TOWARD A TRAGIC CONSCIENCE IN AMERIKKKA

NMBR corrects itself [from yesterday's post] and poses the question:

Is an American Velvet Revolution possible without the broad cultural development of a tragic conscience?

It is the question that existentially corrects the political.

What rises in the question of the existential attitude are questions of love, responsibility, forgiveness, vocation, commitment. When we ask these questions, we engage in the existential attitude, transforming the child-like experience of the idyllic into a profoundly honest accounting of the exilic: From the idyllic to the exilic, though, does not open despair; rather, it opens an indirect proof of love—that we have already been, as Kierkegaard and Levinas will aver, absent from ourselves. From the exilic—which is to say, from a non-possessive ownership of our violences—we approach each other as a living out of our supplications for forgiveness.

MM points out that Vaclav Havel transforms these questions politically, so that just as every post-Nazi German must ask “what kind of German am I?” so every American, in light of our history of empire, oppression, genocide, must ask the same: “What shall I be?” and “How shall I be a self?” become the questions of self-choice.

The difficulty of this question, however, is that America still experiences nothing of a tragic conscience: We still pretend to be innocent, like children. Nothing in American history challenges the persistence of this experience of innocence; there is no sense of sin and finitude. We are like the island of children in Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, as our erotic play turns violent sexual transgressions. Is it any wonder that as we suffer the disappearance of the historical, a hyper-commidified eroticism without intimacy occupies and mesmerizes the cultural attention—like anonymous sex devoid of love or memory.

It will require pedagogy—a giving of oneself to the pedagogical.
We must all be Jan Palach's set afire with love.

American Velvet Revolution

NMBR has been busy. We resume now with the regularly scheduled program.

“But if we, as a nation, want to end the farce of false patriotism to justify wars for profit and empire, we will have to sacrifice until it hurts. In this cleansing act will come redemption, because then we can be assured that all of the children of the world are safe and sound. If we don't work to end the absolute stranglehold of violence we are clutched in, then we deserve what we get.”
~Cindy Sheehan, April 17, 2007

Also see: Cindy Sheehan: “We need a non-violent revolution to overthrow this private government.”

Cindy Sheehan came to Purdue on Thursday, April 12, 2007. The local media, and seemingly half the population of our humble hamlet, became frenzied, mad.

[You will find at the bottom of this post a series of articles and letters written against her visit.]

In good biopolitical form, protestors against Cindy Sheehan tend to buy into Bush’s sacrificial logic of “you are either with us or against us.” What they assume to be anti-American is in fact an indifference to stupid patriotism.

A concern for the all the innocent dead of war is not necessarily an hysterical mobilization against Amerikkka.

Those who still support the war in Iraq—and, worse, those who still support the president—are controlled and manipulated through RADICAL FEAR. Many so-called supporters of the war, if they are not out-right racist, will pretend to a courage that they can never imagine. It is fear that drove this people to war; it is fear that keeps the people from coming to honesty and realizing the magnitude of lies; it is fear that maintains the scapegoating mechanism operative at the heart of our culture; and it is fear that will function ideologically to mask the obscenity of war-profiteering driving the continuation and escalation of the war.

Let there be no mistake: Cindy Sheehan is a radical whose plans for change would bring this country to a radical identity crisis. But that’s why this velvet revolution she proposes is necessary. Most importantly, her revolution is a Socratic revolution! It takes political discourse for diversity, freedom, and happiness seriously—even when the supporters of Bush, who claim to be most Amerikkkan, willingly effect a “state of exception” to the constitutional rights ostensibly afforded to everyone.

Cindy Sheehan promotes a radical, non-violent, and revolutionary gesture of self-sacrifice—a bold new political and religious subjectivity that necessarily challenges “patriotic” fear and racist paranoia. It is a revolution of love—a revolution whose ethical corrective to solidarity is guaranteed by critical, Socratic questioning and by the directly communicated imperatives of love, obligation, and a preferential treatment for the poor, the subaltern. This call for self-sacrifice is inspired (as breathed life into) by a certain Scriptural tradition, or a postsecular discourse of responsibility—a discourse that offers notions of “bearing witness,” “self-sacrifice as cleansing act,” and agapic “unconditional love” (and not privileging the preferential love of patriotism).

