Not active

This shit is 4 years old and not active. that said, maybe some day i will return to this. db

Stop Being a Stupid Liberal pt 7 of 7: On New Beginnings

(This isn't quite right but so it goes...)

We begin. We fail, we become depressed, we hit new year’s, we quit, we move, we have a crush on your mom…we begin again. Beginnings are a puzzling phenomenon, when everything, again, becomes new. In a simple way such changes make clear the difference between humanity and any notion of a single “world out there”.

But in any case—and this is the core of my argument—it is important to have positions. Your life is your position, your direction, your railroad tracks, and you can begin again. And just as by beginning again you have a new world, so too, we can construct the world we want for all of us, we can build the relationships, the networks, and the institutions to make it happen. And this is my life, so if you ever want to try to figure something out, my info will be out there so long as facebook is on the air.

And EXCO, however fragile and with however far to go, is only the beginning. Yet this project speaks to what I would like to see in how we organize our creation. We do so in a way that gives us and other regular people the power. We do so in a way such that there are not people who serve others and those who are served but that our collective liberation is built into the same project. We are all teachers and learners…all our humanities are at stake. We do so in a way that creates spaces and builds communities and encourage people to find ways to use those resources to fit their needs, goals, and projects. We find a small, beautiful idea, tend it, nurture it, figure out the kinks, and spread it everywhere like what should be done with flowers and food and hemp and friendship.

This is what I want to do in the Twin Cities, and then throughout the world.

And this process is work. It requires recognition of how we as people are living so as to prevent other people from being people, and how we’ve always known we were doing this and how we always hide it from ourselves. It requires desiring. It requires patience, and dedication to a task that doesn’t allow us to bask in the wonder of spontaneity, the practical naivety of believing that everything is equally important. It requires seeing evil and not dying. It is helped by a belief in the impossible, a willingness to hold onto it, and perhaps a willingness to see what capital and the State think autonomy looks like…us bleeding in the road.

But listen.

You live. You have ideas, desires, good vibes, visions. You know that a world built on speaking bullshit is bound to be pretty crappy. You know people who know people. To be passionate is simply to have a desire and hold onto it, to give it breath in your life.

Your life is your position. You have already begun. If you want, begin again.

david “the imf/world” boehnke can be contacted at db(at)riseup(dot)net

Stop Being a Stupid Liberal pt 6 of 7: On Singing

Today, Wednesday the 20th, has been a day of songs. I sang Jewish songs of freedom and gratitude to God as I walked to school; an uncomprehended language speaking strongly in my ears, and lungs and walk. Later, in the upstairs of Weyerhauser, I sang “Macalester is anti-war, oh how I long to be in that number, Macalester is anti-war, go Mac!” smiling to the various higher-ups whose heads peaked out from their offices, or to the associate deans of students who for whatever reason felt the need to be unrequested chaperones.

And we don’t need chaperones or rulers or war, but we do need singing. I think of the Kantian enlightenment in which our staff and faculty and presidents and parents live their lives—think whatever you want but obey.

And that is not what we live for. We don’t live our lives to be thinking robots, to think different but be same all the same, trapped and broken as we are, whether we’re buttered up with health care or bags of cash, or left counting on luck to avoid dying uncared for in a hospital lobby. And we don’t live only to be what the world needs, or what our families need, or what our parents in the law or the kind, sickening bureaucrats and the smiling-corporate-fucks tell us we need to become. And there is too much of that on this campus. Too much heaviness in our steps and goals and souls and bodies. God damnit people, learn from the motherfucking hippies! Shit.

Perhaps I swear so much because I’m talking to myself, or because so much and so little has changed since a time when I wasn’t alive and because it is important to remember and distinguish those similarities and differences. Or perhaps it is because of this obscene out-of-body-egoism that seems to be the only form of freedom left, a horrible falseness where one’s image substitutes itself for one's life and livings… individually and institutionally.

In singing we use our voices, and in singing together, in screaming what democracy looks like, we can recreate it. And that’s why we need new songs to go with the old ones, and new projects to go with the songs, and “Hey you! You should teach an EXCO class, the priority deadline is April 6. Check it out at www.EXCOtc.org”.

And the Summer of Love didn’t get it right; neither did the May of 1968. And perhaps history will tell us we didn’t get it right, but it is up to us to get it done…and by that I mean the revolution. Small goals, mind you, small goals!—making up new songs and making revolution.

And you should know that I’m serious about all this; I’ve talked to two experts about it this week, one radical and one professional nonprofiteer no less, and both tell me that my plans are realistic. And why not? We’re here. There's rocks, there's trees, there's birds, there's squirrels. Come on, we'll bless them all until we get vashnigyered [drunk]!—or until the State or capital decides that they know what democracy looks like…us bleeding in the road.

