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Greta Morgan, "When the Sun Comes Up" (2020)

#greta morgan #music #Youtube

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While I was writing this to you, Janet Napolitano, the former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security, assumed her new post as the twentieth president of the University of California system, the first woman to occupy the office. The revolving door between institutions of policing, bordering, surveillance, incarceration, illegalization, militarization, and schooling is not new. Indeed, in San Diego, where I am based, Alan Bersin was superintendent of public schools from 1998 to 2005, after three years of running U.S.–Mexican border law enforcement for Attorney General Janet Reno under President Clinton. After his stint governing schools, Bersin governed the border (again) in 2009, this time for the Obama administration, working as ‘border czar’ under Janet Napolitano, then Homeland Security secretary, now UC president. However, it would be a misguided comparison to describe the bodies of faculty and students as analogous to the bodies of detainees and deportees and migrants and suspectees. It is not analogous power but technologies of power that recirculate in these imperial triangles, for example, debt financing, neoliberal market policies, information systems, managing noncitizen populations, land development. If we consider triangular connections between war abroad and refugee management within, antiblackness and the maintenance of black fungibility and accumulation, and militarization and Indigenous erasure throughout empire, then we can understand why the governors of war and the governors of schools can have similar résumés, without pretending that the governed suffer through identical conditions.

la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 37–38.

#la paperson #k. wayne yang

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Decolonization is, put bluntly, the rematriation of land, the regeneration of relations, and the forwarding of Indigenous and Black and queer futures—a process that requires countering what power seems to be up to. To take effective decolonizing action, we must then have a theory of action that accounts for the permeability of apparatuses of power and the fact that neocolonial systems inadvertently support decolonizing agendas. […] Colonial schools have a tradition of harboring spaces of anticolonial resistance. These contradictions are exquisitely written about by the eminent novelist, literary scholar, and postcolonial thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He describes how the machine of British colonial schooling in Kenya produced a Black governor of colonial Kenya and, paradoxically, also helped to produce Mau Mau revolutionaries. Fearful that schools sheltered the Mau Mau, who occupied the imaginations of Indigenous Kenyans and settlers alike as he quintessential Black, violent resistance movement, the colonial state banned many of its missionary-inspired schools in the 1952 declaration of a state of emergency. This ban included the Kenya Teachers College, whose campus was converted into ‘a prison camp where proponents of resistance to colonialism were hanged.’ During the Mau Mau Rebellion, [Ngũgĩ] attended Alliance High School, a segregated, elite missionary school for Black Africans in British Kenya. And prior to that, he attended Manguo elementary school, which was banned for a time by the colonial government. How can colonial schools become disloyal to colonialism? According to [Ngũgĩ], the decolonial is always already amid the colonial.

la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Duke University Press, 2017), pp. xv–xvi, summarising Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir.

#la paperson #k. wayne yang #ngũgĩ wa thiong'o #decolonisation

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[C]olonialism (and hence decolonising) cannot be reduced to a historically specific and geographically particular articulation of the colonial project, namely settler-colonialism in the Americas. Nor can struggles against colonialism exclusively target a particular articulation of that project: the dispossession of land. To do so, would be to set aside colonial relations that did not rest on settler projects (such as, for example, commercial imperialism conducted across the Indian Ocean littoral, the mandate system in West Asia, the European trade in human beings, or financialised neo-colonialism today) or to turn away from discursive projects associated with these practices (such as liberalism and Orientalism). It would not only remove from our view these differentiated moments of a global project of colonialism, but also interactions and connections of these global but differentiated movements with settler-colonialism itself.

Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu and Dalia Gebrial, “Introduction: Decolonising the University?”, in Decolonising the University, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu and Dalia Gebrial (Pluto, 2018), p. 5.

#gurminder k. bhambra #kerem nişancıoğlu #dalia gebrial #colonialism

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Christy NaMee Eriksen’s 2010 poem about mothering-as-insurrection, ‘My Son Runs in Riots,’ imagines her infant’s body as a petrol bomb: one she wishes she had the historic option of assembling as something less destructive. Eriksen’s poetry, in which gestating and breast-feeding is weapon-building, and black mothers are pétroleuses by default, also defines plural maternity in and against murderous attacks by the police: ‘when you watch the video / It’s tough to tell whose son it is.’ Reproduction itself in this context is an insurgency of the commons—personal yet plural, intimate yet exclusive.

Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2021), p. 152.