**
Here is a copy of anarkissed’s speech given at the rally:

FREE SPEECH! FREE SPEECH! FREE SPEECH! FREE SPEECH! FREE!
FREE SPEECH! FREE SPEECH! FREE SPEECH! FREE SPEECH! FREE SPEECH! Welcome everyone to the free speech island so generously abandoned to us by the police!

Welcome activists, leftist, and human beings alike! We’ve got to be here tonight to speak out against this right-wing lynch-mob which has organized tonight against Cindy Sheehan.

On the one hand, the title of Cindy Sheehan’s speech—“Speaking Peace to Power”—brilliantly modifies the obsolete and clichéd imperative to “Speak Truth to Power”: As Noam Chomsky asks, what the hell does speaking truth to power even mean when power already knows the truth! The Bush administration is fully aware of their lies that drove us to war and their attacks on our civil liberty!

Power already knows the truth, because the truth is that power is making obscene profits from this war!

Power already knows the truth, because the truth is that power still controls the fears and minds of a full third of the American population!

Power already knows the truth, because the truth is that power has destroyed the truth!

In a time of mass nationalist hysteria and radical war fever, in a time of saturated corporate media plugged directly into the war-machine, in such times all we can do is speak PEACE to power!

But how do you speak peace to a mob? Is it even possible to speak peace to the mob mentality—with its echoing and paranoid chatter of fear?

The right-wing lynch mob thinks we are caught up in a culture war! They read their O’Reilly’s and their Limbaugh’s and their Glenn Beck’s like heroes in some courageous culture war! CULTURAL WARRIOR! Bill O’Reilly declares himself. The fearful and the frightened gather together into a mob and they call it courageous, or even heroic.

But these people have no idea that what we’re fighting is not a culture war. It’s a motherfuckin’ Class War! But if they keep us distracted fighting the so-called culture war, they can keep waging their class war with relative invisibility. We are caught up in a class war that we are finally beginning to realize was commissioned decades ago by the right-wing—by the so-called moral majority that freaked out about people dropping out of the culture of fear!

And don’t fool yourself: Capitalism adores the culture war. In the culture war, the consumer is the soldier and fear is the tactic of choice. Why else did Bush tell us after 9/11 to go out and buy things? Capitalism profits from demographics fighting demographics. Capitalism loves to sell you t-shirts and bumper stickers. Capitalism loves to sell you television and hatred and mindless diatribes. And most importantly, capitalism loves to sell you fear!

Analysts complain that the Bush administration went to war in Iraq without a sufficient strategy, but if we read the Iraq war as another tactic in the broader globalized class war, then the war serves it purpose—which is to continue shifting radical amounts of capital—hundreds of billions of dollars every year—from the people to the private corporations getting multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts from their cronies who designed the war.

The right-wing lynch-mob thinks we’re fighting a culture war! But we’re really caught up in a class war—that we didn’t even start!

Check this out: Last month, Forbes magazine declared 2006 “The Richest Year in Human History!” The same week that Forbes declared 2006 the richest year in human history, another article was published—a separate article that paints an entirely different economic portrait of America. This second report points out that the US Economy is “Leaving Record Numbers in Deep Poverty.”

How is it that the richest year in human history also sees the highest and the deepest poverty rates in America since 1975—the year the Vietnam war finally came to a close? Where has all this money gone if not back to our communities? If not to our schools, our hospitals, our environment? Where does the money go? It gets concentrated into the hands of a few. It goes to Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, KBR. It goes back to the military-industrial-congressional complex and thus it goes to fuel a more aggravated class war!

Corporations profiting in the billions from this war are the ones who staged it! This means that private interests are paraded as public interests! It was never about Weapons of Mass Destruction! It was never about “Fighting them over there rather than over here”! It was never about “spreading democracy”! It was about shifting massive amounts of capital across the globe! And now what are they doing? Halliburton is moving to Dubai, and Blackwater USA—the world’s largest private corporate army of mercenaries are protecting Halliburton at the expense of the tax payers and of the workers and of the generations coming to age!

