No American political figure of the entire twentieth century had a more baleful effect upon America itself than Ronald Reagan. (Though there are others who can contend with him for the dubious honor of having created the most misery for the world in general). Something like 90% of the American people are far worse off economically than they would have been had Reagan not been elected, and economic policy followed some other, less right-wing-extremist course. But worse than that, perhaps, is the fact that Reagan created an ugly social and cultural climate in America, one that is still with us today: a climate of cynicism, greed, selfishness, bigotry, frat-boy self-congratulatory boorishness, and blame-the-victim disdain for “losers” and the weak, all buttressed by a willfully ignorant, proudly vapid, feel-good-at-all-costs Pollyanna-ism. Hearing all the nauseating encomia for Reagan that are filling the airwaves tonight, it is important to remember that Ronald Reagan, more than any other human being, was the face of evil of the late twentieth century. I only hope that I live long enough to see his foul legacy effaced, as all legacies must be sooner or later.
No American political figure of the entire twentieth century had a more baleful effect upon America itself than Ronald Reagan. (Though there are others who can contend with him for the dubious honor of having created the most misery for the world in general). Something like 90% of the American people are far worse off economically than they would have been had Reagan not been elected, and economic policy followed some other, less right-wing-extremist course. But worse than that, perhaps, is the fact that Reagan created an ugly social and cultural climate in America, one that is still with us today: a climate of cynicism, greed, selfishness, bigotry, frat-boy self-congratulatory boorishness, and blame-the-victim disdain for “losers” and the weak, all buttressed by a willfully ignorant, proudly vapid, feel-good-at-all-costs Pollyanna-ism. Hearing all the nauseating encomia for Reagan that are filling the airwaves tonight, it is important to remember that Ronald Reagan, more than any other human being, was the face of evil of the late twentieth century. I only hope that I live long enough to see his foul legacy effaced, as all legacies must be sooner or later.
The Seattle International Film Festival got underway last night. It’s an enormous event, with something like 250 feature films shown in the space of 3 1/2 weeks. There are lots of things I’m dying to see, from Guy Maddin’s two most recent films to a restored 70mm print of Jacques Tati’s Playtime and the director’s cut (with much restored footage) of Donnie Darko to new films, about which I’ve heard great things, by Pen-ek Rantanaruang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wang Xiaoshuai.
Every year, I buy a Full Series Pass to the Festival. I used to see 40 or 45 films in the course of the Festival. But now, with a small child at home and being busy with preparations for moving across the continent, I won’t be able to manage anywhere near that number.
What especially caught my attention, though, was the following alert sent out by the Festival to all full series pass holders:
NO RECORDING DEVICES AT SIFF SCREENINGS
Due to piracy prevention efforts mandated by the motion picture industry and our film suppliers, recording devices of any kind (including camera phones) will not be allowed into festival venues. This policy will be strictly enforced. At certain screenings film studio representatives may require a physical search of your person or personal property upon entrance to festival venues. These searches are in no way intended for any materials other than possible recording devices–this includes cellular telephones equipped with cameras. We apologize for the inconvenience and will take every step to make these searches as quick, efficient and unintrusive as possible. We do not have facilities to hold or secure these items during film screenings. We strongly suggest that you leave any cameras and cell phones with cameras at home or in your car.
This says a lot about the insane levels of paranoia in Hollywood today, and the sickness of their crusade against piracy. Obviously SIFF can only show local premieres of all those hot new indie soon-to-be-releases by allowing the industry to send its goons to conduct “physical searches.” I’m assuming this is less likely to happen at screenings of the obscure Asian art films I’m most inclined to go to, than at screenings of American films that will be opening soon in the theaters anyway.
But I wonder how far they will carry this. Will they make filmgoers strip, just in case they are hiding illicit recording devices inside their underwear? Will they give refunds to banned filmgoers? Will they compensate us for the trouble they cause us?
I’ve said it many times, the current copyright code is so restrictive and so destructive of any possibility of free speech or creativity, that I believe that violating said code, by disseminating copies of music, movies, etc, for free, is a virtuous act of civil disobedience.
But cameraphones? The picture quality is so poor, and the amount of storage is so low, that I wouldn’t be able to capture images & sounds worth pirating even if I tried.
This draconian regulation puts me in a dilemma. My mobile phone is a cameraphone. It can take pictures, sort of. But it is basically a phone. If I leave it behind when I go to the movies in the evening, then when the movie’s over I won’t be able to call for a taxi, in order to get home. This is a problem, since I can’t drive. Buses in Seattle are fine during the day, but the schedule is much restricted at night, and the bus that goes near my house simply stops running after about 7pm. I don’t relish the thought of waiting half an hour for a bus, then taking a forty-minute ride, then having to walk almost half an hour in the dark in the middle of the night.
So I’m bringing my phone with me to every SIFF screening. What will happen? Will I be asked to submit to a physical search? Will I be ejected from films I very much want to see, and that I have paid for, because I refuse to surrender my device? Will I start frothing at the mouth and shouting obscenities, be blacklisted from SIFF forever, and show up on the nightly news?
Stay tuned.
The Seattle International Film Festival got underway last night. It’s an enormous event, with something like 250 feature films shown in the space of 3 1/2 weeks. There are lots of things I’m dying to see, from Guy Maddin’s two most recent films to a restored 70mm print of Jacques Tati’s Playtime and the director’s cut (with much restored footage) of Donnie Darko to new films, about which I’ve heard great things, by Pen-ek Rantanaruang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wang Xiaoshuai.
