[-empyre-] more on cooptation of the oppressed

[dj lotu5]

what sandoval articulates so well, i think, is that under postmodern
conditions, where meaning and truth are destabilized, that all people
exist in a state of uncertainty or precarity which was previously
particular to migrant people, queer people, people of color, broadly,
oppressed people.

what to do about it is a very big question, but i think that da silva's
work helps to point out that the very categories through which
resistance has been organized, through which solidarity has been found,
are based in enlightenment conceptions of the self, of the I, and of
truth, which then create the very conditions of oppression. what i want
to do about it is to continue to rethink these very things. for example,
with becoming dragon, i want to help contribute to a dialog about how we
can think of the subject as something that is always in transition. and
i dont think this is a recent concern, ala deleuze and guattari, but
that it goes so much farther back before bergson to people like
heraclitus and to indigenous traditions of shapeshifting and shamanism
before that (again here anzaldua's serpent spirit raises her head). the
question is, how do we think and communicate in a way that accounts for
the fact that concepts themselves are fabricated constructions, as
nietzsche talked about, that everything is in flux and we only see forms
because of the particular tempo of our neurons, rods and cones?


naxsmash wrote:
> Micha, I really appreciate your picking up on the threads in  
> Virginia's comments on transfeminism and my request for quotes from   
> "This Bridge We Call Home."
> 
> Could you contextualize your reference here to Sandoval a bit more?  I  
> am intrigued--
> 
> as you quote her,
> 
> "...enters the kind of psychic terrain formerly inhabited by the ...  
> queer..."
> 
> yes this is what David's been riffing on too in his post about  
> guantanamo-American poetry .
> 
> so what do we do about it ...  you mention denise ferrira de silva  
> here too and I'd love to listen more to you about these conditions of  
> possiblity rethinking the subject...
> 
> maybe the best 'answers' to my query come in the world of actual  
> practice-events-
> 
> hmm
> 
> 
> On Jul 22, 2009, at 2:11 PM, dj lotu5 wrote:
> 
>> 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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