The right-wing lynch-mob thinks that we’re fighting a culture war. The problem is that it’s easier to speak peace to power than it is to speak peace to a mob. Maybe, then, to speak peace to the mob we must start by speaking Peace not to power, but peace to Truth! You start by giving a shit about others! You start with real courage to stand up against the administration, to speak your mind even when confronted by the police or by the right-wing lynch-mob. This is why we’re here today: We must speak peace to the mob so that Cindy Sheehan can speak peace to power!

Recently, Cornel West describes what it means to be a leftist, which is how I will conclude:
So that if you are concerned about structural violence, if you’re concerned about exploitation at the workplace, if you're concerned about institutionalized contempt against gay brothers and lesbian sisters, if you're concerned about organized hatred against peoples of color, if you're concerned about a subordination of women, that's not cheap PC chitchat; that is a calling that you're willing to fight against and try to understand the sources of that social misery at the structural and institutional level and at the existential and the personal level.”

That's what it means, Cornel West says, to be a leftist. I add, that’s what it means to be a human.


NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR!!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Partial List of Sheehan Hate-Mail to Purdue’s Exponent
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Department embarrasses Purdue with Sheehan visit

http://www.purdueexponent.org/?module=article&story_id=5278

Sheehan will not receive warm welcome with all
http://www.purdueexponent.org/?module=article&story_id=5271

Anti-American speakers have no place on campus
http://www.purdueexponent.org/?module=article&story_id=5035

Purdue may as well invite Chavez to teach politics
http://www.purdueexponent.org/?module=article&story_id=5342

Sheehan 'speaks peace' to mixed audience
Note: This article frankly lies when it suggests that the heckler “was nearly escorted from Fowler Hall” when he protested during Sheehan’s speech. The cops were willfully ignoring his interruptions. It was quite a different story from when anarkissed was kicked out of Colin Powell’s recent Purdue speech for clapping alone.
http://www.purdueexponent.org/?module=article&story_id=5404

Here’s a funny fool who suggests: “Cindy Sheehan’s version of “peace” is the same as the Islamic jihadists’…” This guy groups all his scapegoat victims under the rubric of communism—but it could just as easy be fascists, Jews, Mexicans, or niggers.

--------------------------------------

Dead Flag Blues

Some of the most recent work from NMBR's companero, AB
(you've read him before)
Soundtrack: Godspeed You Black Emperor!

Become the Media!

Here is a must-read article from Paul Street posted yesterday on ZNet:

War Journalism Lives On: Newsweek’s “Voices of the Fallen”
Soldiers and civilians may die but war journalism lives on.
The Empire and Inequality Report, No. 15

**
[I offer some commentary]

The other night, we were discussing Cecil B. Demille's Ten Commandments, reading the film—as Alan Nadel suggests—as a cold war epic that allegorically pits the God-fearing United States [the Hebrews and proto-Christian Americans] against the brutal and atheistic Egyptians [as the militarized and godless Soviet front]. While Nadel's article gives a "fun" reading of the techno-cultural history of the cinematic apparatus—for instance, he argues that the invention of the wide screen format parallels an invigorated US cold war imperialism—his reading is nonetheless thoroughly contained within an allegorical logic that aims to read power relations as representational.

The problem with allegorical renderings of history is that such representational thinking offers only a correspondence theory of political motivations. Allegorical history will invariably offer only mythic, heroic understandings of culture and thus will always miss the organizing violence of culture. Paul De Man notes, accordingly, that there are two kinds of reading/writing: (1) that which is blind, and (2) that which is blind, but is aware of its blindness. Allegorical thinking—or, to be more specific, representational thinking (or a prejudicial logic)—can never account for its own blindness. As such, we contrast the logic of representation against the logic of the symptom as such a logic capable of situating its blindness.

To the extent that Nadel reads the Ten Commandments as allegory, his reading is limited—however critically and sophisticated—to reading the relations of force as ones organized only by power.