On Self-Education is missing...

If anyone has a copy I'd be grateful to have a chance to type it up/post it...(it is number 5 of this series).

Thanx, db

Stop Being a Stupid Liberal pt 4 of 7: Against Peace

This is the finale of the negative part of this series. Yay! If you haven’t read until now, this is the one to read, so that you can understand what I mean in the next few articles, instead of warping them back into liberal stupidity.

A few weeks ago I participated in a march through the skyways of downtown Minneapolis initiated by the Local 26 Janitors Union (SEIU), who paraded through the skyways during lunchtime, reasserted their presence, importance, and power over the spaces they clean; spaces that were constructed to exclude them.

A largely Latino union, chants were in many languages and drew heavily on the still ongoing immigrant rights struggle. A bright day, a happy mob clogging up the lunch bags of the wealthy; smiles, cheers, chants, dedication, hope, struggle...and a recent victory with a new contract that includes, among other things, affordable family health insurance.

My favorite chant went like this. “No Justice? No Peace!” “No Justice?? No Peace!!” and on and on. Occasionally a shouter would change the first would from “Justice” to “Health Care,” emphasizing the partial nature of their current campaign, its demands, and its potential justice. “No Justice? No Peace!” This is my argument.

And I am writing to people invested in being stupid liberals and sedated by the false promises of the status quo. Those who exist anxiously between expressing support for resistance and demanding that it be crushed with incredible violence. Those who are too unsure to make real political decisions, who can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

And just as nonprofits are the key obstruction to any attempt at a just alternative, so are liberals the key barrier to any sort of justice. Why? Because they strategically immobilize themselves in defense of their privilege. Because in their humanitarian obsessions, their gut reaction driven I’m-like-mother-teresa-but-I-fuck righteous politics they invest themselves and the status quo with moral authority. Because they are all talk and no walk and spend their time learning to drive, not to organize. Seduced and blinded by privilege, made hypocritical by hope, made dangerous by their identification with authority and their corresponding moral or cynical righteousness, made pathetic, guilty, and impotent in their waffling courage.

Of course we who grew up as liberals, who were fed false promises with breasts, had no choice but to believe them. And in growing up we could not at first accept them as lies. And now, even after experience has demanded that we acknowledge their falsehood, most of us remain too desensitized to their destruction, too alienated from hope to see the depth of liberalism’s emptiness.

Let us move beyond apathetic infancy; let us rediscover the paths or questions to hope. Of course adults hardly help in this regard, deceiving either to keep Santa alive or saying that he never existed. Of course they live like he is dead or never existed anyway, but not the good Santa. It is the Bad Santa, the liberal Santa that they live out. Perhaps this is why that particular movie is so enjoyable to watch…is it not the incarnation of an obvious yet forever hidden truth? That Santa is an asshole?

What is important is not so called belief or unbelief but the belief by which we can live. It is only by creation, by acting out a system that embodies something qualitatively better that we can live out what could be called justice.And let us point out here the centerpiece of Hollywood’s false turns, the ideology of love that conquers all, that individualizes our problems, and transforms a desire for something better into the reproduction of society as it stands.

The fact that love is seen as a solution precisely when liberal values collapse results in love as an escape from the world, making unpolitical our own lives and bodies, when these things are the only part of politics worth keeping and the ground from which new worlds will be born. Nor can the current system and its institutions birth a qualitatively improved world, invested as it is in systematically aborting the living. It will propagate horrific violence to prevent transformation, it will seduce and co-opt nonprofits and liberals into justifying itself, it will alienate those very same liberals from power, what is called politics…insofar as they participate in it, it remains structurally beyond them.

But it is not structurally beyond us. And it is here that we may discover new words to call for, new words and goals and desires to fight for what is now called “peace” and “justice”. And because liberals use their notions of “peace” and “violence” to obscure what is and should be done, our search will turn around the word in which they are empty, what is now called “justice”. That, however, is for the three articles to come.

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Bleached and Don’t You Mess With Language Like That! (A last note from the author) As a bleached person I am seriously offended that Ian Boswell would say that it is “curious and mildly hypocritical” that a student calling white students bleached at the Spike Lee talk “has gone unnoticed and uncommitted on in a time when all kinds of people are sounding off about an ephemeral racist presence on campus.” My ancestors worked their asses off to become bleached and I am damn pissed that anyone might not recognize this effort (with its ugly consequences), especially because for most of them this happened within the last 60-90 years. Damn the man who speaks rudely without an attempt to know anything about what he is saying. It remains ironic that Sir Boswell would use rudeness and ignorance in an attempt to cover up albeit in a small way a history of oppression and ideology. Next Week’s Topic: On Self-Education

Stop Being a Stupid Liberal pt 3 of 7: Against Politics

Politics in this country is currently a means through which certain people mask their own interests through the language of the common good. Worse, this is done to intentionally prevent others from being heard or speaking at all. This article will discuss this at two levels: 1) the hypocritical discourse of political correctness and 2) last week’s open faculty letter.

