----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
hi everyone,
This particular intersection of thinking about war, sanctuary, and the
"ethicopoetics of sight" gets to the heart of many of my present
concerns. I'll take up the threads in reverse order below:
_on sight & blindness_:
The discussion above regarding blindness and sight serves as helpful
reminder that so many of our ethical and critical tropes are rely upon
diminishing the humanity of the subject. When, for example, liberals
dismiss Trump as "crazy" or "stupid" they reveal more about their
distain for the mentally ill or disabled than they do about Trump. While
Brian's description of the violence of war as 'blind' is clearly more
nuanced and self-reflexive than this sort of invective, it can equally
serve as a moment of inquiry into the meanings associated with sight and
blindness.
As an instructor at UC Santa Cruz I often find that I come to these
themes of visuality and rationality through the UC moto "Let there be
light." The founders *clearly* intended light to function metonymically
in this moto as a stand-in for all manner of evidence-based reasoning,
even as the cliche of "seeing is believing" has continued to lend a
particular air of instrumentalization to a learning institution founded
as a school for the applied-science of mining engineering. In the face
of this nexus of rationality, visuality, and industrial-capitalism, I've
often made recourse to Frederick Douglass's claim that "it is not light
is needed, but fire." Douglass issued this in defense of irony and
sarcasm, but I believe it usefully counterposes the cold and calculating
light of the laboratory with the heat and flicker of revolutionary fervor.
More broadly, it is worth thinking through what forms of knowledge our
preoccupation on the visual tends to obscure. This task helped drive
some friends of mine to start an online journal of cultural inquiry
called "Blindfield" -- for which I serve on the editorial board. From
our mission:
"Our journal seeks to understand critical tendencies and latent
antagonisms of the contemporary period and its cultural imaginaries —
drives and impulses that demand the cultivation of different modes of
perception, interpretation, and resistance. We insist that we live in
history; the present is a blind field."
While Blindfield has generally focused our content on para-academic
writings which provide insights into contemporary culture from a
marxist-feminist perspective, we recently found it necessary to break
with that genre in order to publish a few observations regarding the
contemporary status of political protest and the struggle against
fascism, which seem like they might be of particular interest to readers
of this list:
https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/02/03/vocabularies-for-struggle/
Of specific relevance to this <EMPYRE> thread is a section on sanctuary.
_on sanctuary_:
What does a real sanctuary look like? Sanctuary cities are ill-defined
and unevenly applied concepts, but even at their most rigorous these
municipal guidelines do little to protect vulnerable populations. Like
“love,” the idea of “sanctuary” could prove a site for mobilizing new
forms of mutual aid and community self-defense, including rapid-response
groups to defend against ICE raids, safe-houses, neighborhood discussion
groups, and support-groups for victims of sexual assault.
We go on to suggest some additional strategies that might function well
alongside of "sanctuary" as forms of resistance and revolutionary
struggle. For us these include the erasure of borders, the creation of
community self-reliance, the rejection of gentrification, and production
of solidarity networks, but the list is non-exhaustive. To think
critically about the meaning of sanctuary at this moment entails two
important tasks: to understand the historical context in which
"sanctuary" appears (the podcast 99 percent invisible did a pretty great
job of introducing context
recently: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/church-sanctuary-part-1/) and
to understand what sorts of material conditions would provide meaningful
sanctuary to those among us most at risk today. This second task is much
more difficult, as it requires sustained engagement with actual people,
whose actual needs, vocabularies, and value will invariably be more
complex and idiosyncratic than we initially anticipate, and yet it is
precisely in this space of listening that creative practitioners such as
those on this list can be most effective at this juncture.
a quick side-note on this question of what sorts of reprisals Trump and
Sessions can leverage against "sanctuary cities." From what I've read
they are specifically talking at this point about refusing to disperse
federal funds to local police departments in jurisdictions deemed
"sanctuaries" -- a threat which they might be able to follow through on
as related to enforcing federal immigration law. For those of us who
have attempted to expose and resist the ways that federal funds have
been spent towards the further militarization of local police forces,
this threat might appear of little concern. At the same time, it is
worth acknowledging that the threat is quite carefully gauged to place a
divide between popular forces demanding sanctuaries and municipal
governments (and police depts) that have attempted to honor that demand.