#sophie lewis #christy namee eriksen

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The collective labor of reproduction and regeneration involves a quantity of killing: maybe always, but definitely under colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. For example, fourteen-year-old Bresha Meadows killed her father because she, her siblings, and her mother needed him dead in order to live. The proactive morbidity of social reproduction does not just touch abusers, though, and sometimes indeed mothers—in all thoughtfulness—do kill children. One infamous account of the organization of generational care in a shantytown in Brazil in the 1990s holds that fully half the babies born were turned into ‘little angels’ by their mothers—deaths ‘without weeping’—because they were never going to make it in such a harsh environment. Proletarian and peasant practices around death and birth typically rub shoulders—and no wonder, given how frequently the two coincide across the disease-, disaster-, and poverty-ravaged geographies of human life.

Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2021), pp. 150–1.

#sophie lewis

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Claire Rousay / More Eaze, "Smaller Pools" (2021)

#claire rousay #more eaze #music #Youtube

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[Orwell discusses], in The Road to Wigan Pier, […] how his hatred for imperialism built up in Burma: “All over India there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part; and just occasionally, when they are quite certain of being in the right company, their hidden bitterness overflows”. This passage conjoins contingency (“just occasionally”) and excess (the bitterness that “overflows”) and soon shifts to a more overt depiction of political intimacy: of politics as intimacy, and intimacy through politics. Orwell continues: “I remember a night I spent on the train with a man in the Educational Service, a stranger to myself whose name I never discovered. It was too hot to sleep and we spent the night in talking. Half an hour’s cautious questioning decided each of us that the other was ‘safe’; and then for hours, while the train jolted slowly through the pitch-black night ... we damned the British Empire—damned it from the inside, intelligently and intimately.... [I]n the haggard morning light when the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple”. As much as anywhere in Orwell’s work, this passage makes the affective nature of political commitment explicit. This passage also anticipates the furtive, outlawed relationship of Winston and Julia in 1984. Orwell’s stress on this intimacy with someone who remains a stranger (“whose name I never discovered”) also resembles the focus on his brief but “utter intimacy” with the Italian militiaman at the opening of Homage to Catalonia. Here, too, such intimacy is built on contingency (we might even think of the oxymoronic description of how the train, in Wigan Pier, “jolted slowly”): “But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I never did see him again. One was always making contacts of that kind in Spain”.

Alex Woloch, Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 337 n. 31.

#alex woloch #george orwell

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Au Revoir Simone, "Hurricanes" (2005)

#au revoir simone #music #Youtube

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In the German camps there were criminals, politicals, asocial elements, religious offenders, and Jews, all distinguished by insignia. When the French set up concentration camps after the Spanish Civil War, they immediately introduced the typical totalitarian amalgam of politicals with criminals and the innocent (in this case the stateless), and despite their inexperience proved remarkably inventive in creating meaningless categories of inmates. Originally devised in order to prevent any growth of solidarity among the inmates, this technique proved particularly valuable because no one could know whether his own category was better or worse than someone else’s. In Germany this eternally shifting though pedantically organized edifice was given an appearance of solidity by the fact that under any and all circumstances the Jews were the lowest category. The gruesome and grotesque part of it was that the inmates identified themselves with these categories, as though they represented a last authentic remnant of their juridical person. Even if we disregard all other circumstances, it is no wonder that a Communist of 1933 should have come out of the camps more Communistic than he went in, a Jew more Jewish, and, in France, the wife of a Foreign Legionary more convinced of the value of the Foreign Legion; it would seem as though these categories promised some last shred of predictable treatment, as though they embodied some last and hence most fundamental juridical identity.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin, 1951/2017), p. 589.