Political correctness is a hypocritical discourse because it pretends to support racial equality while preventing any action that would support such equality. Inaugurated in the 1960s to replace an equality of result with an equality of what-can-be-said-in-polite-conversation political correctness has been mobilized by liberals to attack the overt racism of conservatives and cover up their own lack of real commitment to racial equality.

Originally used to prevent increasing investment in deep inequalities, this language of covert racism has over the past 25 years been used to deepen inequalities. And while political correctness is unpleasant, responding by being politically incorrect is a hurtful and privileged way to cope with its existence; it celebrates the racism on which PC is founded, as we who attended the forum last Tuesday learned for ourselves. Destroying PC without legitimating racism requires destroying its roots in political economy, not the deceptive speech that misdirects us from institutional racism...and our own. I think about my high school and its celebrated liberalism, its sincere multicultural mouthing, while at the same time running a tracking system that sent upper (middle) class whites or Asians to schools like Mac, sent middle class whites and blacks to state schools, and sent the large group of lower class blacks as well as lower class whites, Asians, and Latinos nowhere, or to prison. And I grew up in a “liberal bubble.”

Then I think of Macalester. Macalester has the same false liberalism, the same sincere, empty talk. But, due to an event that allows us to begin to learn what this means, we have an opportunity to make significant institutional (and personal) changes to transform this hypocrisy.
We will now turn to the faculty letter and the hypocrisy on which it stands. Ridiculously enough, this letter was supported by the MacWeekly’s editorial board. I quote “[the faculty letter] eloquently and correctly establishes what has gone unsaid for too long: pursuing pre-eminence has always been integral to Macalester’s mission, and that pursuit and social consciousness are by no means mutually exclusive.” This is bullshit. Let us explore why.

The first clue is that the professors associated with or engaged in social activism did not sign this letter. Those who did are well served by the status quo and wish to expand it, to make Macalester a “pre-eminent institution.” When used in this way, pre-eminence or excellence in education means elitism in education, a maximization built on current oppressions and inequalities, and a refusal to challenge them—an embodiment of the hypocrisy that is political correctness. Worse, the faculty admonished students for speaking their concerns, first, by calling them part of a disease that gets rid of presidents, without mentioning that these presidents were booted for things like arguing that women are inherently inferior at math and science, as was the case at Harvard. Second, the letter said that the clear and direct arguments from students are beyond the realm of appropriate discourse. In such a logic only what is sanctioned is appropriate. This is not acceptable. Only ideological self-interest could so blind these faculty to their letter’s ridiculousness. Last but not least, to demonstrate a history of commitment to pre-eminence as the faculty does is a historical argument, not an ethical one. Just as one cannot justify the continued oppression of the lower classes by mentioning serfdom, slavery, and sharecropping, so one cannot argue for the ethics of pre-eminence by citing its existence in previous administrative documents.

If we are going to move away from the elitism and PC in which we find ourselves, the unacknowledged racism and classism (etc) that found the status quo, if we are ever going to consider what real excellence in education might mean we need to 1) acknowledge our hypocrisy and 2) begin asking different questions. Instead of asking: how many sweet speakers can we pay boatloads of money to provide us with ‘prestige’ and a smidgen of education, let us ask what type of school would make sweet speakers volunteer to speak, or want to teach? What type of school with what type of students might incite passionately ethical people like Kofi Annan, Toni Morrison or Spike Lee to inquire about speaking or teaching for a semester? Luckily for all of us, ethics is not only constituted after the fact.

We have an opportunity, here and now, to do what it takes to begin dismantling the hypocritical notions of political correctness and educational excellence as they now stand. We have the opportunity to learn from those who know more than ourselves and help as we are able, to do good on the suffering from which we have benefited and the oppression with which we collaborate when we do nothing. We have an opportunity to participate in creating a place like what Macalester was supposed to be, and discover real educational excellence in the process. We have an opportunity to be part of a movement that has begun here at Macalester to make good on the promises of ideologies…by destroying them.

Stop Being a Stupid Liberal pt. 2 of 7: Against Nonprofits

There is a belief that by working at a nonprofit one gets paid to help people, to do good. This is far from the truth. Instead of an exploitation free zone, nonprofits are actually the key force justifying oppression and preventing the growth of movements for underlying change.