If, however, we read Ten Commandments not as an allegory of the cold war but as a symptom of the cold war, we move from a reading predicated on relations of power to a reading that is capable of registering that which cannot be represented in any stable signifying economy—mainly, the very real fear and paranoia of the cold war American public.

The heroic necessarily masks the constitutive wound of its own fears.

Fear and paranoia will invariably—and quite invisibly, at least initially—organize culture on the basis of sacrifice, blood rituals, and war. (And actually, this is what scripture already tells us). In the middle of violence, we are often unaware of the reproductive sacralizing mechanisms at work.

While reading violence through the logic of the symptom proves more capable of situating our violences (our fears and paranoia) in such a way as to open the conditions for reconciliation and healing, the symptomic rendering of violence will always (dare I say, structurally?) occur too late! In the midst of things, we are almost always too close to read the events in any other way than through the heroic.

But not always.

Paul Street's article moves toward such a symptomatic reading of the American enthusiasm for war against Iraq. As he points out, war journalism is still alive and well—which is to say, our corporate journalists are still too beholden to that heroic narrative of the "fallen soldiers"—those brave boys that "we" sent off to fight for liberty "over there" so that "they" would not have to fight them "here." Such journalism is blind to its own blindness. It reads violence only in terms of power and never in terms of fear and paranoia, and thus we hide behind a certain mythic rendering of history to maintain a position of innocence, or to carry on our status as victims.

I propose this reading of Paul Street’s article (through a reading of Nadel’s reading of Ten Commandments) because what our analyses of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ tend to miss—which is to say, what our readings of the American enthusiasm for war tend to remain blind to—is that the war on terror is a continuation of the cold war! It’s the same playing out of the cold war geopolitical machinations—cast by the same cold war players: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, et al.

An allegorical, mythic, or heroic reading of the collapse of the Soviet Union would suggest that we won the cold war. On the contrary, a symptomic, diachronic, or genealogical reading of the collapse of the Soviet Union begins to recognize (always belatedly) that perhaps we lost (or are losing) the cold war.

Paul Street’s article—necessarily too late, in one regard, but not too late in another regard—works to situate the blindness of heroic, historical “war journalism.”

MM writes, “I pity the land that is in need of heroes.” The existential subversion of the heroic requires that we take control of the mechanisms of cultural mediation—that we account for our violences and take ownership, as a non-possessive ownership, of our cruelties and indifferences. To take control of the mechanisms of mediation means that—within that asymptotic infinity of the event, of existence, or within that space of incommensurability between us and the world—that we…

…become the media.

Bush dodges question on Blackwater USA

Mother of Exile

[Above: South Korea Trade Protests]



From Emma Lazarus’ sonnet from the Statue of Liberty:

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! cries she
With silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Agamben says we live in the “Age of Refugees,” noting that we are witnessing the “inexorable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional legal-political categories”—and as such, “the refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of the people in our day.”

According to a 2006 report by the International Labor Organization, 191 million people migrated from their homes in 2005 due to poverty and conflicts, which is up from 81 million only five years earlier. War and free trade drive the forced migration of millions of refugees every year.

For instance, the recent free trade deal signed with South Korea repeats the same promises that consistently fail across the globe: While thousands protest in the streets of Seoul—many of whom are farmers who fear losing their farms with the new flood of cheap American imports from our massive agriculture-industry—the politicians and corporate executives assert the same failed assurances that these new policies will in the end benefit the people, despite the fact that such agreements bring only more misery, hunger, and poverty.

Of course, by comparison, NAFTA never accomplished what it promised, and according to Research Director Raul Hinojosa of the North American Integration and Development Center at UCLA, 3 million Mexican farmers have already been displaced from their farms since NAFTA was signed, and Hinojosa predicts that that figure will eventually reach nearly 10 million displaced farmers. As state utilities are opened for investment by international corporations, as forests are opened for private development (thus displacing many more), and as cheap subsidized American products are dumped into Mexico, the drive for open markets and profitability has driven the real wages of Mexicans down 20%, thus further contributing to the disparity between the rich and the poor. Driven from their homes and farms into the urban centers, a cheap pool of surplus labor opens the conditions for radical exploitation: As it stands now, the number one private employer in Mexico today is Wal-Mart (Wal-Mex).

