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[...] The great danger is that, time and time again, the storm of rage that builds up gets defused and coopted into yet another election campaign. We fool ourselves into believing that the change we want will come with fresh elections and a new president or prime minister at the helm of the same old system. Of course, it is important to bounce the old bastards out of office and bounce new ones in, but that can’t be the only bucket into which we pour our passion. Frankly, as long as we continue to view the planet as an endless “resource,” as long as we uphold the rights of individuals and corporations to amass infinite wealth while others go hungry, as long as we continue to believe that governments do not have the responsibility to feed, clothe, house, and educate everyone—all our talk is mere posturing. Why do these simple things scare people so much? It is just common decency. Let’s face it: the free market is not free, and it doesn’t give a shit about justice or equality.
I am against unctuous injunctions and prescriptions from above to resistance from below. That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Oppressors telling the oppressed how they would like to be resisted? Fighting people will choose their own weapons. For me, the question of armed struggle versus passive resistance is a tactical one, not an ideological one. For example, how do indigenous people who live deep inside the forest passively resist armed vigilantes and thousands of paramilitary forces who surround their villages at night and burn them to the ground? Passive resistance is political theater. It requires a sympathetic audience. There isn’t one inside the forest. And how do starving people go on a hunger strike?
In certain situations, preaching nonviolence can be a kind of violence. Also, it is the kind of terminology that dovetails beautifully with the “human rights” discourse in which, from an exalted position of faux neutrality, politics, morality, and justice can be airbrushed out of the picture, all parties can be declared human rights offenders, and the status quo can be maintained.
nice
I don’t believe that the current supporters of empire are supporters of empire in general. They support the American empire. In truth, captalism is the new empire. Capitalism run by white capitalists. Perhaps a Chinese empire or an Iranian empire or an African empire would not inspire the same warm feelings? “Imperial thinking,” as you call it, arises in the hearts of those who are happy to benefit from it. It is resisted by those who are not. And those who do not wish to be.
Empire is not just an idea. It is a kind of momentum. An impetus to dominate that contains within its circuitry the inevitability of overreach and self-destruction. When the tide changes, and a new empire rises, the managers will change, too. As will the rhetoric of the old managers. And then we will have new managers, with new rhetoric. And there will be new populations who rise up and refuse to be managed.
I also think we need to question the idea that Trump’s America First agenda is unprecedented, that the U.S. imperium—whether under Republicans or Democrats—has not continuously violated international norms. Didn’t Barack Obama threaten to renegotiate NAFTA? Didn’t George W. Bush put Iran in the “Axis of Evil” and openly scorn France and Germany for failing to join his misadventure in Iraq? It has become too easy since Trump’s ascension to say that the United States once advanced liberal democracy and freedom. This was never the view from India or Pakistan, let alone Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The United States was and is a self-interested global hegemon; it has supported the world’s worst despots when they seemed to protect U.S. interests. The only difference is that Trump openly repudiates emollient rhetoric and does not hesitate to alienate U.S. allies.
Jacques Derrida talks about two different notions of the future. There is “the future” (le futur), the programmed, prescribed, predictable unrolling of the present so as to perpetuate what already is, to extend the way things are. This is the future in which capital relentlessly expands and empires cling on, locking in and deepening existing relations of power. The immiseration of the peripheries. The financialization of everything. The sixth mass extinction. The carbon we have already burned, suspended in the air around us, and that which is still in the ground but which we cannot avoid burning. [...]
the last few lines are weirdly pretty
Neoliberalism is what plantation politics look like now. It is the idea that you are responsible for your life in a system that is rooted in the death project, which itself is rooted in the oppression of Black and brown bodies in order for it to profit. It profits from death and containment of our bodies, whether on Turtle Island or in Europe. Neoliberalism takes collective responsibility and makes it personal. Neoliberalism is the idea that if you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you'll be fine, except, of course, if you don't have any boots or have a pair without laces.
Neoliberalism is New Age politics: it's all your fault. You just didn't save enough, you didn't work hard enough, you you you ... never enough.
[...] the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? These questions can be posed in a psychoanalytic register — if we are not who we think we are, what are we? — but they also apply to the forces governing capitalist society. Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.
What is the weird? When we say something is weird, what kind of feeling are we pointing to? I want to argue that the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.
The centrality of doors, thresholds and portals means that the notion of the between is crucial to the weird. It is clear that if Wells’ story had taken place only in the garden behind the wall, then no weird charge would have been produced. (This is why a feeling of the weird attaches to the lamppost at the edge of Narnia in C.S. Lewis’ stories, but not to Narnia proper.) If the story were set entirely beyond the door, we would be in the realm of the fantasy genre. This mode of fantasy naturalises other worlds. But the weird de-naturalises all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside.
precisely given what Jameson calls the “cabbage stink” of naturalism:
The misery of happiness, […] of Marcuse’s false happiness, the gratifications of the new car, the TV dinner and your favourite programme on the sofa — which are now themselves secretly a misery, an unhappiness that doesn’t know its name, that has no way of telling itself apart from genuine satisfaction and fulfilment since it has presumably never encountered this last.
In this lukewarm world, ambient discontent hides in plain view, a hazy malaise given off by the refrigerators, television sets and other consumer durables. The vividness and plausibility of this miserable world — with misery itself contributing to the world’s plausibility — somehow becomes all the more intense when its status is downgraded to that of a constructed simulation. The world is a simulation but it still feels real.
on philip k dick. quote relevant for mr & mrs smith? maybe i need to read marcuse first