To understand nonprofits one must first recognize the role of the State in society. Reduced to its essentials, the modern State is constituted to legitimate, enforce, and expand corporate interests and power. Moreover, corporate norms infiltrate all of society via a whole collection of disciplinary apparatuses, via the media, schools, the family, police, not to mention the economic sphere proper, the realm of work.

The most obvious symptom of this is the twin currents of professionalism and dependence that define the relationships between the State and nonprofits and between nonprofits and their “clientele”. Nonprofits are dependent on the State (or corporations) for their funding, charter, tax status, etc. These criteria shape how they are run, what interests they serve, and who can run them.

The profundity of this dependence is deepened in the relationship between nonprofits and those they supposedly serve. ‘Professional’ requirements prevent people from learning to fish in such an exclusionary, bureaucratic pond, while the power of nonprofits access to resources systematically obscures community resources. And nonprofit resources extend beyond money to authoritative models legitimated through corporate best practices, grant criteria, and academic certification. These models undermine and delegitimize alternative visions and desires while focusing solutions on bandaging (with white-skin-colored band-aids) wounds created and policed by those communities benefiting from the bleeding.

Such a situation explains nonprofits’ participation in the defining of oppressed communities as inferior or deficient. Moreover, in their horror at the suffering in which they are complicit, nonprofit leaders constantly seek to expand State intervention—more funding, more bureaucracy, more studies of what is wrong.

This call for the expansion of State power depoliticizes and hides the source of oppression—the corporate State—while justifying the violence of the system as natural or endemic to minority communities. Moreover, it serves nonprofits self-interest, expanding their programming, making them think that they can do more good. In truth, it does the opposite, redirecting blame for oppression to the oppressed communities and justifying the expansion of the very power which organizes and enforces this oppression. In addition, this focus on organizational self-interest traps nonprofits into competition and niche markets, separating them from their goals, and each other.

A quick look at history, and the expansion of nonprofits to their present form in the 1960s demonstrates their insidious potential. Nonprofits and State violence, carrot and stick, were central in fracturing the radical demands that grew out of the civil rights movement. Moreover, the nonprofit sphere to this day is central in alienating activists from communities and subordinating radical interests to those of the corporate State.

Then and now nonprofits serve the corporate State as a channel that manages dissent, obscure and redirect the causes of oppression, legitimize power and its abuses, and calls for an expanded form of domination. Even worse, nonprofits uproot alternative sources for change by usurping, obscuring, and delegitimizing community resources, and seducing those who seek to end oppression into becoming its blind supporters.

Let us not be seduced. Let us not give up the struggle. There are plenty of alternatives to nonprofit organizing, like worker-run unions, neighborhood organizations, religious congregations, co-ops or networks of all kinds, traveling radical bands, and those who share or use essential skills against corporate/State oppression (farming, medicine, law, architecture, and war come to mind).

But most of all, it is time to consider work for justice as work, but not work that you get paid for; work that you engage with among your peers in your daily life or with your soulmates everywhere; work that allows you and your fellow humans to live as you would like; and above all work that is against the exploitation that we at Macalester are trained to enact and oversee, the gun-to-the-head necessity of work itself.

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Welcome! to the seven part series entitled Stop Being a Stupid Liberal. I hope you enjoy it, after all, I wouldn’t be writing it without you. Unhappily not a zealot, I am pleased that most of you find politics dispiriting. It means you know shit when you see it and still have hatred for being forced to act like what we say when applying for jobs, or college.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what we enforce as appropriate, normal, even moral, when we refuse to have a position.

Next week’s topic: Against Politics.

Stop Being a Stupid Liberal pt 1 of 7: Against Nonviolence

“Nonviolence” can be the heart of an uncompromising movement as typified by Gandhi and the struggle for Indian independence or the core method through which those who refuse to hear are forced to see, as typified by Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

Yet this article is not intended to critique nonviolence or to reveal it’s limitations, but to argue against nonviolence altogether.

Why is this? It is because the central feature of the movements mentioned above, the reason why they were effective, was not their nonviolence, but their violence. Their assaults against the status quo, and its violence, could not be ignored within their historical contexts.

A refusal to recognize nonviolence as a specific strategy of organized violence is to fall into a mainstream-created trap. This trap simultaneously makes space for “legitimate” protest (long since neutralized), while severely punishing anything that can be portrayed otherwise. Nonviolence therefore becomes a codeword for “waste-of-time.”

This needn’t change the dictum that our ends and means are one, that we must live the world we wish to create; but it does mean that any effort to do so is thoroughly removed from the current status quo… and liberals.