Every year, I buy a Full Series Pass to the Festival. I used to see 40 or 45 films in the course of the Festival. But now, with a small child at home and being busy with preparations for moving across the continent, I won’t be able to manage anywhere near that number.
What especially caught my attention, though, was the following alert sent out by the Festival to all full series pass holders:
NO RECORDING DEVICES AT SIFF SCREENINGS
Due to piracy prevention efforts mandated by the motion picture industry and our film suppliers, recording devices of any kind (including camera phones) will not be allowed into festival venues. This policy will be strictly enforced. At certain screenings film studio representatives may require a physical search of your person or personal property upon entrance to festival venues. These searches are in no way intended for any materials other than possible recording devices–this includes cellular telephones equipped with cameras. We apologize for the inconvenience and will take every step to make these searches as quick, efficient and unintrusive as possible. We do not have facilities to hold or secure these items during film screenings. We strongly suggest that you leave any cameras and cell phones with cameras at home or in your car.
This says a lot about the insane levels of paranoia in Hollywood today, and the sickness of their crusade against piracy. Obviously SIFF can only show local premieres of all those hot new indie soon-to-be-releases by allowing the industry to send its goons to conduct “physical searches.” I’m assuming this is less likely to happen at screenings of the obscure Asian art films I’m most inclined to go to, than at screenings of American films that will be opening soon in the theaters anyway.
But I wonder how far they will carry this. Will they make filmgoers strip, just in case they are hiding illicit recording devices inside their underwear? Will they give refunds to banned filmgoers? Will they compensate us for the trouble they cause us?
I’ve said it many times, the current copyright code is so restrictive and so destructive of any possibility of free speech or creativity, that I believe that violating said code, by disseminating copies of music, movies, etc, for free, is a virtuous act of civil disobedience.
But cameraphones? The picture quality is so poor, and the amount of storage is so low, that I wouldn’t be able to capture images & sounds worth pirating even if I tried.
This draconian regulation puts me in a dilemma. My mobile phone is a cameraphone. It can take pictures, sort of. But it is basically a phone. If I leave it behind when I go to the movies in the evening, then when the movie’s over I won’t be able to call for a taxi, in order to get home. This is a problem, since I can’t drive. Buses in Seattle are fine during the day, but the schedule is much restricted at night, and the bus that goes near my house simply stops running after about 7pm. I don’t relish the thought of waiting half an hour for a bus, then taking a forty-minute ride, then having to walk almost half an hour in the dark in the middle of the night.
So I’m bringing my phone with me to every SIFF screening. What will happen? Will I be asked to submit to a physical search? Will I be ejected from films I very much want to see, and that I have paid for, because I refuse to surrender my device? Will I start frothing at the mouth and shouting obscenities, be blacklisted from SIFF forever, and show up on the nightly news?
Stay tuned.
You were never prepared for this. You never expected it. You grew up poor, in one of the poorest parts of the United States. You were something of a tomboy, but a good sort of person — you got along with folks, and they tended to like you. You were impulsive, sometimes — marrying on a whim at age 18, only to divorce the guy a year or so later — but never nasty or vicious. You joined the Army Reserve, mostly, because it seemed to offer money and opportunities you couldn’t get any other way. You hoped it would allow you to save up for college, and give you some of the skills you’d need in order to get in.
But you never expected you’d be called up to active duty, and sent to Iraq: a country far away, hotter than Hell, and filled with people who we were supposed to have freed from tyranny: you were told that these people would love you, but it seemed that they mostly resented you, in a sullen sort of way; aside, that is, from the ones who actively hated you and tried to kill you.
You were trained as much to be a bureaucrat as a soldier: your job was to sit behind a desk and process the papers of Iraqi detainees. But once you were actually working at the Abu Ghraib prison, you found that a lot more was expected of you.
The higher-ups (both military officers whom you were supposed to obey, and private “contractors” who you were told you should also obey) wanted “information” from the detainees, and they wanted you to help them get it. There were various interrogation techniques they taught you: depriving the prisoners of sleep, stripping them naked and humiliating them sexually, putting hoods over their heads and subjecting them to mild electric shocks; and of course, threatening them with physical violence, and sometimes carrying through on the threats, for the sake of credibility.
It was weird at first; you had never, in your wildest dreams, imagined doing these sorts of things to anyone. But these prisoners really hated and resented you; you knew they’d kill you if they could, if the positions were reversed. So it wasn’t that hard to think of them as less than human; especially since your superiors encouraged you to think this way, encouraged you to be relentless, not to let the fuckers get away with anything, pry their secrets loose from them before more Americans, more of your buddies, were killed. And when you did your part in the interrogations, when you finally got one of the prisoners to break, to lose his defiance, to tell the “contractors” everything he knew, your superiors praised you for a job well done.
And after a while, you even started to enjoy it; it wasn’t the power, exactly, so much as a kind of recognition from your peers: an esprit de corps that kept you going, when you were cut off from home and family; and an acceptance as one of the guys, which was something you had always wanted, proving yourself as their equal even though they originally looked down on you because you were a girl. In a funny way, it was also something that brought you and your boyfriend together more: not that you got off on what you were doing, exactly, but it was a kind of complicity, and a way in which the two of you could feel that you were triumphant, standing together against — and in spite of — everything else, and everyone else in the world.