Let us not forget how in Jamaica, after the opening of trade policies with their IMF loan, it became cheaper for the poor to buy powdered milk imported from USA than to buy their own neighbor's goat milk; when the farms collapsed, they had no choice but to go assemble clothes in the "Free Zone"--an isolated part of the island cordoned off by concrete and barbed wire and totally free of any legal protections.

[see "Life and Debt" trailer]

War and poverty. Nearly 200 million immigrants, or refugees.

Certainly, Agamben has a critical eye to finding those zones of indistinction were real cultural violences are justified and played out, and he has famously asserted that the model of the Western city is not the polis, but the camp—not Athens, but Auschwitz.

Indeed, new devices such as high-power microwave weapons are being developed for the stated purposes of crowd-control; even Air Force officials suggested that these new weapons be tested as crowd-control devices in America before being deployed on the battlefield. Of course, as we have seen with Blackwater USA’s recent domestic work in New Orleans, it won’t be long until private mercenary armies are carrying their own crowd-control devices to fight the millions of poor, displaced workers around the world fighting for a sustainable life.

WE NEED MASS REFUSAL!

Like all my posts so far, the scarcity of hope against the radically oppressive and exploitative conditions that millions of the world’s poor seems dire: Corporations with their own armies, governments, and secretive organizations (IMF, World Bank, &c.) dominate the globe and bring with their policies and machinations untold poverty, ecological devastation, and war. Against the rise of a militarized police presence in our cities of America and around the world, the hope of revolution, of qualitative change, seems impossible.

But what the police cannot control, and what the corporate politicians cannot legislate, and what the ideology cannot media-te is our mass refusal to take part in the continued oppression and invisibility of the poor!

They cannot control our refusal—our will to withdraw from the whole damn economy!

Don’t buy genetically modified food from the agriculture-industry. Don’t buy from Wal-Mart. Don’t buy from Exxon. Don’t watch CNN, MSNBC, Fox News. Don’t buy the sweat-shop brands like Nike, Hollister, &c.

***

And in the meantime, someone should climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty, saw off her crown, and drape a Zapatista ski-mask over her head. YA BASTA!

Moral State of Exception (Go straight to hell, boy)

The principle underlying the tactics of battle—that one has to be capable of killing in order to go living—has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population.
~Michel Foucault, A History of Sexuality, v.1

Giorgio Agamben’s theory on the logic of sovereignty is largely organized around the notion of the state of exception in which the figure of sovereignty is, at the same time, paradoxically inside and outside the juridical order. Based on the initial work of Carl Schmitt, Agamben proposes that “the sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law,” and in the process, the sovereign defines itself against the juridical exception (Homo Sacer 15): “Here the decision is not the expression of the will of a subject hierarchically superior to all others, but rather represents the inscription within the body of the nomos [law] of the exteriority that animates it and gives it meaning [physis, nature]” (Homo Sacer 26). The current Bush administration seems to regard this logic of sovereignty as “how-to” manual for the management of whole populations—or, biopower.

This logic of sovereignty, this theory of the sovereign exception (ex-capere), is what Agamben describes as a zone of indistinction—a zone that relates nomos and physis along a complex topographic relation of outside (nature) and inside (law) through which we can trace the threshold that defines sovereignty. By drawing on a complex series of analogues, etymologies, and historical references, Agamben develops one of the more important implications of this logic of sovereignty based on the exception—mainly, that at this paradoxical threshold of indistinction, the sovereign and the sacred too become indistinguishable. Bush is the sovereign precisely because he would claim to determine its exception.

We see this quite clearly in the case of the “enemy combatants” whereby the executive administration remains outside the law in order to determine those “combatants” who too remain outside the law—as both a framing of the interiority of law (which is effected through a total collapse of the moral and juridical) and as a total continuity between sovereign power and bare life: Prisoners of the state of exception are reduced to bare life and thus can be tortured, abused, interrogated, and effectively disappeared. Such a relation has certainly not gone without comment, and many journals, conferences, blogs, and protests have brought this to our attention.