Since the 1960s, when the supposedly beneficent government of the USSR was exposed as a bureaucratic nightmare, communities of all types have worked towards realizing in earnest what is promised but impossible within the current world order.

Growing out of the civil rights movement in the US, identity groups of all sorts sought to reclaim their humanity and shatter the primacy of the capitalist and the white-maled norm. At the same time, other groups around the world sought to realize direct democracy, group autonomy, sustainable living, to mention a few. An example of this is Europe’s Autonomen, but epitomized by the ongoing practice of the Zapatistas in Chiapas.

This is an ongoing struggle, local and global, as demonstrated by recent events in Oaxaca and the decision by the Minneapolis Janitors (SEIU) to strike if their core demands are not met today.

What we see in current movements at their best is a recognition that there is no one way towards the world we wish to create; that oppression must be opposed in all its forms. Moving towards a qualitatively better world therefore requires organizing so that no group is allowed to consolidate sufficient wealth or power to take control over any others. It is this type of organizing that is antithetical to the dominating structures of the State.

It is here, in these struggles for liberation where violence returns and destroys, where the violence of political liberalism and State politics reemerges — not to mention the terrorific economic system which drives and supports violence. And it is because of this violence that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. organized their own violence against the powers they opposed.

Perhaps it is time for us to again organize our violence, or better, join others that are doing so. It is in this context that we may realize “freedom as the practice of freedom”.

Welcome! to the seven part series entitled Stop Being a Stupid Liberal. I hope you enjoy it, after all, I wouldn’t be writing it without you. Unhappily not a zealot, I am pleased that most of you find politics dispiriting. It means you know shit when you see it and still have hatred for being forced to act like what we say when applying for jobs, or college.

Unfortunately, this is precisely what we enforce as appropriate, normal, even moral, when we refuse to have a position.

As such, I am writing these articles, and holding discussion hours [not on the blog but wow, you can comment]. For these discussions I am listing contextual reading, though I would of course prefer talking to you than to myself.

This week’s discussion will be on...The Damage Done by Sophie Smith, found in last semester’s zine (available in the Infoshop) and the first chapter of Wendy Brown’s new book on tolerance, which can be found at: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8306.html.

Next week’s topic: Against Nonprofits.

So...Old Shit, Again

So I think I'm going to start posting old 'classics' as a way of revitalizing this space while I decide if I want to keep it. Check 'em out. (including the last one).

Love you all.

dfb

Rad (Old) New Article...an oldy but not much has changed...

I support the ideas behind the liberal project. Human lives can be better, fuller; hunger, alienation, need to be overcome. But how, and by what, and in what manner? I know I have come too late but the time to act is always the present. I like to dance but generally by myself because I don’t know if I’m good or not, or what they think, or when it matters. They say that power never moves down once it has gone up. Unless you want collapse into… horror. But such spokespeople are dead, or old. And nothing is ever the same. Besides maybe mustache styles, which, generally speaking are timeless.

They say if unregulated, humans are like locus, and that they too, will leave everything dead. But that is an argument for their type of regulation, a mask to prevent change. They say that laws, and statues, and bureaucracies, and the 1,138 rights a couple receives on marriage can bring about paradise…we just need 1,138 times more rights, and laws, and statues, and bureaucratic mechanisms then we have now, private or public. This is offensive and disgusting like shit on a wall. We live in a world where no one understands their needs and everything comes from somewhere else.

The only people allowed into our current system of power are those who have no power in it: politicians, bureaucrats, PACs, the media, corporations, small groups who parade for Santa Claus in the streets…

What do I mean? Aren’t these the only sources of power that exist today? Or are you building up to the solution, to THE source of power, THE PEOPLE? But what is this people that melts into this system, which melts over into…that stirs like a pot of boiling water till all is gone? What do I want? True love, a nice house, a lifelong, meaningful job, good friends, pleasurable pastimes, and a family. Don’t you? Is there anything else I am allowed to want? Photographs of riches, power, your breasts? But I don’t want any of these things, the American dream or those photographs. Not like this. That is not to say they don’t ever invade my dreams, but only my waking ones. Freud says dreams are more real. Lacan says the I in the mirror is not me. I say I have recently enjoyed ginger beer.

Americans are fat because they are helpless, because there is no war worth fighting, because running a marathon won’t get you far enough to overcome the necessary bureaucratic formulas, because fitness means you have more energy to throw away. People get in shape because it feels good, because it is attractive, because it might mean something. Such people have hope. Offensive linemen don’t, and what are American bellies but a futile offensive line? What is education but a long path through which hope is created and utilized to maintain a system of hopelessness? To train one to accept and value as necessary all those invisible structures that need not be there, to put oneself over some and under others, to be indebted to this process that has trained you, blindly, for some blind reason…To enshrine your trust in the hallways of knowledge and not in that delicate space between people of which they can share.

