[-empyre-] WH vs sanctuary cities

[Brian Holmes]

Frederic wrote:
"I think that there is a war at stake, because the problem is not any
longer to produce the rules thanks to which neoliberalism can work, but to
create a space without rules thanks to which a destruction can occur
without any limits, to enable a tiny group of persons to enjoy a huge
amount of money in the short term."

Well, I agree. The techniques you described at work in the banlieue in
France, or that we could describe at Standing Rock, are the war machine
unleashed and able to operate at full violence. I had a brush with it
seventeen years ago in Prague, where the cops looked at my passport, saw
that I was an American, radioed central command and then let me go - while
capturing and later torturing other protesters whose governments had a
different place in their local balance of forces. In my view, this force of
unleashed violence is the "neo" of Imperial control and domination, without
the "liberal" element of (often pseudo-) regulation and legitimacy that was
formerly mixed in with it, all the way through the Obama era. The value of
the postwar liberal system of rights, and even more, of the attempts to
extend it to a greater number of social subjects after 1968, becomes more
clear as it disappears. We are really leaving that neo-liberal order behind
now, and yet the new level of violence - visible, for example, in the
violence of resource extraction that you can now see so clearly at work
within the territory of the US itself - that "new" level of devastation was
always there, it was always emerging as the radically violent potential of
domination within the temporarily stabilized neoliberal order.

Marx believed that capitalism was doomed to failure in its attempt to use
representational democracy to regulate itself for its own smoother function
ing. He was right, but despite all the grand claims in the early and middle
twentieth century, no one developed a system of political oversight,
regulation and steering that was as sophisticated and capable as the
representational democracy that emerged from the American and French
revolutions. Many of us on this list - well, you and me certainly, along
with our comrades at the journal Multitudes - made similar grand claims
about two decades ago, essentially to the effect that new communications
technology was unleashing a collective intelligence that could finally
improve on representative democracy. We were not entirely wrong. What we
called "the multitudes" is known to contemporary political theory as
"transnational civil society." It, and we as part of it, still has the key
role to play in overcoming the blind violence of war and extending the
liberal system of regulation so far that the ecocidal violence of
capitalism itself is throttled back along with all the drones and tanks and
laser-bombs etc. If not, we shall die as a civilization. It's socialism or
barbarism all over again, but we need a much less naive, much more
sophisticated
political understanding of the potential that used to be called
"socialism." We need an ecosocial democracy that can actually govern, with
all the communicational finesse and technical detail that implies. This is
how things stand in the early twenty-first century.

Or at least, that's how this particular washed-up middle-aged
not-so-middle-class old white fart sees it anyway!