And it must have been in one of those moments that your boyfriend took those photos: of you grinning and giving thumbs up, and pointing at the genitalia of a naked, abject prisoner; or of you grinning and holding one of those poor fuckers by a leash, as if he were a disobedient dog.
And now those pictures have been published, and you are the most infamous woman in the world; and they’re going to throw the book at you, and basically you have no future and no hope. But of course somebody has to take the fall; and of course it will never be the people who imagined it, who organized it, who trained you in it, who told you to do it, and whose dreams of conquering and looting the world you were never really privy to. They can’t be blamed, so it has to be somebody like you, who was poor and without prospects to begin with. No matter how deeply you felt that esprit de corps, you never were a member of that elite, and you never would be; you were expendable from the beginning, and your life is the price our rulers are happily willing to pay, as they pursue their program of conquest and domination.
You were never prepared for this. You never expected it. You grew up poor, in one of the poorest parts of the United States. You were something of a tomboy, but a good sort of person — you got along with folks, and they tended to like you. You were impulsive, sometimes — marrying on a whim at age 18, only to divorce the guy a year or so later — but never nasty or vicious. You joined the Army Reserve, mostly, because it seemed to offer money and opportunities you couldn’t get any other way. You hoped it would allow you to save up for college, and give you some of the skills you’d need in order to get in.
But you never expected you’d be called up to active duty, and sent to Iraq: a country far away, hotter than Hell, and filled with people who we were supposed to have freed from tyranny: you were told that these people would love you, but it seemed that they mostly resented you, in a sullen sort of way; aside, that is, from the ones who actively hated you and tried to kill you.
You were trained as much to be a bureaucrat as a soldier: your job was to sit behind a desk and process the papers of Iraqi detainees. But once you were actually working at the Abu Ghraib prison, you found that a lot more was expected of you.
The higher-ups (both military officers whom you were supposed to obey, and private “contractors” who you were told you should also obey) wanted “information” from the detainees, and they wanted you to help them get it. There were various interrogation techniques they taught you: depriving the prisoners of sleep, stripping them naked and humiliating them sexually, putting hoods over their heads and subjecting them to mild electric shocks; and of course, threatening them with physical violence, and sometimes carrying through on the threats, for the sake of credibility.
It was weird at first; you had never, in your wildest dreams, imagined doing these sorts of things to anyone. But these prisoners really hated and resented you; you knew they’d kill you if they could, if the positions were reversed. So it wasn’t that hard to think of them as less than human; especially since your superiors encouraged you to think this way, encouraged you to be relentless, not to let the fuckers get away with anything, pry their secrets loose from them before more Americans, more of your buddies, were killed. And when you did your part in the interrogations, when you finally got one of the prisoners to break, to lose his defiance, to tell the “contractors” everything he knew, your superiors praised you for a job well done.
And after a while, you even started to enjoy it; it wasn’t the power, exactly, so much as a kind of recognition from your peers: an esprit de corps that kept you going, when you were cut off from home and family; and an acceptance as one of the guys, which was something you had always wanted, proving yourself as their equal even though they originally looked down on you because you were a girl. In a funny way, it was also something that brought you and your boyfriend together more: not that you got off on what you were doing, exactly, but it was a kind of complicity, and a way in which the two of you could feel that you were triumphant, standing together against — and in spite of — everything else, and everyone else in the world.
And it must have been in one of those moments that your boyfriend took those photos: of you grinning and giving thumbs up, and pointing at the genitalia of a naked, abject prisoner; or of you grinning and holding one of those poor fuckers by a leash, as if he were a disobedient dog.
And now those pictures have been published, and you are the most infamous woman in the world; and they’re going to throw the book at you, and basically you have no future and no hope. But of course somebody has to take the fall; and of course it will never be the people who imagined it, who organized it, who trained you in it, who told you to do it, and whose dreams of conquering and looting the world you were never really privy to. They can’t be blamed, so it has to be somebody like you, who was poor and without prospects to begin with. No matter how deeply you felt that esprit de corps, you never were a member of that elite, and you never would be; you were expendable from the beginning, and your life is the price our rulers are happily willing to pay, as they pursue their program of conquest and domination.
Negri on Negri is a book of interviews that gives a gentle introduction to Toni Negri’s thought. It’s worth reading because Negri is one of the few contemporary thinkers who is really trying to work out radical alternatives to our current regime of postmodernity and globalization. Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire is clearly one of the key texts of the new century, something that anyone interested in political change needs to come to terms with — even if I find much of it problematic.
Negri on Negri is a much “lighter” book than Empire, but that makes it good as an introduction. Negri goes into his life and political career — his work as a political activist in Italy, the disturbances at the time of the Red Brigades, with whom he had a certain sympathy but which he was falsely accused of supporting and even masterminding, his years in jail, his years in exile in France, his ultimate return to Italy and more time in jail. This all provides a background to a thought that remains, in spite of everything, incredibly cheerful and optimistic.
Negri’s current thought is grounded in the changes that the world has gone through in the last thirty years or so: changes from industrial capitalism to a “knowledge economy,” and from the Cold War to a global marketplace, in which corporations have become more powerful than nation-states. In this new economy, traditional distinctions of place and time, between physical and intellectual labor, and indeed between labor and leisure, have pretty much disappeared. This metamorphosis is what doomed the radical movements — left of the Communist Party — to which Negri devoted his life in the 1960s and 1970s.