I would love to see a class spent on an Anarchist Cookbook. It seems that one could start in kindergarten. “Ok children, A was for Anarchism, and now we’re going to learn how to Bake Bread, and Create Cheese.” Children need to become adults, but for the most part what that means is not reading, writing, or arithmetic—the ability to practice, and make, to discover when to listen, and when to be careful with their love…how to grow well…for themselves.

I have become more radical lately, since I began to lay my experiences and feelings against the world of words, abstractions, promises, and quests. They are different. I have experienced dirty underwear.

I don’t like the mentality ‘human rights’. But lets us not demand a perfect world, an end to history, or catastrophic structural changes. These are sad things. Let us talk today. I would like to see new mentalities, new culture, more fruitful ways of approaching living. I would like people to throw their selves, like bodies against another, towards the symbols that make up their world as I have described. And see which body is bleeding now. And wonder how much blood could be saved on the same streets tomorrow. Like next Tuesday. And then, thank God Almighty, no one would be afraid of ketchup.

For these reasons I hate television. And the mentality of inability, of doing one’s job, enforcing the Rulez, on blacktops or schools, or sinning or owing or flicking off God. And I would really like to know how to make ginger beer. Or pollinate sassafras. Or find out which tuxedoes the penguins are in.

The Movie 300 and Whiteness

At the end of her book $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, A. Kiarina “the wonderful” Kordela asks the question “Who are we when we see those strugglers [‘terrorists’] as psychotic murderers? What and whose gaze is this, which desires so badly to be killed by the other?” While I don’t pretend to understand the book in its entirety and may read it again, this final makes me immediately think of whiteness. This premonition is reinforced by reference to my own memory of being a pre-adolescent half-Jew-in-America, obsessed with the holocaust and full of desire to have been a survivor of it.

Whiteness, as I and others have argued elsewhere, is another name for the totalizing system of our day (patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc, or most commonly and completely—capitalism). It is unique, however, in that it is a perspective that is both substantive and symptomatic. That is, it is simultaneously a lived identity (I am white, I am not a racist, whether or not I may be one) and thus whiteness possesses a real subjectivity as opposed to a media-based caricature, but is also made invisible—it is a repressed, but normative identity, and therefore when it returns it reveals much more than itself.

What is a good way to understand this identity? There are many ways to approach this problem (see particularly Richard Dyer’s extraordinary book White to which I owe most of the ideas presented here) but I will choose to do so through a recent, massively successful film that holds a strangely non-ideological place in that any attempt at interpretation immediately becomes political but it is precisely interpretation itself that is refused by nearly all critics, not to mention the director, writers, and original book author. Which film? In this case, I am referring to Zack Synder’s 300.

300, bad-assly refusing letters, is the story of the three hundred Spartans who held off a vast Persian army thus allowing Greece to come together to expel Persian invaders, as immortalized by Herodotus and Frank Miller. It is an epic comic-book battle between ‘slaves’ and ‘free men’ which “selectively idealizes Spartan society in a "problematic and disturbing" fashion, as well as portraying the "hundred nations of the Persians" as monsters and non-Spartan Greeks as weak.” Ephraim Lytle, professor of Hellenistic History at the University of Toronto, quoted above as well (see Wikipedia) suggests that the film's moral universe would have seemed as "bizarre to ancient Greek as it does to modern historians"”. Replete with dramatic sex scenes of oracles enslaved to hideously deformed religious figures counter-posed to (also dramatic) sex between the main character (the king of course!) and the Spartan queen who simultaneously speaks as the mother of the world’s only “real men” and is completely subordinate to the male-dominated social system (a perfect woman, non?), mockery of Athenian boy-lovers (regardless of the happily supported homosexuality of real Sparta), and so forth.

Moreover, and moving to the central umpf of the movie, Sparta’s freedom, which (as Arendt would remind us) is precisely the freedom of those who have escaped necessity by virtue of having slaves (who are never mentioned, shown, or implied in the film), is defended from the invaders whose society is based on ‘slavery’ to an emperor/god whose central demand is to be bowed down to, and who has a vast army that has conquered “the entire world”.

We have in this movie, then, a classic imperialist reversal on a number of levels, with Sparta serving as a defender of civilization in a ‘clash of civilizations’ manner (USA! USA!). These reversals are created by setting up a dualism between a free, ‘western’, civilized, totalitarian militarism, and an ‘eastern’, Persian, Iraqi, religiously tinged, slavery-based, barbaric, empire. Two primary reversals are at play here. The first is a typical one whereby the aggressors reframe themselves as those attacked, the defenders of X, in this case freedom, (the US or Israel in relation to terrorism for example), and therefore justify their imperialist practices through increasing their (already existing) aggression. 300 does this via reference to historic analogy which (p.s.) was Goebbel’s favorite mode of propaganda.

