<div dir="ltr"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">hi everyone,</font><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">This particular intersection of thinking about war, sanctuary, and the "ethicopoetics of sight" gets to the heart of many of my present concerns. I'll take up the threads in reverse order below:</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><u>on sight & blindness</u>:</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">The discussion above regarding blindness and sight serves as helpful reminder that so many of our ethical and critical tropes are rely upon diminishing the humanity of the subject. When, for example, liberals dismiss Trump as "crazy" or "stupid" they reveal more about their distain for the mentally ill or disabled than they do about Trump. While Brian's description of the violence of war as 'blind' is clearly more nuanced and self-reflexive than this sort of invective, it can equally serve as a moment of inquiry into the meanings associated with sight and blindness. </font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">As an instructor at UC Santa Cruz I often find that I come to these themes of visuality and rationality through the UC moto "Let there be light." The founders *clearly* intended light to function metonymically in this moto as a stand-in for all manner of evidence-based reasoning, even as the cliche of "seeing is believing" has continued to lend a particular air of instrumentalization to a learning institution founded as a school for the applied-science of mining engineering. In the face of this nexus of rationality, visuality, and industrial-capitalism, I've often made recourse to Frederick Douglass's claim that "it is not light is needed, but fire." Douglass issued this in defense of irony and sarcasm, but I believe it usefully counterposes the cold and calculating light of the laboratory with the heat and flicker of revolutionary fervor. </font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">More broadly, it is worth thinking through what forms of knowledge our preoccupation on the visual tends to obscure. This task helped drive some friends of mine to start an online journal of cultural inquiry called "Blindfield" -- for which I serve on the editorial board. From our mission:</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="color:rgb(58,58,58);background-color:rgb(246,246,246)">"Our journal seeks to understand critical tendencies and latent antagonisms of the contemporary period and its cultural imaginaries — drives and impulses that demand the cultivation of different modes of perception, interpretation, and resistance. We insist that we live in history; the present is a blind field."</span><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">While Blindfield has generally focused our content on para-academic writings which provide insights into contemporary culture from a marxist-feminist perspective, we recently found it necessary to break with that genre in order to publish a few observations regarding the contemporary status of political protest and the struggle against fascism, which seem like they might be of particular interest to readers of this list:</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><a href="https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/02/03/vocabularies-for-struggle/">https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/02/03/vocabularies-for-struggle/</a><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Of specific relevance to this <EMPYRE> thread is a section on sanctuary.</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><u>on sanctuary</u>:</font></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;background-color:rgb(246,246,246);color:rgb(58,58,58);box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;border:0px;outline:0px;text-decoration:underline"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;background-color:rgb(246,246,246);color:rgb(58,58,58);box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;border:0px;outline:0px;text-decoration:underline">What does a real sanctuary look like?</span><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;background-color:rgb(246,246,246);color:rgb(58,58,58)"> Sanctuary cities are ill-defined and unevenly applied concepts, but even at their most rigorous these municipal guidelines do little to protect vulnerable populations. Like “love,” the idea of “sanctuary” could prove a site for mobilizing new forms of mutual aid and community self-defense, including rapid-response groups to defend against ICE raids, safe-houses, neighborhood discussion groups, and support-groups for victims of sexual assault.</span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;background-color:rgb(246,246,246);color:rgb(58,58,58)"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;background-color:rgb(246,246,246);color:rgb(58,58,58)">We go on to suggest some additional strategies that might function well alongside of "sanctuary" as forms of resistance and revolutionary struggle. For us these include the erasure of borders, the creation of community self-reliance, the rejection of gentrification, and production of solidarity networks, but the list is non-exhaustive. To think critically about the meaning of sanctuary at this moment entails two important tasks: to understand the historical context in which "sanctuary" appears (the podcast 99 percent invisible did a pretty great job of introducing context recently: </span><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><a href="http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/church-sanctuary-part-1/">http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/church-sanctuary-part-1/</a>) and to understand what sorts of material conditions would provide meaningful sanctuary to those among us most at risk today. This second task is much more difficult, as it requires sustained engagement with actual people, whose actual needs, vocabularies, and value will invariably be more complex and idiosyncratic than we initially anticipate, and yet it is precisely in this space of listening that creative practitioners such as those on this list can be most effective at this juncture. </font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">a quick side-note on this question of what sorts of reprisals Trump and Sessions can leverage against "sanctuary cities." From what I've read they are specifically talking at this point about refusing to disperse federal funds to local police departments in jurisdictions deemed "sanctuaries" -- a threat which they might be able to follow through on as related to enforcing federal immigration law. For those of us who have attempted to expose and resist the ways that federal funds have been spent towards the further militarization of local police forces, this threat might appear of little concern. At the same time, it is worth acknowledging that the threat is quite carefully gauged to place a divide between popular forces demanding sanctuaries and municipal governments (and police depts) that have attempted to honor that demand. Specifically, the "sanctuary city" movement has often been buoyed (and legitimized for center-left / democrat types) by the support received from police chiefs who fear that being associated with ICE will cause immigrant communities to "distrust" the police (a laughable, if