Lady Regrets
by dogwood

People's Park 1969 same as US Now!

Below my words here I have placed some footage that is from a place close to home.
Peoples' Park is celebrating it's 42nd Anniversary this coming Sunday (04/24/11)! This footage could be a kind of preview to what we might need to do again to stop the wars, in Iraq, and Afghanistan. Also, recently we have started bombing even more countries; Egypt and Libya.
I want us to confront this state, our state, the United States of Empire, this May 1st, 2011. People are once again coming together, organizing and celebrating at People's Park, and in other communities around Berkeley, and around our country to demand a better world, and better governance! But as Lenin and Fanon made clear in the writings we studied in class, we must prepare to take what we need, and this means that we must prepare to seize power, and use force to make the positive changes happen! So, it's time for direct action everybody!
People's Park community has dispersed to everywhere around our country since the days of the sixties when people reclaimed UC land and created the Park. People's Park is now represented all over the world now by many who have come through Berkeley, loved, and defended the Park over the years. Please check out the history of this rich green place, symbolic of so much more than it's actual acreage.
The sometimes gritty place it has locally devolved to is not always reflective of the wonderful hub of the better world it represents and actualizes. This hub is really the center of a multitude of activists, educators, artists and, in general, the great wheel of actual and hopeful spokes of people who want to build and create a better world. We are here, there and everywhere!
For example, "Food Not Bombs" serves good mostly organic meals Monday through Friday at 3:00 pm in the Park. This great institution is only one name, of one wonderful organization connected with the Park that constantly keeps the dream of a better world without war fresh!
Many people all over the United States who built the Park came to Berkeley a couple of years ago on the 40th anniversary of the Park, and told their stories. We came together and remembered how large and extensive our community still is, and we met the founders of the Park. They spoke about the reasons that they created the Park. One lady, a student at the time, just wanted a green place for her kids to swing!
On this coming Sunday, once again, we the people, are planning to celebrate the Park's history of resistance and community-building and revisit the same issues, such as free speech on campus, attacks on immigrants, exclusivity reigning once again at UC-Berkeley, and plan the march to protest the budget cuts in Sacramento, and the strike on May 1st!
We are going to protest and demand an end to the budget cuts that are only being claimed as necessary due to failed Neo-liberal policies and governance right here at home, in California and the US.

What do we need to do to bring home the idea to students at the University, and to people in the communities in Berkeley and Oakland, that it is once again time to rise up?
We need to connect the dots for folks, between such policies as shrinking public transportation and educational opportunities for many, and especially working class folks, and trillions spent on wars to enforce our economic policies in other countries. Rich folks rake it in during wars, how much has Dick Cheney made?
The readings that we covered in class by Lenin, and Fanon, as well as Scheper-Hughes illustrate the societal functions and the roles that wars play for those who are wealthy and privileged, the reformists and confusion mongers of our time, many students and faculty, alumni, administrators, and government officials, and police who think that reform efforts, more peaceful and by not being too demanding all at once, we will eventually figure out a way to stop these heinous wars, and create the change we need. The organization, Peace Action is another such reformist player, working right now to reduce nuclear arms proliferation, and ask for an end to the wars. Asking our Congress, composed of politicians who need the corporate donations of war profiteers, such as CEO's who work for KBR, and the US Navy (Bennett), and many such folk in the corporate sphere, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, the list is endless, actually; is useless at this point, as are the Democrats.

They are as wrong now as they were in Fanon's and Lenin's day! They are basically just enforcing more structural, physical, and symbolic violence for all, which will not ultimately come about in non-confrontational, peaceful ways.
We need to rise up, and stop "business as usual" and make sure that the policy enforcers like Yudof and UCPD get the message and than take it to their higher ups that no amount of "policing" is going to hold back the force of the people! We want to bring the troops home, now and stop the wars against other people now! We want to and we will get more folks a University level education, and more parks right here in California!
We need to forcibly- perhaps by campus and neighborhood occupations, point out by force of a take-over just as the students and community did in 1969, that once again we are in need of "getting over" the muddling of the issues by "confusion mongers" as Fanon called the "reformists" in his time. We need to share with others, these writings as Aaron has shared them with us!
Lenin went to great lengths to clarify, in his writing, "State and Revolution", that only a violent take-over will work to bring revolutionary change, i.e.; stop the wars. I am considering here that "stopping the wars" is basically a revolutionary-alternative policy. It is a very similar program that we are being ruled under that Lenin was talking about in his writing. In the 60's with the long and ongoing war we were facing then waged by the United States, the ongoing "intervention" in Vietnam, many "confusion mongers" used the same reason to keep us bombing then. Now, these same groups would have us think that continued efforts through various more peaceful actions such as lobbying, working alongside the Democratic Party and with the corporate media, through classrooms, etc. will get us further toward more peace. It will not, it is getting us nowhere except involved in more wars!
check out this indy media site for the information on the strike and march on May 1st:

Let's organize once again in and around People's Park, on campus, and march to Sacramento this coming May 1st which is also International Worker's Day, to stop the wars and fund education- college education for all! Now! from dogwood Here is the flick from the anti-war and community park movement 1969 on Youtube:

Race Confrontation. Suffolk, VA.

There is a schizophrenia.

In that we oscillate between a subjective and objective gaze— ostensibly neutral, distant onlooking; then a certain oblivion-space between the two; then submersion as fractional individuals into immediate totality, into immediate identity. Academy, not only economic refuge for the counter-revolution’s children, but an emotional refuge. To empty out daily life to approach the scale of abstraction (society, history, ad nauseam)— yes— but also the scale of emotion. That daily life is immiserated— emptied of such passion. French (and always the French) bourgeois disillusionment after 1848 makes itself heard in Flaubert: ‘Passion in the form it is allowed to take these days, that is to say the inactive kind’. The scale, the scale of my apartment, our bed, our kitchen wares so animated by our past labors, congealed, into death— used, drained, and dead again. Into muted life. Into concrete rights. Demands we make on each other. Justice disgusting.

Between an immediate and a societal scale.

The immediate reality: visible, discernable, describable. Unsignified or signified with an apparent object.
And the scale of society, of history, the abstraction, the spatially and temporally distant, flows, boundaries, patterns or without pattern. The latent forces. Potentialities.

One cannot live solely in either. 'Meaning', the purview of art objects, is an attempt to penetrate the immediate reality with the scale of society. This, as we have heard, cannot rely solely on mimesis. It is the individual submerged into a totality. One’s project is to bring the scale of society to the immediate scale of life. Meaning making, art objects, documentation are so many fractions, (dirty, distorted) residue of another world.

Residue without a strategy of negation is witnessing, witnessing relies on a juridical mechanism, a force. Organized residue, organized witnessing (a la ‘Cop Watch’) then is a testament to our powerlessness vis a vis the immediate scale. The scale where the state appears as the police. The scale where the economy appears as personal debt, filial duty, the lovely date or sneakers we afford ourselves. The scale where the social appears as the friend who is less beautiful, less reliable, less shelter than the small home I’ve rented.

Catalog - A Collection of Corporate Language

In the selection from "Flammable" by Auyero and Swistun, there is an account of the Shell Company responding to the conditions around one of its refineries in Argentina. As a response to public outcry over the health conditions and high levels of lead in the water and soil in nearby "shantytowns" and among many of its inhabitants, it responds with "special programs" and pseudo-promotional catalogs. These catalogs list its response programs in the area, yet it turns most of the outrage into its "active policies". It is a public relations campaign instead of a humanitarian response.

By differing with moral outrage in favor of disavowing its legal responsibility with these conditions and future investment conditions in the region, it also exposes its inherently inhumane policies. If it is simply a matter of language, then it is easy to see why most accidents may be dismissed as "lessons learned". The systemization of corporate interests (economically and socially) reveals the limitations of the system itself when morality is involved. This corporation reveals the systemic violence upon which it depends.

As Auyero and Swistun state: " In hiding actual life conditions, the catalog reveals the way in which a corporation seeks to signal its legitimacy (euphemized as 'corporate social responsibility') in the face of massive suffering; a suffering that is factually denied at the same time it is invoked(80)".

Is this not systemic violence in practice?