The second reversal is more interesting in that it displaces precisely the conditions of capitalism (which has indeed conquered the world)—the dominance of money over people, and slavery (“the freedom to sell one’s labor on the market”)—onto the attackers and therefore positions Sparta as at once a 1)stand-in for America, 2) the most extreme form of single-ideological-self-enforced-totalitarianism imaginable, and, precisely because of this totalitarianism, this sole purpose, 3) the defender of a free way of life under assault. And this assault from the forces of slavery, money, physical grotesqueness/disability, and ‘false’ or manipulative sexuality are external (as it is a deformed Spartan who is rejected from the army who is corrupted by and exchanges sex and money to betray the otherwise undefeatable army who he later attempts to usher into his newfound paradise) and internal (like the traitor who attempts to discredit the queen after falsely agreeing to support sending more troops in their support in exchange for sex (predicated on the condition that “you [the queen who otherwise experiences ‘uncorrupted’ sexual enjoyment] will not enjoy it”).

And while it is tempting to say that the desire stimulated by the Spartans in this movie is the ‘natural, spontaneous, ease’ desired by anarchism (and Tibetan Buddhism), it is rather precisely the individualist, capitalist desire that has seized both fascist and so-called individualist ‘anarchists’ alike, a single desire split between the total obedience to a single, unquestionably correct code of Law/Honor whose pleasures are a pure and controlled form of the ‘instinctual’ and ‘driving’ pleasures of sex and violence or the total obedience to solitary individual desire...just as in the Godfather the ‘primitive’ mob-based-rejection of modern capitalism (and whiteness) is precisely the conditions of modern whiteness (and capitalism) itself.

These reversals are enacted with animated yet real looking he-man muscles, capes, dramatic, stylized violence against monsters, while epic (if not literal) flag-waving creates a new brand of media fascism…and whiteness…perfectly fitting the core of capitalism whereby instead of displacing corruption on Jews, for example, it is the entire foreign (and internal), monstrous, racially non-white, effeminately male (and perhaps vaguely gay), world which is based precisely in the existing ‘underside’ (true form) of capitalism itself, such that the heroic white warrior proves himself in defeating that of which he is both creator, slave, and master (the current global order), a rather amazing feat of self-abjection and self-glorification (the split subject).

As a white man leaving the movie I was filled both with the dramatic casting forward of purpose based in the absolute of some historic age, the thrill and pleasure of enacting righteous violence and sex, and the deep sense of glorious, defensive, inevitable victory tied to some future ongoing threat. A threat that, as a condensation of capitalism into terrorism, is sure to be with us…from us…well into the future (assuming other more real and more important us-caused dramas like climate change, peak oil, etc, don’t piss us away first). This is the soul of whiteness, this desire for unleashed, righteous, bestial, greatness, in the heart of buggifying bureaucracy; certain, absolute purpose supported and sustenance in the heart of an emptying decadence and increasing economic decline; the savior and the warrior, the king and lover, the household master and father—a Nietzschean greatness that uses capitalism as both the ground of its magnificence and its rejection of the present.

Of course, as the initial quote suggests, this is not the only enactment of whiteness; indeed, it is the limit case of a necessarily-desperate ideology built on the reversals (repressions, and history,) demonstrated above, the substitution of power for defensiveness, of freedom for slavery (and slavery for freedom), and the combination of righteousness and sexual violence (and violent (reproductive (land possessing, etc) sex).

It is from this basis that we can begin to understand the desire for ‘the real’ in suffering which is so important today, in its justification of racism (sexism, homophobia) and bitter attacks against political correctness through (obvious) misidentification (as in my own holocaust fantasies, in other’s appropriation of black culture, particularly hip hop, etc). In suffering, we white men have the possibility of ‘being’ the ideology we inhabit, most particularly if we suffer at the hands of our (pure evil) ‘enemies’. Moreover, these enemies are constructed as pure evil because they are (within the silenced acknowledgement of the ideology) not viewed as a consequence of the actions of real men but as the embodiment of the psychotic and murderous underside of whiteness itself. Similarly, with the desire to be killed by the terrorists, we display both an ‘intentional’ ignorance of its causes and an almost ejaculatory political and personal relief in being victims of ‘evil’ (and of ourselves!). In being killed by terrorists, a foreign based entity, we can simultaneously (as in 300) glorify our righteousness and goodness, our being under-attack, and assert our (alienated) power in being able to ‘seek out and kill all the terrorists’ (chilling words that freaked out but didn’t deter Democratic Party zealots in the uselessness of elections, in this case Kerry vs. a Turd Sandwich).

