[-empyre-] WH vs sanctuary cities

Sat Apr 1 08:00:42 AEDT 2017

A brilliant intervention, for its practicality, thank you.

BH

On 03/31/2017 01:34 PM, kyle mckinley wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
>
> 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
> <mailto: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
>     <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>     http://empyre.library.cornell.edu <http://empyre.library.cornell.edu>
>
>
>
>
> --
> http://www.kylemckinley.com/
> http://buildingcollective.org/
>
>
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