Cedars

In the Warren trials, U.S. prosecutors made a slew of philosophical arguments that might be known characteristics of the nation-state but are seldom spelled out with such clarity. I’ll gesture to three of them here.

The first is that the nation-state wishes to reduce and simplify. When pressed to confirm that he is a “high-ranking leader in No More Deaths,” Scott paused and smiled—not because he was plotting a lie but because the government doesn’t understand horizontal power structures. “He paused,” was the U.S. government’s argument as to why Scott’s testimony was not credible.

Second, the nation-state relies on a myth of “common sense.” When asked about the spirituality that calls him to practice humanitarian aid in the desert, Scott gave an immense description of the sacredness that inheres in places where people suffer. On the spot, he defined the word “place” like a practiced philosopher. In response to this carefulness and complexity, the U.S. government wielded an anti-intellectual appeal to argue that Scott’s way of speaking was “obscure” and thus untrustworthy. In both of these instances, the state advocated a devaluation of complexity, contemplation, and carefulness.

The third is most succinctly demonstrated by the debate that took place in the courtroom around the difference between “giving directions” and “orientation.” The prosecution argued Scott gave directions so that the migrants could avoid BP checkpoints, and their evidence was that, through a surveillance scope, BP agents had seen Scott “waving his hands around” toward the mountains while standing with the two men. Asked to define, as a geographer, the difference between orientation and directions Scott said: “Orientation is partly an art and partly a science, of being able to tell where you are in relation to the landscape.” His attorney argued that “orientation is just as much of a human right as food, water, and shelter. Humanitarian aid organizations around the world recognize the reality that migrants are going to migrate. No More Deaths’ mission is to reduce harm.”

What Do People in Solitary Confinement Want to See?

By Doreen St. Félix

Kent Rogowski: Love = Love, 2006-2008

Kent Rogowski: Love = Love, 2006-2008

I’m always struck by this hesitance not only to name white terrorism but to name whiteness itself during acts of racial violence. In a recent New York Times article on the history of lynching, the victims are repeatedly described as black. Not once, however, are the violent actors described as they are: white. Instead, the white lynch mobs are simply described as “a group of men” or “a mob.” In an article about racial violence, this erasure of whiteness is absurd. The race of the victims is relevant, but somehow the race of the killers is incidental. If we’re willing to admit that race is a reason blacks were lynched, why are we unwilling to admit that race is a reason whites lynched them? In his remarks following the Charleston shooting, President Obama mentioned whiteness only once — in a quotation from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. intended to encourage interracial harmony. Obama vaguely acknowledged that “this is not the first time that black churches have been attacked” but declined to state who has attacked these churches. His passive language echoes this strange vagueness, a reluctance to even name white terrorism, as if black churches have been attacked by some disembodied force, not real people motivated by a racist ideology whose roots stretch past the founding of this country.”

Popular songs are full of desire: to say what we want to with our own mouths, to dance with someone who loves us, to rock and roll all night and party every day.   Poems are popular songs and have desires, too.  The Venezuelan-Trinidadian poet Miguel James has a lovely poem about desire, which in its entirety is this:

You want flowers Me, a horse, a guitar And to never work, never, never.

It’s an unforgettable poem not just because the desire in it is perfect (nunca! nunca!) but because also the form of the poem proves the quality of desire. It says exactly enough that we understand the trueness of a horse and a guitar but not so much that the poem itself becomes the work we never want to do.

But one of the weariest things about the world as it is is how it makes so many of us do so many things we don’t want to do.  We sleep with people we don’t want to, sometimes because we are bored or to feel loved or to have a bed; we sell off the hours of our lives to the bosses and still don’t have enough to live.  We eat shitty food, and then click on things.  We get sick and offer our bodies up to poisonous and mutilating cures.  We do things we don’t want to do so much that eventually, to just survive it, we can mistake what we must do for what we desire.  I want a job, we sometimes even think, to the great horror of our own thoughts, even when we love all the poems against work. Or I want to die, we think, when what we mean is “I want to actually live.”