In recent weeks, however, despite the determinations of the midterm election—and while the new congress ostensibly positions itself to check the abuses of executive power—the right-wing pundits (who are barely distinguishable anymore from Fox News consultants) are ratcheting up the rhetoric of exception and mobilizing the biopolitical forces that fall along the lines of racism, sexism, classism, ad fucking infinitum.

WE ARE ALL UNDESIRABLES (GIVE US YR POOR!)

Certainly, we have what we might recognize as “traditional” maneuvers from the culture wars that exploit and maintain the biopolitical, historical divide; for instance, Gingrich, who faired surprisingly well in the recent straw polls of the Conservative Political Action Committee, is stoking old Southern racist fears by appealing, again, to that old xenophobic campaign for total English language. Gingrich says, recently: "The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.”

What appears most racist about this claim is that Gingrich is effectively naturalizing the existence of ghettoes and thus erasing the real conditions of historical oppression, neglect, and political/cultural sabotage that have engendered such living conditions. Worse, still, Gingrich not only naturalizes ghettos, but he addresses poor America in a strange and uniquely racialized way: Either you speak English, the language of the prosperous, or you speak the language of poverty, which is the language of the ghetto.

Ha Ha Ha, as if all the poor rednecks of the South ain’t runnin’ everywhere yellin’ Git r’ dun! Git r’ dun! No, that’s the language of the prosperous.

But is the logic of sovereignty—organized around the state of exception—different from a more broad sublimation of the biopolitical in general—meaning, there must be a more nuanced relation of power between Gingrich and his supportive constituents who remain simply racists, without any real experience of what we would call sovereignty proper.

EVERYONE IS AN EXCEPTION, SO EVERYONE IS SOVEREIGN!

The question, perhaps, gets at the heart of the difference between Agamben’s theory of the biopolitical and Foucault’s. For Foucault, I’m going to suggest, the effectuations of the biopolitical remain more anonymous with no discernible sovereign agency—that is, like power, we nowhere can isolate the biopolitical agency, but everywhere we see its effects.

But we do seem to be experiencing a strange new development in the biopolitical organization of culture, in that the juridical state of exception has all but collapsed into a total moral state of exception in which everyone can act now as a sovereign precisely because everyone is now ex-cepted (exception in the most egregiously pejorative sense). As the logic of sovereignty slowly assumes the sovereignty of logic, we are confronting an hallucinogenic, surreal logic of exception—of radical hypocrisy—that is transforming logic itself at the very deepest levels.

Amerikkka’s consciousness industry is radically saturated with this new bold state of exception, this saturated white-noise static of fear and cowardness.

Martin Matustik gave a short presentation of his new book on Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope last week, and amidst his numerous examples of acts of radical evil committed across the globe, I asked him if excessive indifference to the suffering Other, on the part of vast majority of Americans, should also be considered as a form of radical evil—and he agreed.

But consider this: No longer are we individuated, as Heidegger wrote, by our own-most-possibility-toward-death; no longer are we individuated, as Foucault wrote, through the investiture of disciplinary power—through the juridical, the medical, or the institutional. Rather, I would argue, we are individuated now according to a certain heroic devotion to the state of exception, which is to say that the moment of radical individuation—of Jemeinigkeit—is the moment in which, as Foucualt astutely observes, we are expected to kill in order to go on living. Or, at the very least, to remain willfully indifferent to the global suffering of poverty maintained by our own ordinary lifestyles and banal debaucheries.

Thus, because the heroic is anathema to the existential, we are effectively erased as humans. We are something else entirely.

KING SOLOMON, HE NEVER LIVED 'ROUND HERE

But we will have to regain our humanity by stripping ourselves of this fetishized sovereignty and unconditioning the Other from this state of exception. It will require pedagogy and love; it will require passivity, patience, commiseration, and hope.

So ends the good news.