However, internal pressures have proven the most dangerous to this white ideological framework, as it is the coming to light of internal oppressions through resistance that have proven or had the potential to prove to whites in the US that they are not righteous, that they don’t have a purpose in the world, or at least not a good one, that they are not defenders but aggressors, and so on. It is here then that the white savior as well as the self-defeating, impossible animalistic minority, the corrupted family, the subordinate sexual woman, the anti-societal queer, the stealing, non-English speaking immigrant, come in. This is particularly relevant in our present anti-political-correctness bile, which is right insofar as political correctness is a deeply hypocritical and implicitly racist discourse (a development of whiteness!), in that it transparently supports the current, racist social order while ambivalently proposing obviously inadequate fixes—a typical and disgustingly white liberal solution. This hypocrisy is then re-directed by conservatives to (implicated) minorities and is re-described against them as a source of tyrannical power under the name of racism. And it is this reversal against racism which is used to defend and expand a real racism upon which whiteness is organized. As such we can see that in its fundamentals, the ideology of whiteness, like the laws of capitalism, have not been significantly altered despite being transformed from one phase to another.

And even if one sees in “capitalism” a better description of the cause of today’s ills it cannot be denied that in the United States, and hence throughout the world, it is in the language of whiteness that capitalism is spoken, justified, and fought out in the political system of the world’s most powerful pseudo-democracy. And just as it is the failure of an anti-(or alternative)-whiteness is based in its insignificant anti-capitalism, so is the failure of anti-capitalists an effect of having failed to sufficiently understand and take into account the subjectivity of US capitalism, whiteness in its critique, and to do so in a way that confronts the subjectivity itself.

Here I must rest my analysis and leave it to others, who stand in a different relation to the powers that be, to consider the effects of this whiteness in the US, and to ask in what ways, and in what discourses, capitalism holds subjectivity from other positions and in other and all areas of the world. And just as A.K. Kordela rightly insists that a new world must be both at the level of bodies and language and that this can only be done by acknowledging the effect of fantasy and enjoyment, as opposed to ignoring them as illusory or constructed, so must those theorizing the abolition of whiteness ground their critique in the rock of whiteness itself and its own basis in the global history of which we all play a part.

How we are to do so, how we are to reconstitute ourselves as subjects of now-time as opposed to empty historical time (Benjamin), how we are to organize and joyously and strategically live a new world into being will be left for another day, though I would be most interested if the author of $urplus (and others) would apply her (and their) critical gaze to books which, in the most delightful spirit of the anarchist tradition, attempt to provide an informative framework and concretely address issues of practice…particularly two recent contributions to a radical transformative project—Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, by David Graeber, and Getting Free, by James Herod, both of which are readable for free online.

DreamGirls a Review

More than anything else, watching DreamGirls made me realize that it is the social conditions surrounding race, and therefore economic and political power, that are the crucial determinates of the constellation that is racism. Moreover, just as Thomas Kuhn in his book on scientific revolutions notes that at some points in time you have to wait for the elders to die before the new paradigm can take over, so with racism. And just as members of my family will not be shook from their worldviews without unusual circumstances, or unusual friendships, and will cloak themselves in privilege and the ‘right’ ideology (insofar as they are aware), so do we have different reactions to DreamGirls; be it “different” or “fun”. And while it is no surprise that cultures can only go big, in a positive propaganda type of way, once they are safely old, safe, ‘classic’, etc…it doesn’t keep the fact from being depressing, like the conversation in the car about how rap is either awful or, well, there is better and worse rap, but it’s all rap (i.e. bad, black, yucky, whatever).

It is also interesting how fashion is reinterpreted, as after all, to be entertaining, then must continue to be racy both formally and off screen; which is to say, no their wasn’t nude pictures of Diana Ross on the cover of magazines. Also, while the conditions creating the necessity of being a ‘crossover’ are mentioned, they are written off by the similar practice by the Jamie Foxx character who, after engineering the crossover tries to own and control the sound. Or rather while it is wonderful that we have a movie that is almost solely made up of black actors and actresses, and therefore the movie should not be about white people, not challenging the ideology of an opposite project (i.e. those who proclaim the end of racism, the civil rights movement solving all race-related problems, etc) makes one worry, especially when one even glimpses at how it is read by white audiences, which is not of course to say we don’t want more such movies.

3 out of 4 stars.

db

p.s-this is in not to say i've figured this shit out, i am not racist, etc; but here i am.