Bradley Manning Tortured

Here in the United States, Bradley Manning's fate is in question right now. However, the military and other state power's that currently exist, such as the O'Bama administration, are on one side, and groups like, "Courage to Resist" are on the other. Please check out the courage to resist website, couragetoresist.org. Please watch and select some of these videos to get a look at how things are being framed and to see which side, you might be on. I believe that Bradley Manning is being singled out for violent treatment by the state, and a worthy whistleblower from the past is in agreement with me. His name is Daniel Ellsberg. He is a hero from the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era. Find out more about him as well. He is one of the great reasons that the United States finally ended it's role of bombing and fighting in Vietnam. He is also a Berkeley resident. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Bradley+manning%2C+torture%3F&aq=f

The Communist Hypothesis

Chara mentioned this in class today, a quick read: The Communist Hypothesis

More Brown for Your Buck

Feminism as Subversion

"The fact that neither state power nor male dominance is unitary or systemic means that a feminist theory of the state will be less a linear argument than a mapping of an intricate grid of overlapping and conflicting strategies, technologies, and discourses of power(Brown 177)."

This selection from Wendy Brown's paper equates a resistance to the hegemony of masculinity and state power to what is traditionally a natural resistance to power in general. This, I think, is where we find ourselves today. Gender inequality is not regulated to the peripheries of the system. To subvert this violently racist system, and to set an example of honest appraisal of the system for others to follow, begins with admitting these base indignities. This disciplined society comes out of a predisposition to power and control yet it is fueled by domination of gender and a variety of other controls that cannot be constrained to "linear" political logic. It must be understood socially to have any effect at all.

Brown's contention is based on the "gendering of the state(177)" and that state presuming the actions of its participants. Masculinity exposes itself in practice and defense of the state through violence. Not just any violence, but an American, white, racist and gendered violence. Such a reaction comes out of the function of the state itself. Subversion begins with those pushed toward the bottom of society. Those that are dominated must to, have to, find a way to subvert an inherently unequal system. To do less would be to accept an indignity. It would be to accept failure. Those of us looking to fill these positions of power after graduation must accept that they fill the roles of an unequal system. It is imperative that they look to subvert that system by shifting and subverting the roles laid out in front of them. This is a challenge of all generations from here on out. To do less would be to accept failure. It is much clearer, thankfully, than election politics. It occurs in everyday interaction. For Brown, it begins with subversion through feminism.

Finding the Transgender Woman in the State

"The prerogative of the state, whether expressed as the armed force of the police or as vacillating criteria for obtaining welfare benefits, is often all that stands between women and rape, women and starvation, women and dependence upon brutal mates—in short, women and unattenuated male prerogative” (Brown 1995:191).

On Third Worlds as Political Strategy

Preliminary Theses on (the Continuing Appeal of) Identity Politics

Marx in 1844 Asked 'Emancipation or Assimilation'?

1. That 'identity politics' a la Francis Fox Piven sought to forge a 'third way': an emancipation through (a degree of) assimilation. This strategy sought to create extra-class social identities (the legacy of the Third World formation: political alliances such 'people of color', 'women of color', 'queers', etc.) within moribund social movements (Jefferson Cowie, Stayin Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, 2009; Dan Georgkas, Detroit I do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution, 1999) as victimized identity categories recognized by the state-- interestingly, not as a strategy for assimilation but one which assumed that by the state politically 'including the excluded' necessary contradictions within capital would be brought to the fore. As a consequence, this strategy shaped social movements as movements primarily focused on state recognition, Keynesian state legislation, an expansion of 'cultural politics', and broad alliances with sympathetic members of the capitalist class (George Soros Foundation, Ford Foundation, etc).

2. That this 'identity politics' milieu and its rights based strategy instead found that capital could in fact 'include the excluded' without contradiction-- to use David Harvey's terminology, capital 'turned a limit into a barrier it could overcome'. Capital's process-- of producing identities/fragmentation/difference and of 'overcoming barriers'-- is also a process of value production.

