[-empyre-] more on cooptation of the oppressed

[dj lotu5]

i also wanted to add that i think sandoval's writing in methodology of
the oppressed is brilliant in this regard. she writes:

“If, as Jameson argues, the formerly centerd and legitimated bourgeois
citizen-subject of the first world (once anchored in a secure haven of
self) is set adrift under the imperatives of late-capitalist conditions,
if such citizen subjects have become anchorless, disoriented, incapable
of mapping their relative positions inside multinational capitalism,
lost in the reverberating endings of colonial expansionism... then the
first world subject enters the kind of psychic terrain formerly
inhabited by the historically decentered citizen-subject: the colonized,
the outsider, the queer, the subaltern, the marginalized. So too, not
only are the “psychpathologies,” but also the survival skills, theories,
methods, and the utopian visions of the marginal made, not just useful
but imperative to all citizen-subjects.” [p. 27]

i deeply appreciate virginia's repeated efforts to bring this
conversation back into a broader political grounding and i also, as she
does, find a lot of relevance in the work of anzaldua and sandoval.
while i think that the intersectional argument is problematic, as denise
feerrira da silva has pointed out, i think that da silva's work does
point to the way that epistemological systems underpinning the operation
of sexuality also shape the conditions of possibility rethinking the
subject which carries the markers of race and gender as well.


dj lotu5 wrote:
> hello all,
> 
> this week i finished reading Paolo Virno's "A Grammar of the Multitude"
> and i want to share a quote from it, because i think that it would be a
> mistake to not discuss RA in the context of post-fordist cooptation of
> earlier strategies of resistance.
> 
> Virno writes:
> 
> "When hired labor involves the desire for action, for a relational
> capacity, for the presence of others--all things that the preceding
> generation was trying out within the local party headquarters--we can
> say that some distinguishing traits of the human animal, above all the
> posession of a language, are subsumed within capitalistic production.
> The inclusion of the very anthropogenesis in the existing mode of
> production is an extreme event. Forget the Heideggerian chatter about
> the "technical era"... This event does not assuage, but radicalizes,
> instead the antinomies of economic-social capitalistic formation. Nobody
> is as poor as those who see their own relation to the presence of
> others, that is to say, their own communicative faculty, their own
> possession of a language, reduced to wage labor."
> 
> and also
> 
> "This is one role of the communication industry, once post-Fordism has
> become fully entrenched: an industry of the means communication."
> 
> In this way, I think we can see Relational Aesthetics as a cooptation
> and commercialization of earlier, more radical, art practices based on
> social processes and presence. Surely, Kaprow and Fluxus happenings were
> aimed at getting people together in live, unregulated situations where
> they could interact, but outside of the profit system of galleries and
> museums.
> 
> One could see RA as a cooptation of many queer artistic and biopolitical
> strategies as well. I think that in Jack Smith's flaming creatures and
> in kenneth anger's pleasuredome, one can see on screen, a rich social
> process. While RA claims to want to reclaim social interaction as an
> artistic domain, it is actually reclaiming the kind of queer community
> building practices that are so necessary for queer people to live safely
> and happily, but reclaiming them for the profit making art industry. RA
> can be seen as heteronormative in that it is normative, taking the kind
> of collective, social artistic process of earlier artists and putting it
> on the tongues of artforum readers everywhere as something totally hip.
>   It's like a feminist consciousness raising meeting for the art elite.
> 
> Looking at Tara's work, particularly the Men With Missing Parts makes me
> think of how this process of cooptation and recuperation flips over and
> goes through a constantly resonating feedback loop, with queer drag
> performers coopting mainstream icons like Dorothy for drag performance,
> and then later Drag performance being turned into hollywood
> productions... Even "putting the balls away" is a great example of the
> culture industry coopting and profiting off of feminist the gender
> liberation movements of the 60s-70s and the ensuing social tension.
> 
> ok, thats all for now...
> 
>   micha
> 
> 


-- 
blog: http://transreal.org

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