For Negri, traditional Marxism, with its traditional notion of the “working class,” no longer makes any sense under these changed conditions. But this does not mean that he capitulates to the idea that the worldwide capitalist marketplace is the ultimate horizon of possibility, the only thinkable social arrangement. Instead, Negri seeks to reinvent Marxism for these changed conditions, for the changed (but still quite horrible) new configurations of capitalism.
Basically, Negri argues that capitalist “production” is no longer a specific category or specific portion of society. It is no longer the “base,” in comparison to which everything else would be a mere “superstructure.” Rather, capitalist production is everything and everywhere — and quite directly so. It’s brain power as well as machinery, leisure time as well as work time, recreation as well as reproduction, inner thoughts as well as outer actions.
This is the situation foreseen by Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, who presaged a state of society in which all independence would be exterminated, and everything would be subjected to the “laws” of capitalism, commodification, and instrumental reason.
But the situation that Adorno viewed with unalloyed horror is seen by Negri as a source of hope — seen with an almost insane optimism. For Negri, such a condition means that oppression is really in its last extremity: if globalized, informational capitalism seems to have appropriated everything, with no remainder, it’s because this “everything” is now something that we are all directly involved in, and that we can therefore reappropriate. Indeed, for Negri, the conditions have never been so propitious. Capitalism’s own mechanisms and technologies have made the overcoming of alienation, and of scarcity, possible for the very first time. Negri thus rejects the forms and categories of old-fashioned Marxism, in order the better to establish Marxism’s oldest utopian premise and promise, that of universal “communism.” Global capitalist oppression has ironically created the conditions for global freedom to be almost within our grasp.
Now, all this is so wildly, insanely optimistic that I don’t believe it for a second. Nonetheless, I can’t help finding Negri’s ideas beautiful and inspiring. For they rest on a sense of life as a joyous, ongoing process of creation and collaboration, of what Negri calls the “common,” or “the liberty of being-together”: the amassing of multiple “singularities” without them ever fusing into a fixed identity. These pages are filled with paeans (I can’t believe that I am actually using this word) to “the pleasure of singularity” (149), or to “the moment when the arrow of Being is shot, the moment of opening, the invention of Being on the edge of time. We live at each instant on this margin of Being that is endlessly being constructed” (104). I feel enlivened by Negri’s celebration of singularity, plurality, invention, and imagination, even if I am unable to share his materialist and (post)humanist faith.
I can’t remember who it was who said that the great thing about Negri was how he countered the self-deluding voluntarism of Gramsci’s “pessmism of the intellect, optimism of the will” with an attitude of “optimism of the intellect,” even in the face of an inevitable (given the history of how revolutions have been defeated, or turned into something worse when they succeeded) “pessimism of the will.”
Negri on Negri is a book of interviews that gives a gentle introduction to Toni Negri’s thought. It’s worth reading because Negri is one of the few contemporary thinkers who is really trying to work out radical alternatives to our current regime of postmodernity and globalization. Negri and Michael Hardt’s book Empire is clearly one of the key texts of the new century, something that anyone interested in political change needs to come to terms with — even if I find much of it problematic.
Negri on Negri is a much “lighter” book than Empire, but that makes it good as an introduction. Negri goes into his life and political career — his work as a political activist in Italy, the disturbances at the time of the Red Brigades, with whom he had a certain sympathy but which he was falsely accused of supporting and even masterminding, his years in jail, his years in exile in France, his ultimate return to Italy and more time in jail. This all provides a background to a thought that remains, in spite of everything, incredibly cheerful and optimistic.
Negri’s current thought is grounded in the changes that the world has gone through in the last thirty years or so: changes from industrial capitalism to a “knowledge economy,” and from the Cold War to a global marketplace, in which corporations have become more powerful than nation-states. In this new economy, traditional distinctions of place and time, between physical and intellectual labor, and indeed between labor and leisure, have pretty much disappeared. This metamorphosis is what doomed the radical movements — left of the Communist Party — to which Negri devoted his life in the 1960s and 1970s.
For Negri, traditional Marxism, with its traditional notion of the “working class,” no longer makes any sense under these changed conditions. But this does not mean that he capitulates to the idea that the worldwide capitalist marketplace is the ultimate horizon of possibility, the only thinkable social arrangement. Instead, Negri seeks to reinvent Marxism for these changed conditions, for the changed (but still quite horrible) new configurations of capitalism.
Basically, Negri argues that capitalist “production” is no longer a specific category or specific portion of society. It is no longer the “base,” in comparison to which everything else would be a mere “superstructure.” Rather, capitalist production is everything and everywhere — and quite directly so. It’s brain power as well as machinery, leisure time as well as work time, recreation as well as reproduction, inner thoughts as well as outer actions.
This is the situation foreseen by Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, who presaged a state of society in which all independence would be exterminated, and everything would be subjected to the “laws” of capitalism, commodification, and instrumental reason.