Specifically, the "sanctuary city" movement has often been buoyed (and
legitimized for center-left / democrat types) by the support received
from police chiefs who fear that being associated with ICE will cause
immigrant communities to "distrust" the police (a laughable, if
politically useful, rationale). The point being that while the ability
of Sessions to dictate municipal policy might be quite limited, this
week's specific threats signal a ramping up of the administration's
understanding of how to attack local alliances, particularly those
tenuous ones which include elements of official power.
_on war:_
_
_
much of the sorts of warfare that are alluded to above consists of the
"shock and awe" tactics of modern wars of occupation, in which use of
overwhelming force and strategic advantage (ie airstrikes) are deployed
to terrify a populace into submission. Such warfare is reliant upon
visual surveillance, as Alan points out, but is doubly reliant upon
visual media for its intended affect of subduing the population. While
aspects of this sort of spectacle of violence are present in the
policing of populations within the empire proper (e.g. the manner in
which the racial-incarceral state utilizes the history of violence
against black bodies to terrorize entire racialized populations), other
types of warfare are also at work. These other types of warfare include
the structuring of our (urban and suburban) geographies
(haussmannization, etc), the structuring of our social relations (the
feminized character of social reproduction, the alienation of the hourly
wage, etc) and the production of false scarcity. In each of these
examples we have an opportunity to confront the low-visibility war of
capitalism (which provides the conditions for Trumpism to flourish) with
low-stakes tactics of survival and subsistence, such as sanctuary,
solidarity, and community self-defense. Such tactics can take the
appearance of "protest" or other constitutionally sanctioned activities,
but make no mistake: these are the tactics that our counter-attack takes
in an ongoing war. It is non-coincidental that strengthening such
capacities will serve us well should more dramatic, or spectacular,
forms of warfare come to our cities and towns in the future.
thanks all for your time and good will.
warmly,
kyle
On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 8:04 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondh...@panix.com
<mailto:sondh...@panix.com>> wrote:
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
On Tue, 28 Mar 2017, Brian Holmes wrote:
You're not off the mark, Alan. You're also right that blindness is
not a very good word. By blind, I mean blind to consequences that
ultimately fold back on the agents of violence as well as their
victims. This is a kind of blindness that inhabits the most precise
forms of vision. But you're a poet, right? We need new words.
I read a family biography of the Kochs. Smart, precise, driven, violent
people. Maybe we also need a new conception of sight, an
ethicopoetics of
sight, so as to see and embrace the world in a different light than
these
people do.
====
I agree with you re: an ethicopoetics of sight, absolutely. I do
wonder if it would make any difference. All these analyses! (Mine,
too, on "semiotic splatter.") We feel we understand what's
occurring, we constantly come up with scenarios, alternative
solutoins, but it makes no difference to those in power. What they
do understand is violence (military, environmental, etc.) and its
employment/dissemination. And a good example of this us the
emerge/agency (thinking of Ulmer here) reflected in this from the
New York Times, more or less just now:
"WASHINGTON The senior United States commander in Iraq said on
Tuesday that an American airstrike most likely led to the collapse
of a building in Mosul that killed scores of civilians this month.
But the commander, Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, indicated that an
investigation would also examine whether the attack might have set
off a larger blast from explosives set by militants inside the
building or nearby.
It was the fullest acceptance of responsibility by an American
commander since the March 17 airstrike.
My initial assessment is that we probably had a role in these
casualties, said General Townsend, who commands the American-led
task force that is fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But
he asserted that the munition that we used should not have collapsed
an entire building.
That is something we have got to figure out, he added.
With an increase in reports of civilian casualties from the American
bombing of Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, some human
rights groups have questioned whether the rules of engagement have
been loosened since President Trump took office.
Pentagon officials said this week that the rules had not changed.
But General Townsend said on Tuesday that he had won approval for
minor adjustments to rules for the use of combat power, although he
insisted they were not a factor in the Mosul attack.
General Townsend acknowledged, however, that steps had been taken to
speed up the process of providing air power to support Iraqi troops
and their American Special Operations advisers at the leading edge
of the offensive to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State. The
goal, he said, was to decentralize decision-making.
General Townsend did not describe the changes in detail, but he cast
them as a return to the militarys standard offensive doctrine, in
contrast to the very centralized approach he said was initially put
in place after President Barack Obama sent American forces back to
Iraq to combat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL."
- the latest count seems to be over 200 civilians killed as a block
was leveled. And this is something the general has to "figure out."
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
<mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu>
--
http://www.kylemckinley.com/
http://buildingcollective.org/
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