#hannah arendt

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[T]he chief difference between a despotic and a totalitarian secret police is that the latter […] does not use the old method of secret services, the method of provocation. Since the totalitarian secret police begins its career after the pacification of the country, it always appears entirely superfluous to all outside observers – or, on the contrary, misleads them into thinking that there is some secret resistance. The superfluousness of secret services is nothing new; they have always been haunted by the need to prove their usefulness and keep their jobs after their original task had been completed. The methods used for this purpose have made the study of the history of revolutions a rather difficult enterprise. It appears, for example, that there was not a single anti-government action under the reign of Louis Napoleon which had not been inspired by the police itself. Similarly, the role of secret agents in all revolutionary parties in Czarist Russia strongly suggests that without their ‘inspiring’ provocative actions the course of the Russian revolutionary movement would have been far less successful. […] It seems, after all, no accident that the foundation of the Okhrana in 1880 ushered in a period of unsurpassed revolutionary activities in Russia. In order to prove its usefulness, it had occasionally to organize murders, and its agents ‘served despite themselves the ideas of those whom they denounced … If a pamphlet was distributed by a police agent or if the execution of a minister was organized by an Azev – the result was the same’ [Laporte, Histoire de l’Okhrana, p. 25]. […] Decisive for the revolutionary tradition was the fact that in times of calm the police agents had to ‘stir up anew the energies and stimulate the zeal’ of the revolutionaries [Laporte, p. 71]. […] Provocation, in other words, helped as much to maintain the continuity of tradition as it did to disrupt time and again the organization of the revolution. This dubious role of provocation might have been one reason why the totalitarian rulers discarded it. Provocation, moreover, is clearly necessary only on the assumption that suspicion is not sufficient for arrest and punishment. None of the totalitarian rulers, of course, ever dreamed of conditions in which he would have to resort to provocation in order to trap somebody he thought to be an enemy. More important than these technical considerations is the fact that totalitarianism defined its enemies ideologically before it seized power, so that categories of the ‘suspects’ were not established through police information. Thus the Jews in Nazi Germany or the descendants of the former ruling classes in Soviet Russia were not really suspected of any hostile action; they had been declared ‘objective’ enemies of the regime in accordance with its ideology. The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the ‘suspect’ and the ‘objective enemy.’ The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it. He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a ‘carrier of tendencies’ like the carrier of a disease.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin, 1951/2017), pp. 552–4.

#hannah arendt

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Terror as the counterpart of propaganda played a greater role in Nazism than in Communism. The Nazis did not strike at prominent figures as had been done in the earlier wave of political crimes in Germany (the murder of Rathenau and Erzberger); instead, by killing small socialist functionaries or influential members of opposing parties, they attempted to prove to the population the dangers involved in mere membership. This kind of mass terror, which still operated on a comparatively small scale, increased steadily because neither the police nor the courts seriously prosecuted political offenders on the so-called Right. It was valuable as […] ‘power propaganda’: it made clear to the population at large that the power of the Nazis was greater than that of the authorities and that it was safer to be a member of a Nazi paramilitary organization than a loyal Republican. This impression was greatly strengthened by the specific use the Nazis made of their political crimes. They always admitted them publicly, never apologized for ‘excesses of the lower ranks’ – such apologies were used only by Nazi sympathizers – and impressed the population as being very different from the ‘idle talkers’ of other parties.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin, 1951/2017), pp. 450–1.

#hannah arendt

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The disturbing factor in the success of totalitarianism is […] the true selflessness of its adherents: it may be understandable that a Nazi or Bolshevik will not be shaken in his conviction by crimes against people who do not belong to the movement or are even hostile to it; but the amazing fact is that neither is he likely to waver when the monster begins to devour its own children and not even if he becomes a victim of persecution himself, if he is framed and condemned, if he is purged from the party and sent to a forced-labor or a concentration camp. On the contrary, to the wonder of the whole civilized world, he may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is not touched. It would be naïve to consider this stubbornness of conviction which outlives all actual experiences and cancels all immediate self-interest a simple expression of fervent idealism. Idealism, foolish or heroic, always springs from some individual decision and conviction and is subject to experience and argument. The fanaticism of totalitarian movements, contrary to all forms of idealism, breaks down the moment the movement leaves its fanaticized followers in the lurch, killing in them any remaining conviction that might have survived the collapse of the movement itself. But within the organizational framework of the movement, so long as it holds together, the fanaticized members can be reached by neither experience nor argument; identification with the movement and total conformism seem to have destroyed the very capacity for experience, even if it be as extreme as torture or the fear of death.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin, 1951/2017), pp. 402–3.