But the situation that Adorno viewed with unalloyed horror is seen by Negri as a source of hope — seen with an almost insane optimism. For Negri, such a condition means that oppression is really in its last extremity: if globalized, informational capitalism seems to have appropriated everything, with no remainder, it’s because this “everything” is now something that we are all directly involved in, and that we can therefore reappropriate. Indeed, for Negri, the conditions have never been so propitious. Capitalism’s own mechanisms and technologies have made the overcoming of alienation, and of scarcity, possible for the very first time. Negri thus rejects the forms and categories of old-fashioned Marxism, in order the better to establish Marxism’s oldest utopian premise and promise, that of universal “communism.” Global capitalist oppression has ironically created the conditions for global freedom to be almost within our grasp.
Now, all this is so wildly, insanely optimistic that I don’t believe it for a second. Nonetheless, I can’t help finding Negri’s ideas beautiful and inspiring. For they rest on a sense of life as a joyous, ongoing process of creation and collaboration, of what Negri calls the “common,” or “the liberty of being-together”: the amassing of multiple “singularities” without them ever fusing into a fixed identity. These pages are filled with paeans (I can’t believe that I am actually using this word) to “the pleasure of singularity” (149), or to “the moment when the arrow of Being is shot, the moment of opening, the invention of Being on the edge of time. We live at each instant on this margin of Being that is endlessly being constructed” (104). I feel enlivened by Negri’s celebration of singularity, plurality, invention, and imagination, even if I am unable to share his materialist and (post)humanist faith.
I can’t remember who it was who said that the great thing about Negri was how he countered the self-deluding voluntarism of Gramsci’s “pessmism of the intellect, optimism of the will” with an attitude of “optimism of the intellect,” even in the face of an inevitable (given the history of how revolutions have been defeated, or turned into something worse when they succeeded) “pessimism of the will.”
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has proposed an ordinance that mandates the city to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.
This is a step in the right direction.
However, County Executive Ron Sims still refuses to start granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples, saying: “There is nothing I can do. Governments cannot pick and choose which laws they’re going to enforce.” This is an evasion; Sims ought to grant the licenses, and to say, like San Francisco Mayor Newsome, that he is enforcing the equal protection under the law provisions of the state constitution. The state could then be sued if it refused to recognize the validity of such licenses.
Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has proposed an ordinance that mandates the city to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.
This is a step in the right direction.
However, County Executive Ron Sims still refuses to start granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples, saying: “There is nothing I can do. Governments cannot pick and choose which laws they’re going to enforce.” This is an evasion; Sims ought to grant the licenses, and to say, like San Francisco Mayor Newsome, that he is enforcing the equal protection under the law provisions of the state constitution. The state could then be sued if it refused to recognize the validity of such licenses.
An interesting article by Eli Sanders in The Stranger (Seattle alternative weekly newspaper) this week points out that King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels have the administrative power to do what San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome has done: authorize marriage licenses for gay and lesbian couples, and go to court to force the state to recognize the validity of such licenses. Of course, as Sanders also points out, Sims and Nickels are probably too lame and spineless to actually do this.
But it’s something they really ought to do, they really need to do. One thing that hasn’t been pointed out enough in all the press about the weddings in San Francisco is that social change never happens in a vacuum. Change comes when there is a cascade of events promoting it; it’s only at the very end of such a cascade of events that the law actually changes. The women’s suffrage movement of the early twentieth century, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, both exemplify this.
Recent events suggest that we have the chance of reaching a similar flash point, or tipping point, for equal marriage rights. Which is why I think that it’s imperative for Seattle, and other cities and localities throughout the country, to follow the lead of San Francisco (and Massachusetts and New Mexico). Politicians who say they want to wait for a more opportune moment (or whose mealy-mouthed equivocations, as in the case of John Kerry, imply such reasoning) need to realize that this is the opportune moment. If we don’t act now, Bush will probably get his odious constitutional amendment.
Not all injustices can be rectified overnight. Women’s suffrage did not eliminate sexism, and the civil rights movement did not eliminate racism. Nor will equal marriage rights eliminate homophobia. But when there is a rush of events opening up the prospect of of (even partial) freedom, it’s inexcusable not to seize the moment.
An interesting article by Eli Sanders in The Stranger (Seattle alternative weekly newspaper) this week points out that King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels have the administrative power to do what San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome has done: authorize marriage licenses for gay and lesbian couples, and go to court to force the state to recognize the validity of such licenses. Of course, as Sanders also points out, Sims and Nickels are probably too lame and spineless to actually do this.
But it’s something they really ought to do, they really need to do. One thing that hasn’t been pointed out enough in all the press about the weddings in San Francisco is that social change never happens in a vacuum. Change comes when there is a cascade of events promoting it; it’s only at the very end of such a cascade of events that the law actually changes. The women’s suffrage movement of the early twentieth century, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, both exemplify this.
Recent events suggest that we have the chance of reaching a similar flash point, or tipping point, for equal marriage rights. Which is why I think that it’s imperative for Seattle, and other cities and localities throughout the country, to follow the lead of San Francisco (and Massachusetts and New Mexico). Politicians who say they want to wait for a more opportune moment (or whose mealy-mouthed equivocations, as in the case of John Kerry, imply such reasoning) need to realize that this is the opportune moment. If we don’t act now, Bush will probably get his odious constitutional amendment.
Not all injustices can be rectified overnight. Women’s suffrage did not eliminate sexism, and the civil rights movement did not eliminate racism. Nor will equal marriage rights eliminate homophobia. But when there is a rush of events opening up the prospect of (even partial) freedom, it’s inexcusable not to seize the moment.