Desire is not true, or not any true-er than any other feeling. Our desire is not untrue, either: but desire as we know it is manufactured from the raw materials of another kind of desire, one that is harder to locate, one that we can only sometimes imagine, or one that we mistake as memory.  Sometimes what we want is only a want made out of what is done to us.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “I too am …” is a poem with a desire about desire (and it doesn’t seem to be online anywhere — but it’s in Roman Poems, perhaps I will eventually type it in?). It allows, at first, for the desire that our desires might be true (because wouldn’t that be easier? Can you imagine how relaxing it would be to believe in what you want?) then quickly corrects itself. Pasolini has his “old /stupendous privilege of thinking” that he thinks with, and thinks also that despite this privilege, there may still be a god in him (“bewildered, feeble, child-like, / but his voice human, / almost like a song).”  But he wants to escape from this privilege of his own thought – the misery, he even calls it— because to always be thinking in that demystifying way is also to make us anxious – can’t we just live then in the unanxiety of unexamined desire?  The poem leads him toward an initial okayness toward desires:

Man has humble desires: First of all, an immaculate shirt. First of all, good shoes, proper clothing! And a house in a district Where people don’t both you And apartment in full sun With three or four rooms and a balcony Secluded, but with roses and lemons.

The simple desires accelerate exponentially to the unsimple, bourgeois, lavish and awful ones.  Now  Pasolini is desiring as if “only an eye,” the eye’s desire always that which is aimed by aesthetics (the bird of prey’s eye, the one focused by taste).  The speaker is a bourgeois clown then, joke’s on Pasolini, the desire his desire leads him to is actually one involving dark curtains that block out everything and everyone, a table with a thousand drawers “one for each manuscript/ so as not to violate / the insatiable hierarchies of my inspiration.”  There is so much horror to this wanting now: “a few old paintings by cruel mannerists, / with gold frame.” It goes on like this, ending unendingly in the sordid gold eternity of an ellipsis …

I remember when we were very poor I would soothe myself with dreaming about a house with four rooms, as if that would solve any of the real problems of the world, to have a house all alone. But then I read Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letter #19, and it was so useful against this problem of wanting what I didn’t actually want.  It was a poem that worked like an arrow, pointing to something else, also expanding my “only an eye” into a whole body again, connected to all the other bodies.  Through reading a poem my wanting, then, became more true:

if what you want is housing, industry         (G.E. on the Navaho reservation) a car for everyone, garage, refrigerator, TV, more  plumbing, scientific freeways, you are still the enemy

                    or if you want

degrees from universities which are nothing more than slum landlords, festering sinks of lies, so you too can go forth and lie to others on some greeny campus

Alessandra Maria

I think this endless debate about whether supporting yourself in a particular way “is feminist” is a really indicative illustration about the way in which modern feminism has gone deeply off the rails.  Feminism is not a theme with which you adorn your personality, nor do you at any point accrue enough feminism points with your personal, individual choices to be heuristically A (Good) Feminist(tm).  It’s ironic that criticisms like these often come from radical feminists criticizing liberal feminist (of which, to be clear, I am most emphatically not one), because it’s completely rooted in the notion that one’s individual choices can opt a person out of the patriarchy (which radical feminists seem to understand just fine when they’re whining about weaponized feminity but not when assessing their own NGO/non-profit sector jobs).  Different individuals will feel different ways about their jobs, and more to the point, a worker will probably feel differently from day to day (or client to client) — but a feeling of empowerment is just that, a personal emotional experience that has very little to do with…well, anything else.  Justifying sex work as being “empowering” for women is a red herring that SWERFs love because it’s so ridiculous and easily debunk able — but it is not the axis on which sex workers and those who stand with us and advocate for our right to work safely base our arguments.  Sex worker rights are not a matter of personal empowerment — they’re a matter of basic safety.

Trading sex is neither an inherently feminist nor anti-feminist act. It’s meaningless (just as sex that is not transactional is).  And while their are absolutely misogynist capitalist profiting from the labor of women sex workers in the sex industry, the idea that the workers themselves are somehow responsible for the violence of the patriarchy around them is victim-blaming bullshit.