3. That a victimized identity category recognized by the post-Keynesian (and perhaps 'neoliberal') state will tend not to by its own logic generate social welfare programs, etc. That instead this strategy failed (and continues to fail) to address the 'counter revolution' of the past 40 years (a counter revolution that appears in many forms but in terms of race, in the form of the 'War on Drugs,' the 'War on Gangs', and the 'War on Terror'); post Fordist US deindustrialization (rise of credit/debt economy, concealing work hours as leisure hours, home into office, rise of high/low end service industry); and neoliberal social policies (for instance the transformation of public housing into a booming prison industry).

Colonizer and Colonized

This video is violent. Real violence. It is not heroic or justified. It is systematic.

Perhaps this incident is an indication of the relatively mundane aspects of the machinery of military. Technology and politics fuse their ties in military conflict more than they do in scientific endeavors. As an academic, though hesitant in practice, I am convinced of the structure in which I participate. That is exists. This gun-camera obfuscates the relationship of colonizer and colonized, but in its abstraction to us, lays down a broader abstract scope. It might be characterized as a tragedy, but it is imperative to the relationship between these soldiers and the bodies of those on the ground. It reaffirms their practices and their boundaries.

This is my perspective as an American taking stock in the dichotomy of violence at home, or within the bordered regions of the mind, and the thirst for it abroad. The reality of living in disciplined surroundings, in a white American middle-class skin, straight identified in theory, affords me a place in the "colonizer's" system. My awareness of this space is dependent upon the systematically unbalanced body of the colonized. I need to maintain this identity by reaffirming my distance from these bodies. This desire is a theoretical fine line. It is the line crossed when learning about the human body as the site of authoritarian discipline and observation. It is the line observed in time and space as the body of the colonized, especially at home (for the colonized are next door too). Their struggle for recognition informs their collective identity as colonized. Family takes on a hazy balance as they attempt to gain some amount of dignity. Fear shakes the boundaries between group and theory, usually by reinforcing them afterward. I say to myself, at least it is not me. The colonized say, just wait.

Where can a dialogue exist? It must lay in a restructuring of borders in mind. It will take time, but more importantly it will take belief in the human-ness of the other. There must be something other than what there is now.

This incident is not that. It is evidence of distance. It is evidence of separation.

The Pentagon's New Imperial Cartography

I was very surprised of today topic. Because Barnett's book is interesting as an attempt to suggest a post cold war strategic mentality that has far reaching implications for both the American military and the global economy. Also, he clearly a man of the people engaged in nearly single handed attempt to remake the American military so that it can fulfill the American dream of an orderly and peaceful world in which all may pursue life, liberty, and happiness. This article that who control the global economy equal as the American military makes an excuse for they want to have the power and control the world. I read first time that got falling asleep and second time that I got through the text but did not understand. After a today class, I realized that was living inside a small box. Numbers want to have a power, and if they got the power then they want to continue to carry. They can be murder people who feel need to keep the power. It is very sad.

Limited Perspectives

Barnett's essay is focused on the interests of the Pentagon and the United States government. Though the globalization of democracy and capitalism is its preeminent desire, such a state is interested in using its military power to define how that will happen for the rest of the world. Barnett insists that that "the Gap" between states like the Iraq(Non-Integrating) and the United States(Core) is the "standard of living". What standard is this supposed to represent? Is it clean water and enough food? Does it include healthcare and education? Is this standard of living a right or an earned privilege?

Globalization is an interest of state entities like the Pentagon and the World Bank. Although I too rely on money to exchange for food and education, shelter, et al, Barnett wants me to believe that the violence committed by foreign entities are kept in the "non-integrating Gap" by the gallant efforts of the United States government in "exporting security". This means trading arms for cooperation/oil/democracy. Even Barnett knows that total peace is not possible under this globalization, but that national borders must give way to security. I must admit, my money is good only as long as the base of the American economy, this exporting of security, continues unabated. My interests in getting more money are ultimately founded on maintaining my own "standard of living". It is rooted in violence. Cooperation.

Oil will run out. American democracy is corrupt and not really democracy, it is representative. Cooperation is based upon the interests of a few decision making representatives. Those people who are suffering in Barnett's Gap are not offered any other assistance by the forces of the United States except when it reacts to "system perturbations". Politics does not function is these environments, especially when the policies of this globalizing force are antithetical to peace. "Fight fire with fire"? This is the true face of globalization.