Like everyone else, I kind of wish Nader weren’t running this year. I voted for him last time, but this year the only priority is to beat Bush, with no illusions as to the wonderfulness of whoever replaces him. At this point I am what used to be called a “yellow dog Democrat”: somebody who would even vote for a yellow dog over a Republican. I’d certainly prefer my own yellow dog as President to George W. Bush.
Considering only the major candidates, at this time I prefer Edwards to Kerry, only because Kerry is a walking corpse with zero charisma, and I think that Edwards has a better chance of winning. But it won’t happen; Kerry has the nomination locked up. As I’ve written here before, it’s a peculiar pathology of the Democratic Party that they try to make things as hard as possible for themselves, by going out of their way to nominate the least appealing (indeed, least competent) candidate they can find. Hence Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and now Kerry. Bill Clinton is the sole exception.
Still, though I wish Nader would hang it up instead of making a fool of himself (since his totals are almost sure to be far lower than they were in 2000), I was sickened by Chris Matthews on Hardball last night, who basically told Nader that he was unqualified to run for President because 1)he is unmarried and has no children; 2)he doesn’t drive and doesn’t own a car; and 3)he rents an apartment, instead of owning a house or a condo. I guess parenting, driving, and home ownership constitute the minimum definition these days of what it means to be a “true American.”
And while I’m ranting: has anybody commented on how, at the same time that Bush is trying to stop people from getting married who desperately want to, he is also proposing spending $1.5 billion of taxpayers’ money in order to bully people into marrying who don’t want to?
Like everyone else, I kind of wish Nader weren’t running this year. I voted for him last time, but this year the only priority is to beat Bush, with no illusions as to the wonderfulness of whoever replaces him. At this point I am what used to be called a “yellow dog Democrat”: somebody who would even vote for a yellow dog over a Republican. I’d certainly prefer my own yellow dog as President to George W. Bush.
Considering only the major candidates, at this time I prefer Edwards to Kerry, only because Kerry is a walking corpse with zero charisma, and I think that Edwards has a better chance of winning. But it won’t happen; Kerry has the nomination locked up. As I’ve written here before, it’s a peculiar pathology of the Democratic Party that they try to make things as hard as possible for themselves, by going out of their way to nominate the least appealing (indeed, least competent) candidate they can find. Hence Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and now Kerry. Bill Clinton is the sole exception.
Still, though I wish Nader would hang it up instead of making a fool of himself (since his totals are almost sure to be far lower than they were in 2000), I was sickened by Chris Matthews on Hardball last night, who basically told Nader that he was unqualified to run for President because 1)he is unmarried and has no children; 2)he doesn’t drive and doesn’t own a car; and 3)he rents an apartment, instead of owning a house or a condo. I guess parenting, driving, and home ownership constitute the minimum definition these days of what it means to be a “true American.”
And while I’m ranting: has anybody commented on how, at the same time that Bush is trying to stop people from getting married who desperately want to, he is also proposing spending $1.5 billion of taxpayers’ money in order to bully people into marrying who don’t want to?
A year ago, before anyone had heard of Dean, the story was that the Democratic party insiders had already decided on Kerry as the nominee. And today it looks like that’s what’s going to happen. Dean just “peaked too soon,” as Richard Nixon might have said. He wasn’t able to endure the relentless negative campaigning that blanketed Iowa over the last few weeks. (Negative campaigning, and exaggerated scrutiny, of the sort George W Bush never received from the press, and that Kerry probably won’t receive until after he is nominated).
Now, I’m not a big fan of Dean, and the fact that he’s a psycho in the mold of John McCain may indeed be a handicap. He might well not be able to win, but he would have at least an outside chance, the kind of long odds a risk-taking gambler would put down money on.
(For what it’s worth, I still think that General Clark has the best winning chances of any prospective Democratic candidate. The smoothie Edwards might have a chance, too, just because he’s a Southerner, though I doubt that his phoniness is good enough to really carry things off. But then, neither Clark nor Edwards is going to get the nomination, any more than Dean will).
Kerry probably has the nomination sewed up; he probably had it sewed up, as I said, a year ago. But he has no chance whatsoever of beating Bush. He has loser written all over him: he’s a tired, colorless hack in the exact mold of Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore. When will the Democrats ever learn? They would rather lose every election from now until eternity, than allow a single breath of fresh air to enter the chamber of mummies that they laughingly call a “party.” And we pay the price, in the form of one-party rule by the predacious Bush clan and their sycophantic retainers.
A year ago, before anyone had heard of Dean, the story was that the Democratic party insiders had already decided on Kerry as the nominee. And today it looks like that’s what’s going to happen. Dean just “peaked too soon,” as Richard Nixon might have said. He wasn’t able to endure the relentless negative campaigning that blanketed Iowa over the last few weeks. (Negative campaigning, and exaggerated scrutiny, of the sort George W Bush never received from the press, and that Kerry probably won’t receive until after he is nominated).
Now, I’m not a big fan of Dean, and the fact that he’s a psycho in the mold of John McCain may indeed be a handicap. He might well not be able to win, but he would have at least an outside chance, the kind of long odds a risk-taking gambler would put down money on.
(For what it’s worth, I still think that General Clark has the best winning chances of any prospective Democratic candidate. The smoothie Edwards might have a chance, too, just because he’s a Southerner, though I doubt that his phoniness is good enough to really carry things off. But then, neither Clark nor Edwards is going to get the nomination, any more than Dean will).