politically useful, rationale). The point being that while the ability of Sessions to dictate municipal policy might be quite limited, this week's specific threats signal a ramping up of the administration's understanding of how to attack local alliances, particularly those tenuous ones which include elements of official power. </font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><u>on war:</u></font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><u><br></u></font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">much of the sorts of warfare that are alluded to above consists of the "shock and awe" tactics of modern wars of occupation, in which use of overwhelming force and strategic advantage (ie airstrikes) are deployed to terrify a populace into submission. Such warfare is reliant upon visual surveillance, as Alan points out, but is doubly reliant upon visual media for its intended affect of subduing the population. While aspects of this sort of spectacle of violence are present in the policing of populations within the empire proper (e.g. the manner in which the racial-incarceral state utilizes the history of violence against black bodies to terrorize entire racialized populations), other types of warfare are also at work. These other types of warfare include the structuring of our (urban and suburban) geographies (haussmannization, etc), the structuring of our social relations (the feminized character of social reproduction, the alienation of the hourly wage, etc) and the production of false scarcity. In each of these examples we have an opportunity to confront the low-visibility war of capitalism (which provides the conditions for Trumpism to flourish) with low-stakes tactics of survival and subsistence, such as sanctuary, solidarity, and community self-defense. Such tactics can take the appearance of "protest" or other constitutionally sanctioned activities, but make no mistake: these are the tactics that our counter-attack takes in an ongoing war. It is non-coincidental that strengthening such capacities will serve us well should more dramatic, or spectacular, forms of warfare come to our cities and towns in the future.</font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">thanks all for your time and good will.</font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">warmly,</font></div><div><font color="#3a3a3a" face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">kyle</font></div><div><span style="color:rgb(58,58,58);background-color:rgb(246,246,246)"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></span></div><div class="gmail_extra"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font><div class="gmail_quote"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 8:04 PM, Alan Sondheim <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sondheim@panix.com" target="_blank">sondheim@panix.com</a>></span> wrote:<br></font><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
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On Tue, 28 Mar 2017, Brian Holmes wrote:<br>
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You're not off the mark, Alan. You're also right that blindness is not a very good word. By blind, I mean blind to consequences that ultimately fold back on the agents of violence as well as their victims. This is a kind of blindness that inhabits the most precise forms of vision. But you're a poet, right? We need new words.<br>
<br>
I read a family biography of the Kochs. Smart, precise, driven, violent<br>
people. Maybe we also need a new conception of sight, an ethicopoetics of<br>
sight, so as to see and embrace the world in a different light than these<br>
people do.<br>
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I agree with you re: an ethicopoetics of sight, absolutely. I do wonder if it would make any difference. All these analyses! (Mine, too, on "semiotic splatter.") We feel we understand what's occurring, we constantly come up with scenarios, alternative solutoins, but it makes no difference to those in power. What they do understand is violence (military, environmental, etc.) and its employment/dissemination. And a good example of this us the emerge/agency (thinking of Ulmer here) reflected in this from the New York Times, more or less just now:<br>
<br>
"WASHINGTON The senior United States commander in Iraq said on Tuesday that an American airstrike most likely led to the collapse of a building in Mosul that killed scores of civilians this month.<br>
<br>
But the commander, Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, indicated that an investigation would also examine whether the attack might have set off a larger blast from explosives set by militants inside the building or nearby.<br>
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It was the fullest acceptance of responsibility by an American commander since the March 17 airstrike.<br>
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My initial assessment is that we probably had a role in these casualties, said General Townsend, who commands the American-led task force that is fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But he asserted that the munition that we used should not have collapsed an entire building.<br>
<br>
That is something we have got to figure out, he added.<br>
<br>
With an increase in reports of civilian casualties from the American bombing of Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria, some human rights groups have questioned whether the rules of engagement have been loosened since President Trump took office.<br>
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Pentagon officials said this week that the rules had not changed. But General Townsend said on Tuesday that he had won approval for minor adjustments to rules for the use of combat power, although he insisted they were not a factor in the Mosul attack.<br>
<br>
General Townsend acknowledged, however, that steps had been taken to speed up the process of providing air power to support Iraqi troops and their American Special Operations advisers at the leading edge of the offensive to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State. The goal, he said, was to decentralize decision-making.<br>
<br>
General Townsend did not describe the changes in detail, but he cast them as a return to the militarys standard offensive doctrine, in contrast to the very centralized approach he said was initially put in place after President Barack Obama sent American forces back to Iraq to combat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL."<br>
<br>
- the latest count seems to be over 200 civilians killed as a block was leveled. And this is something the general has to "figure out."</font><div class="gmail-HOEnZb"><div class="gmail-h5"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
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</font></div></div></blockquote></div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br><br clear="all"></font><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">-- <br></font><div class="gmail_signature"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><a href="http://www.kylemckinley.com/" target="_blank">http://www.kylemckinley.com/</a><br><a href="http://buildingcollective.org/" target="_blank">http://buildingcollective.org/</a></font></div>
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