Pentagon's New Map Version 1

Just click on the map

to magnify the image.

Pentagon's New Map Version 2

Just click on the map

to magnify the image.

Fragments on Surveillance and Biography.

Between 1975 and 1984, at a moment when political thought was going through a stagnant phase, the works of Michel Foucault came and got rid of the false concepts that were preventing it from moving forward. In a class from January 5th 1983, Foucault offers a summary of his strategy in two parts: Firstly, substitute a historical analysis of the techniques and procedures of governmentality for the history of dominations. Secondly, replace the theory of the subject and the history of subjectivity with the historical analysis of subjectivation and practices of the self. So, departing from a clear rejection of the empty universal formulas – law, sovereignty, general will, etc – that were monopolizing the theoretical attention given to politics going into a detailed analysis of governmental mechanisms and practices. Power not as a separate hypostasis but regarded as a set of relations. In the place of a transcendental subject, a punctual analysis of the processes of subjectivation.
Giorgio Agamben, ‘On Tiqqun.’


The thing about the intersection between Foucault and social movements is I guess the period that leads to the Italian 'Hot Autumn' of 1966 and the ‘Movement of 77’― 'Autonomia' breaks from the workerist-Marxists (or ‘Operaismo’) and organizes an antagonistic social force within the realm of 'leisure time'― a leisure time that is begun to be recognized as to be just as regulated as 'work time'. And so sociology's (Daniel Bell's) obsession-with / mourning-of the cultural 'schizophrenic' tension between the hedonism necessary for consumption and the asceticism necessary for work. But for all its advances, the autonome project was a failure (in the sense that it didn't accomplish its stated goals, in the sense that it didn't last forever). And in its failure it revealed (again) that the disciplined individual subject perceives herself as always observed, and this perception shapes the actual tactics of a social movement. For the activist, any daily moment could become a point of rupture: the activist/anarchist preoccupation with 'prefiguration', moral behavior, 'being the change you want to see', etc. The activist is the beautiful soul in her own biography (not the sovereign's biography, but the emergence of the 'mass biography')― a trail of documents (birth certificates, vaccinations, certifications, report cards, degrees, citizenship papers, work papers, utility bills) records one’s movements and choices and appears to confirm such biography― when in fact communism/anarchy/whatever are propositions to become 'terrible'. (‘Men will not turn into angels: why should they?’ G. Dauve) The point is that in fact no one is watching― or rather, no one is watching meaningfully― the meaning/enchantment of the sovereign’s (or god’s) vertical surveillance is destroyed for the barren horizontalism of democratic/self surveillance. No such meaning/god could be brought down to democratic surveillance. And so when the literature students read Foucault to become evermore textual, and the art students obsess about the 'process' of making art 'collectively', etc, they hide themselves within the lie of the mass biography. The biography remains still sovereign and divine― decidedly not the mass individual; the pervading ideology is that it is mass. Where is rupture/god?    

Foucault and Discipline

Foucault reminds us that modern society and the foundations upon which it bases its maintenance is observation. This is carried out by the use of "hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and their combination in a procedure that is specific to it, the examination(170)." As a student, I cannot, of course, forget that my abilities as a citizen are impacted by my ability to determine my own place in this process. I am examined continually by myself and others. Especially those who are waiting for me to leave the institution or by those who will assume a measure of control after I move to another area of normality.

The efforts I establish on behalf of my ability to adapt to being an observer and a follower of the discipline founded on the values of the past are a part of my life at Cal. This academic life is subsumed by moments in time, those decisive moments which may change said life in respect to the requirements placed. My student life is narrowed into a corner which has been inhabited before by other people. This shows that such behavior, where being placed into a corner is supposed to lead to reward, is a created by a decision to enable . It is created by my own willingness to subject myself to its limitations and to the exercise of discipline. This "normality" of behavior is both rewarding and threatening, yet holds a lot of potential for intellectual illumination. I think it is essential to understand that the contact with other students is a lot more valuable outside of these limitations. The critical power of recognition and dialogue does not threaten but instead enhances the potential of such distinct, disciplined systems to create social, moral and intellectual realms. Such realms exist in the mind. This bodes well for anyone willing to break down such simple boundaries, to challenge their "normality".