Kerry probably has the nomination sewed up; he probably had it sewed up, as I said, a year ago. But he has no chance whatsoever of beating Bush. He has loser written all over him: he’s a tired, colorless hack in the exact mold of Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore. When will the Democrats ever learn? They would rather lose every election from now until eternity, than allow a single breath of fresh air to enter the chamber of mummies that they laughingly call a “party.” And we pay the price, in the form of one-party rule by the predacious Bush clan and their sycophantic retainers.
The Seattle Research Institute is trying to bridge the gap between academic and journalistic discourse, and to open a new space for a new generation, and a new sort, of “public intellectual.” Over the past few years, they’ve been a vital presence here in Seattle, sponsoring lectures, readings, and performances, as well as publishing two volumes of essays, with more to come. I finally got around to reading their first book, Politics Without the State, by Nic Veroli and others, and edited by Diana George and Charles Tonderai Mudede. (It was originally published in 2002, and has just been reprinted).
Politics Without the State is a brilliant polemic, one of the few I’ve read recently that is actually worth arguing with, rather than just dismissing. Veroli et al. argue for a politics of joy and imaginative expansion, in contrast to the politics of terror and restriction purveyed by the IMF and the US government, no less than by Al Qaeda.They focus on how the current world order works affectively, rather than just economically and ideologically or cognitively. Against “the communication of terror by a private corporate media oligopoly that functions in tandem with a state apparatus”, they advocate “a universal communication” of invention, of joy, and of bodies. The goal that they envision is “gaining collective, participatory control over the imaginary processes through which our identities and desires are instituted.” This means inventing new forms of sociality, imagining alternatives to global capitalism precisely at the moment when we are endlessly being told that no alternative is conceivable.
The theoretical inspiration for all this comes from Deleuze and Guattari, and Negri and Hardt, and to a certain extent Zizek; and before them, from such nomadic thinkers (as Deleuze calls them) as Spinoza (for his theory of affect) and Gabriel Tarde (for his theory of sociality). (They also cite C. L. R. James, as well as some German thinkers I am alas only vaguely familiar with, like Negt and Kluge, and Enzsenzberger).
But there is also a pragmatic inspiration, or one deriving from practice, which has a lot to do with why and how Politics Without the State is more than just an academic exercise. Veroli et al are inspired by the successful Seattle anti-WTO protests of 1999 and by the Zapatistas in Mexico, as well as by the ongoing (and not quite as successful) efforts in the alternative media to develop a counter-narrative to the official “manufacturing of consent” to imperial adventurism in the wake of 9/11.
So what is it that I want to argue with in Veroli et al’s account? I suppose I could put it down to my own neurotic doom and gloom that I find them (as I do Hardt and Negri) way too optimistic. However attractive it is to call for a revolutionary politics of gratified desire, in opposition to the old-fashioned (Leninist) ethos of sacrifice and discipline, I am not really convinced by such a vision. It’s the old problem that Wilhelm Reich ran into: if the masses (or, to use the more up-to-date Negrian term, the multitude) are orgasmically sated and satisfied, they aren’t going to rebel for anything more than their orgasms. While I’m all for “irruptions of idleness, perverse delights, useless pursuits” (Veroli and George), I don’t believe that such “practices of desertion” are radical acts, or threats to the consumerist world order. And although I’m as much in credit card hell as anyone, I also don’t believe that “our mounting debts, even as they topple us, will bring the system in upon itself, effectively sucking the money away from globalization’s larger agenda,” as Robert Corbett playfully (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) proposes. (For one thing, because the problem for world capitalism is not overconsumption, but precisely the reverse: overproduction).
In addition, I wish that anarcho-collectivists, like Veroli et al, would get over their negative fetishization of “the State” as the source of all evil. I know this may make me sound like an old-line marxist fundamentalist, but I’m sorry: the State is not the problem, multi- and transnational capital is. Bush’s police state tactics are in the service of Halliburton, and not the reverse. Deleuze and Guattari write somewhere of the “minimal State,” pioneered by Pinochet and Thatcher, and reaching fruition today under Bush. This is when the State abdicates all forms of authority except for its policing and military functions (and even those are being privatized to a good extent), in order to give capital a freer hand at ever-more horrific forms of exploitation. That, rather than State power, is the main danger, the real source of terror, today. Bush is truly a “crowned anarchist,” destroying the State far more radically than any left anarchists have dreamed.
Similarly, it’s the IMF and the World Bank and free-trade agreements like NAFTA that are the greatest antagonists of the State today, since they are precisely negating any form of independence or local sovereignty, in order to allow for the unimpeded expansion of flows of capital, and in order to further privatize all forms of social life.
So when Veroli dismisses the importance of public services like those of the New Deal, on the grounds that such services were only extracted from the State by the threat of “large mass movements” (which is not untrue in itself), he’s speaking from a position of luxury that fails to acknowledge what a big difference such services have made in many people’s lives however inadequate such services are. And when he says that “it is unlikely that today’s mass movements will be satisfied by a New Deal, even a global one,” I can only throw up my hands in exasperation: it’s like saying that starving people will not be satisfied with access to middle-class American meals, because anything less than the banquets of ancient Rome is oppressive and unfair.
In short, I take the rather unfashionable position that a progressive and democratic politics today must strive to reinvent the State, not bypass it or destroy it. “Politics without the State” is a chimera.
