modernologio

Quality of urban life has become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban political economy. The postmodernist penchant for encouraging the formation of market niches—in both consumer habits and cultural forms—surrounds the contemporary urban experience with an aura of freedom of choice, provided you have the money. Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate, as do fast-food and artisanal market-places. We now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, ‘pacification by cappuccino’. Even the incoherent, bland and monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many areas now gets its antidote in a ‘new urbanism’ movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfill urban dreams. This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action, becomes the template for human socialization.

The notion that black America’s long bloody journey was accomplished through frequent alliance with the United States is an assailant’s-eye view of history. It takes no note of the fact that in 1860, most of this country’s exports were derived from the forced labor of the people it was “allied” with. It takes no note of this country electing senators who, on the Senate floor, openly advocated domestic terrorism. It takes no note of what it means for a country to tolerate the majority of the people living in a state like Mississippi being denied the right to vote. It takes no note of what it means to exclude black people from the housing programs, from the GI Bills, that built the American middle class. Effectively it takes no serious note of African-American history, and thus no serious note of American history.

… The political will to be affected by unhappiness could be rewritten as a political freedom. We would radicalize freedom as the freedom to be unhappy. The freedom to be unhappy is not about being wretched or sad, although it might involve freedom to express such feelings. The freedom to be unhappy would be the freedom to be affected by what is unhappy, and to live a life that might affect others unhappily. The freedom to be unhappy would be the freedom to live a life that deviates from the paths of happiness, wherever that deviation takes us. It would thus mean the freedom to cause unhappiness by acts of deviation. I am not suggesting here that our aim is to cause unhappiness. It is not that unhappiness becomes our telos: rather, if we no longer presume happiness is our telos, unhappiness would register as more than what gets in the way. When we are no longer sure of what gets in the way, then “the way” itself becomes a question. The freedom to be unhappy might provide the basis for a new political ontology, which, in not taking happiness as an agreed endpoint for human action, would be able to ask about the point of action. We might act politically because we do not agree about the ends of action.

“Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of cultural studies?…At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don’t feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.”

Rather than attempting to capture movements of resistance/s vis-à-vis dominant powers or orders through binaries or dialectics, we require a more complex and mobile analysis – an approach that stipulates or captures netiher beginning nor end, but rather endeavours to engage the moments at play. The notion of the milieu (see Foucault; Deleuze & Guattari) provides a productive platform for this effort. The milieu is open, mobile and complex, marked by the simultaneity of movements of production/destruction, order/disorder, reinforcement/erosion; it simultaneously builds upon, produces and reproduces movements of both governance and resistance. We thus encounter a complex field of forces in and through which movements of both power and resistance are produced simultaneously and co-constitutively. Rhizomatic networks of resistance/movements generate ruptures in the fabric of the milieu, punctuating its terrain with ‘lines of flight’ (ligne de fuite; see Deleuze & Guattari) terminating not in tangible endings but in vanishing points (whereby we lose sight of their path) and new evolutionary pathways, characterised by a stable instability of mutation and remix.

Toxic masculinity hurts men, but there’s a big difference between women dealing with the constant threat of being raped, beaten, and killed by the men in their lives, and men not being able to cry.

To use privilege requires admitting to privilege, requires moving beyond guilt and accusation into creative action. Unused privilege becomes a weapon in the hands of our enemies.

When organizers against industries of last resort take to the road, they constantly meet a reasonable question: If not this, then what? In fact, in the left-ish discourse in the United States, an insistence that “winnable” solutions be proposed along with problems has become dominant. This dominance is in part an outgrowth of the professionalization of activism of all kinds and its formalization in not-for-profits, which are regularly required to generate “work products” to satisfy funders that the groups are doing what they say they will do. The “what-is-the-solution” imperative is also an outgrowth of the twentieth-century ascendance of the technocrat, specially skilled in breaking problems down into parts and solving them piecemeal. The trouble with technocracy, affecting engaged research and not-for-profit-based political experimentation, is that narrowness often stands in for specificity (and questions lose stretch and resonance along the way). Thus the long struggle to shrink the U.S. prison system through nonreformist reforms has sometimes been undermined by the technocratic imagination stifling work intended to advance the cause. For example, some advocacy research has narrowed the question “How do we shrink prisons?” to “How can we get some women out of prison?” and has ignored the facts—supported by experience—that the women released might wind up in jails or other lockups, or that the arguments advocated on behalf of decarcerating women might deepen and widen the net in which men and boys are captured and kept.