On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 8:19 AM, Frederic Neyrat <fneyrat at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Brian,
>
> I completely agree with you, but let's take it on its reverse side:
> Trumpism might be a way for a certain number of persons to understand that
> what happens here - in the US territory or in the City - already happened
> there - "out there" or in the banlieue/suburbs." An awareness.
>
> I remember in 2010, in France, during a huge wave of manifestations
> against a project of reform concerning the retirement system, discovering a
> technique used by the police to control and scatter the manifestation
> (helicopters quasi-immobile just above the protesters + splitting of the
> demonstration in several lines + creation of a transient camp with "filter
> roadblocking" enabling the police to take a picture of every protester
> before they leave the camp (a racist practice that always kept the
> French-Arabic persons in the transient camp longer than other people),
> etc.) that was already used in the banlieues before being used in the City.
>
> I don't know whether or not it's possible to extend the concept of war and
> to use it to speak, à la Agamben, to the war of capitalism against
> humanity, or to speak of wars in plural (cf the last book of
> Lazzarato+Aliez that I did not read, but I heard of it).
>
> But when I read
> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/28/trump-
> begins-tearing-up-obamas-years-of-progress-on-tackling-climate-change
> I think that there is a war at stake, because the problem is not any
> longer to produce the rules thanks to which neoliberalism can work, but to
> create a space without rules thanks to which a destruction can occur
> without any limits, to enable a tiny group of persons to enjoy a huge
> amount of money in the short term. The walls that Trump wants to build are
> those that will enable his administration to destroy the US territory,
> preventing the US citizens to escape to Mexico......
>
> Best,
>
> Frederic
>
> 2017-03-27 22:59 GMT-05:00 Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com>:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> While I am far from minimizing the harm that this administration can do
>> (a form of harm which has many parallels around the world and whose
>> interest is maybe not limited to the US), nonetheless the very CNN article
>> being quoted in this thread shows how rhetorical these particular threats
>> are:
>>
>> "On Monday, Sessions reiterated that cities and states hoping to receive
>> federal funds or grants must comply with federal law requiring local
>> authorities to share citizenship or immigrant status of individuals to the
>> Immigration and Naturalization Service if requested. The attorney general
>> did not specify which cities or which funds the department may claw back as
>> it has threatened.... The government would likely be limited to pulling
>> funds that it can prove are related to the policy it is targeting, namely
>> immigration enforcement."
>>
>> The nitty-gritty as I understand it is that they can pull funding related
>> to... Homeland Security. Apparently that's the main destination of federal
>> funding to cities these days! So to fight against the sanctuary cities, the
>> Trump administration can only weaken what so far seems to be its strongest
>> constituency, namely law enforcement.
>>
>> That said, Frédéric's idea of focusing on war is timely. As the putative
>> rhetorical powers of the administration are exhausted, it is obvious that
>> they will attempt to use brute force. They won't do it - or at least they
>> won't do it first - inside the borders of the US, because they do sort of
>> have to obey the laws inside the country: meaning they can deport even more
>> immigrants than the Obama administration's record deportations, yes, but
>> they can't use unprecedented emergency powers unless they can manufacture
>> an emergency. This points toward the impending invention of new definitions
>> and practices of war, legitimating new states of emergency. I think a new
>> definition and practice of war is a logical development of Trumpism. And I
>> also think that rather than making up outlandish ideas of what those new
>> definitions and practices will be, one might do better to look coolly at
>> the record of the two previous administrations to see what they already
>> are, and thereby, to identify where the qualitative thresholds can be
>> crossed. Trumpism will stand or fall on the capacity of all levels of
>> society - not just the top, the bottom, or the middle - to resist the
>> escalation of foreign war and the generalization of its laws to the
>> domestic sphere.
>>
>> Here's the sad, but crucially important truth about the capitalist
>> democracies: they call it fascism when the "just" laws of foreign wars are
>> "unjustly" applied to the domestic sphere.
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 10:02 PM, Frederic Neyrat <fneyrat at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Concerning the occupation - "many of us feel that this is no longer
>>> "our" country or "our" government, but a kind of occupation or
>>> doubling/doppelgange"r - let's think about *The Man in the High Castle *(the
>>> TV show at least, for I did not read PKD's book).
>>>
>>> So, on the one side, the High Castle = the WH; on the other side,
>>> Sanctuary Cities that the WH tries to turn into Obituary Cities.
>>>
>>> I don't know what will be the result of this war. But it's a kind of
>>> war, right? Maybe Empyre forum could devote a month to that topic: Wars.
>>>
>>> My best,
>>>
>>> Frédéric
>>>
>>> 2017-03-27 20:48 GMT-05:00 Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com>:
>>>
>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>>>
>>>> Sanctuary Cities (apologies if I'm just repeating the obvious)
>>>>
>>>> This may be of interest only to US residents, for which apologies.
>>>> It does give some indication of the brutality of a regime which
>>>> pays little attention to protest. The result for refugee and
>>>> immigrant communities - even for families legally in the country -
>>>> has been devastating.
>>>>
>>>> http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/27/politics/jeff-sessions-trump-s
>>>> anctuary-cities/
>>>> http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/25/politics/sanctuary-cities-explained/
>>>>
>>>> (Sending it out because we're in a sanctuary city and state; both are
>>>> poor, and, being pessimistic, I'm waiting for the resulting havoc. What's
>>>> so strange, uncanny, for so many of us, is the speed with which the tenor
>>>> of the US has changed; we've gone from more traditional protests (against
>>>> police brutality, military engagement, women's rights, BLM) to protests
>>>> based on a different atmosphere - that of overt racist acts, and potential
>>>> or real federal attacks on the poor, Blacks, Latinos, the environment etc.
>>>> - attacks from the very institutions that are "supposed" to protect us. So
>>>> in a very real sense, many of us feel that this is no longer "our" country
>>>> or "our" government, but a kind of occupation or doubling/doppelganger, and
>>>> that's hard to come to grips with. I'm speaking of course from two
>>>> positions - that of being white, middle-class, and "educated," and that of
>>>> being Jewish and "senior," and witnessing, for the first time in years,
>>>> acts of anti-semitism on the increase, even in Rhode Island (I won't even
>>>> describe the destructive ageism I'm dealing with). So I'm privileged on the
>>>> whole, not having to deal with what a friend here calls micro- aggressions
>>>> against minorities - micro-aggressions that occur constantly, that have
>>>> only increased as well. On a plane of sociality/communality, the US is a
>>>> foreign country for many of us, located nowhere, going nowhere but towards
>>>> a brutal and militarist future, at least for the time-being.)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> empyre forum
>>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20170328/dce66e28/attachment.html>