The Seattle Research Institute is trying to bridge the gap between academic and journalistic discourse, and to open a new space for a new generation, and a new sort, of “public intellectual.” Over the past few years, they’ve been a vital presence here in Seattle, sponsoring lectures, readings, and performances, as well as publishing two volumes of essays, with more to come. I finally got around to reading their first book, Politics Without the State, by Nic Veroli and others, and edited by Diana George and Charles Tonderai Mudede. (It was originally published in 2002, and has just been reprinted).
Politics Without the State is a brilliant polemic, one of the few I’ve read recently that is actually worth arguing with, rather than just dismissing. Veroli et al. argue for a politics of joy and imaginative expansion, in contrast to the politics of terror and restriction purveyed by the IMF and the US government, no less than by Al Qaeda.They focus on how the current world order works affectively, rather than just economically and ideologically or cognitively. Against “the communication of terror by a private corporate media oligopoly that functions in tandem with a state apparatus”, they advocate “a universal communication” of invention, of joy, and of bodies. The goal that they envision is “gaining collective, participatory control over the imaginary processes through which our identities and desires are instituted.” This means inventing new forms of sociality, imagining alternatives to global capitalism precisely at the moment when we are endlessly being told that no alternative is conceivable.
The theoretical inspiration for all this comes from Deleuze and Guattari, and Negri and Hardt, and to a certain extent Zizek; and before them, from such nomadic thinkers (as Deleuze calls them) as Spinoza (for his theory of affect) and Gabriel Tarde (for his theory of sociality). (They also cite C. L. R. James, as well as some German thinkers I am alas only vaguely familiar with, like Negt and Kluge, and Enzsenzberger).
But there is also a pragmatic inspiration, or one deriving from practice, which has a lot to do with why and how Politics Without the State is more than just an academic exercise. Veroli et al are inspired by the successful Seattle anti-WTO protests of 1999 and by the Zapatistas in Mexico, as well as by the ongoing (and not quite as successful) efforts in the alternative media to develop a counter-narrative to the official “manufacturing of consent” to imperial adventurism in the wake of 9/11.
So what is it that I want to argue with in Veroli et al’s account? I suppose I could put it down to my own neurotic doom and gloom that I find them (as I do Hardt and Negri) way too optimistic. However attractive it is to call for a revolutionary politics of gratified desire, in opposition to the old-fashioned (Leninist) ethos of sacrifice and discipline, I am not really convinced by such a vision. It’s the old problem that Wilhelm Reich ran into: if the masses (or, to use the more up-to-date Negrian term, the multitude) are orgasmically sated and satisfied, they aren’t going to rebel for anything more than their orgasms. While I’m all for “irruptions of idleness, perverse delights, useless pursuits” (Veroli and George), I don’t believe that such “practices of desertion” are radical acts, or threats to the consumerist world order. And although I’m as much in credit card hell as anyone, I also don’t believe that “our mounting debts, even as they topple us, will bring the system in upon itself, effectively sucking the money away from globalization’s larger agenda,” as Robert Corbett playfully (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) proposes. (For one thing, because the problem for world capitalism is not overconsumption, but precisely the reverse: overproduction).
In addition, I wish that anarcho-collectivists, like Veroli et al, would get over their negative fetishization of “the State” as the source of all evil. I know this may make me sound like an old-line marxist fundamentalist, but I’m sorry: the State is not the problem, multi- and transnational capital is. Bush’s police state tactics are in the service of Halliburton, and not the reverse. Deleuze and Guattari write somewhere of the “minimal State,” pioneered by Pinochet and Thatcher, and reaching fruition today under Bush. This is when the State abdicates all forms of authority except for its policing and military functions (and even those are being privatized to a good extent), in order to give capital a freer hand at ever-more horrific forms of exploitation. That, rather than State power, is the main danger, the real source of terror, today. Bush is truly a “crowned anarchist,” destroying the State far more radically than any left anarchists have dreamed.
Similarly, it’s the IMF and the World Bank and free-trade agreements like NAFTA that are the greatest antagonists of the State today, since they are precisely negating any form of independence or local sovereignty, in order to allow for the unimpeded expansion of flows of capital, and in order to further privatize all forms of social life.
So when Veroli dismisses the importance of public services like those of the New Deal, on the grounds that such services were only extracted from the State by the threat of “large mass movements” (which is not untrue in itself), he’s speaking from a position of luxury that fails to acknowledge what a big difference such services have made in many people’s lives however inadequate such services are. And when he says that “it is unlikely that today’s mass movements will be satisfied by a New Deal, even a global one,” I can only throw up my hands in exasperation: it’s like saying that starving people will not be satisfied with access to middle-class American meals, because anything less than the banquets of ancient Rome is oppressive and unfair.
In short, I take the rather unfashionable position that a progressive and democratic politics today must strive to reinvent the State, not bypass it or destroy it. “Politics without the State” is a chimera.
I’m in San Diego. Yesterday we went to see the results of the fires of two weeks ago. Amazing to see everything all burnt out, even more amazing to see how close the fire came to homes, gas stations, and chemical plants, and that it was only a 15 minutes’ or so drive from downtown.
I’m in San Diego. Yesterday we went to see the results of the fires of two weeks ago. Amazing to see everything all burnt out, even more amazing to see how close the fire came to homes, gas stations, and chemical plants, and that it was only a 15 minutes’ or so drive from downtown.
