[-empyre-] WH vs sanctuary cities

Sat Apr 1 05:34:06 AEDT 2017

hi everyone,
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:

*on sight & blindness*:

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.

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.

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:

"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."

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:

https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/02/03/vocabularies-for-struggle/

Of specific relevance to this <EMPYRE> thread is a section on sanctuary.

*on sanctuary*:

What does a real sanctuary look like? 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.

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: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/church-sanctuary-part-1/)
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.

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.

*on war:*

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.

thanks all for your time and good will.

warmly,
kyle

On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 8:04 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> On Tue, 28 Mar 2017, Brian Holmes wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> I read a family biography of the Kochs. Smart, precise, driven, violent
> people. Maybe we also need a new conception of sight, an ethicopoetics of
> sight, so as to see and embrace the world in a different light than these
> people do.
>
> ====
>
>
> 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:
>
> "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.
>
> 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.
>
> It was the fullest acceptance of responsibility by an American commander
> since the March 17 airstrike.
>
> 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.
>
> That is something we have got to figure out, he added.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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."
>
> - 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."
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>

-- 
http://www.kylemckinley.com/
http://buildingcollective.org/
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