#hannah arendt

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The choice of candidates [in the 1932 German presidential election] was itself peculiar. While it was a matter of course that the two movements, which stood outside of and fought the parliamentary system from opposite sides, would present their own candidates (Hitler for the Nazis, and Thälmann for the Communists), it was rather surprising to see that all other parties could suddenly agree upon one candidate. That this candidate happened to be old Hindenburg who enjoyed the matchless popularity which […] awaits the defeated general at home, was not just a joke; it showed how much the old parties wanted merely to identify themselves with the old-time state, the state above the parties whose most potent symbol had been the national army, to what an extent, in other words, they had already given up the party system itself. For in the face of the movements, the differences between the parties had indeed become quite meaningless; the existence of all of them was at stake and consequently they banded together and hoped to maintain a status quo that guaranteed their existence. Hindenburg became the symbol of the nation-state and the party system, while Hitler and Thälmann competed with each other to become the true symbol of the people. As significant as the choice of candidates were the electoral posters. None of them praised its candidate for his own merits; the posters for Hindenburg claimed merely that ‘a vote for Thälmann is a vote for Hitler’ – warning the workers not to waste their votes on a candidate sure to be beaten (Thälmann) and thus put Hitler in the saddle. This was how the Social Democrats reconciled themselves to Hindenburg, who was not even mentioned. The parties of the Right played the same game and emphasized that ‘a vote for Hitler is a vote for Thälmann.’ […] In contrast to the propaganda for Hindenburg that appealed to those who wanted the status quo at any price – and in 1932 that meant unemployment for almost half the German people – the candidates of the movements had to reckon with those who wanted change at any price (even at the price of destruction of all legal institutions), and these were at least as numerous as the ever-growing millions of unemployed and their families. The Nazis therefore did not wince at the absurdity that ‘a vote for Thälmann is a vote for Hindenburg,’ the Communists did not hesitate to reply that ‘a vote for Hitler is a vote for Hindenburg,’ both threatening their voters with the menace of the status quo in exactly the same way their opponents had threatened their members with the specter of the revolution. Behind the curious uniformity of method used by the supporters of all the candidates lay the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened – afraid of the Communists, afraid of the Nazis, or afraid of the status quo. In this general fear all class divisions disappeared from the political scene; while the party alliance for the defense of the status quo blurred the older class structure maintained in the separate parties, the rank and file of the movements was completely heterogeneous and as dynamic and fluctuating as unemployment itself.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin, 1951/2017), pp. 345–6.

#hannah arendt

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The introduction of the number 0, and its function as both sign and meta-sign, altered the conditions of possibility within western culture with far-reaching effects. Not only did it facilitate double-entry book-keeping and thence the development and spread of mercantile capitalism, but the figure for nothing was to be taken up and used in other ways too. [Brian] Rotman argues that vanishing-point perspective, the technique that came to define the art of the Renaissance, was only made possible by the introduction of the number 0 as a representation of the vanishing point from which the picture is viewed from outside the frame [Signifying Nothing, p. 14]. This linear perspectivalism has, in its turn, been credited with an important role in developing the idea of the separation of the modern individuated subject from the world of objects. The viewing subject looks in on the perspectival painting from a vanishing point represented by a zero point outside the frame of the picture, and with this, it is often argued, the idea of the modern, secular subject is born.

Kevin Hetherington and Nick Lee, “Social Order and the Blank Figure,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18.2 (2000), p. 179.

#kevin hetherington #nick lee

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[S]eemingly absurd disparities between cause and effect […] have become the hallmark of modern history. The wild confusion of modern historical terminology is only a by-product of these disparities. By comparisons with ancient Empires, by mistaking expansion for conquest, by neglecting the difference between Commonwealth and Empire […], historians tried to dismiss the disturbing fact that so many of the important events in modern history look as though molehills had labored and brought forth mountains. […] The disparity between cause and effect was betrayed in the famous, and unfortunately true, remark that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness; it became cruelly obvious in our own time when a World War was needed to get rid of Hitler, which was shameful precisely because it was also comic. Something similar was already apparent during the Dreyfus Affair when the best elements in the nation were needed to conclude a struggle which had started as a grotesque conspiracy and ended as a farce.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin, 1951/2017), pp. 170–1.

#hannah arendt

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As anarchists, we do not make a fetish out of death, especially not in the way that fascists, armies, and nations do. We do not prefer our comrades, friends, and lovers to be cold and stern memorials, or rose-colored memories revived in the haze of sentimental poetry. We prefer them beside us, creating with us the spaces and struggles of our liberation, and fighting alongside us in defense of our lives. We do not ask for martyrs. We do, however, know that [it] is inevitable that those of us who struggle, who revolt against the crushing daily violence of the state, capital, and all existing hierarchies, will be put in the cross hairs of repression. We know that those of us who seek to build new worlds in the cracks and unstable edges and boundaries of the old will face all the dangers of the current world’s collapse along with threats from those who try to cement it together again in blood and terror. We are born in the history of the Haymarket martyrs hanged for resisting the industrialists’ police, Suga Kanno strangled by the empire of Japan, and Carlo Giuliani shot down by the Italian cops. We inherit a flag stained black in the remembrance of our dead, the negation of their killers, and the promise to never surrender.

Patrick O’Donoghue, “Seeds Beneath the Snow: Anarchists Mourn Our Dead,” in Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, edited by Cindy Milstein (AK, 2017), p. 410.

#patrick o'donoghue #anarchism