I cite

Kurt Andersen Can't Read

In Fantasyland: How American Went Haywire, Kurt Andersen spends several paragraphs trashing me. He attacks my 1998  book, Aliens in America and then adds some red-baiting for the win. But rather than providing evidence of some kind of leftist contempt for reason, what he proves is that he either can't read or is a liar.

First: he says I was "delighted on principle" to "defend the veracity of people claiming to be not just witnesses but abductees."  What I actually say is that "the advocatory conventions of the UFO discourse have expanded to defend the veracity of people claiming to be not just witnesses but abductees." The paragraph is describing the ways that UFO discourse in the 1980s differs from that in the 1960s. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were scientific and governmental investigations of UFOs that had a degree of legitimacy. For example, there was a Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects held by the House Science and Astronautics Committee in July 1968. In 1966 Gerald Ford wrote a letter to the House Armed Services Committee criticizing the Air Force for dismissing a bunch of Michigan sitings. Likewise in the 50s and 60s, most UFO researchers wanted to keep "contactees" at arms-length. Their claims were considered too wild, beyond the pale, likely hoaxes. By the eighties, the kinds of methods and testimonies prominent in UFO research had changed. Hypnosis was used to recover memories said to be memories of abduction. Andersen either can't read for context (including an entire sentence), doesn't understand how to read a history of a changing discourse, or is deliberately taking me out of context so as to have an easy punching bag. I expect the latter (but this might be too generous -- why choose?).

Second: Andersen says I "celebrate" "every attitude and approach that appalls [sic] him." Celebrate? Aliens in America is dark, depressing, an account of the collapse of the conditions of possibility of democracy. It reads the nineties in terms of paranoia, what I will later with Zizek call the "decline of symbolic efficiency." Instead of either a postmodern embrace of a multitude of language games or a Habermasian insistence on the commensurability of languages, I accept the former as an unbearable condition that democratic theorists have failed to acknowledge. UFO belief and the UFO discourse is the example, case study, and symptom I use to make the argument. In his attack, Andersen renders as my opinion or position what is actually my description of the way UFO discourse functions. So he says I reject the presumption that there is a public anchored in reason. What I point out is that this presumption no longer holds in the US -- the fragmentation, the competing conceptions of the real, the fact that there is no set of common standards to which all agree -- is the condition we are in. My statement is descriptive, not normative. I write:

"UFO belief thus challenges the presumption that there is some 'public' that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged."

In light of the Right's failure to acknowledge climate change, this passage isn't just accurate -- it's prescient.

Third: Andersen says that I claim that the norms of public reason are "oppressive and exclusionary." Again, he takes a phrase out of context. What I write is:

"Various Marxists, feminists, and multiculturalists have stressed the importance of knowledge gained at the margins; the importance of the standpoint of the oppressed as epistemologically superior falsely disembedded view from nowhere."

I link this view to the position that one can never really know the position of another person and the conclusion that this means that we cannot and should not judge what another person claims to know or experience.  Then I criticize it. Andersen attributes to me a view I explicitly criticize. I point out that the problem of multiple ways of knowing is that it is depoliticizing because it is epistemologically confused: there are no common standard, no common reality. At the end of the twentieth century, we were awash in information, with no capacity to judge or assess it because there is no general reality, common reason. The political problem is then how to deal with this absence of a symbolic order.

Fourth: Andersen fails to understand any of my points regarding links, conspiracy theory, and paranoia. I argue that in a setting marked by the absence of a common sense of reason, problems are not solved by more information or knowledge. This is because there is not an underlying truth according to which information and knowledge can be assessed. Adding more and more information thus exacerbates rather than solves problems, especially political problems. In the late nineties, this problem was associated with data glut, search engine design, problems of verification. To an extent, we've let our technologies solve it for us. But it still comes up a lot in politics, often deployed by the Right to block action: we need more information because the science of climate change isn't settled. We also sometimes use it when we don't want to accept information we don't like: a second and third and fourth opinion following a bad diagnosis. At any rate, my argument in Aliens is that under the conditions of the absence of a common reason more information will never decide for us.

Fifth: Andersen ends by pointing out that I am a communist and making a gesture to Goebbels. This is the all too conventional obfuscatory move of equating communism and Nazism. It's used by those who are weak thinkers and politically suspect. Andersen is both.

Related articles

Interview with Lafanzanis

excerpted from here

4. From how things look, however, the government is “saying farewell” to the Thessaloniki program – at least for now. 

LAFAZANIS: We do not abandon the Thessaloniki program, or our comprehensive radical program. Already with the first draft bills, which have become laws in the Parliament, we are moving towards the direction of those programs. No “institution”, no blackmailing and no dilemma is going to bury the decade-long struggles of the executive members of SYRIZA, which were given together with the Left and its principles. SYRIZA is not going to be absorbed by the state, and will not become a crutch and manager of the neoliberal “state-fed” Greek capitalism. The soul of SYRIZA is the society and the need for a progressive reconstruction of the country with a socialist horizon.

5. Does the “freezing” of the pre-electoral announcements of SYRIZA, in order for the country to overcome the ‘Symplegades stones’ of the economic suffocation, seem appropriate to you?

LAFAZANIS: The need for liquidity is the most crucial and urgent problem of the Greek economy. Without liquidity there is no way out. The prevailing circles of the EU, especially in Berlin, are extorting the country in raw, having cut for quite some time now the flow of financing. It is a dirty plan that was implemented in Cyprus with an ultimatum of one week, while in Greece they are following a more prolonged (time-wise), but also more tormenting, version of it. In any case, their behavior looks more like that of ruthless imperialists towards their far-off colony. They are forgetting, however, that this knife, which they are using, cuts from both its sides. Greece is not going to be lost with economic strangulation, nor will it suffer [heart] failure from the economic suffocation.

Greece has many viable and realistic alternative ways in order to react – and in fact react successfully. Greece is a small country to be making any threats, but it is certain that our country has the possibilities of multiple choices, while those that are threatening it are following only one, very problematic and quite dangerous [choice] for their own sake. If we freeze our pre-electoral proclamations – which we are not going to “freeze” – not only will we not exit the Symplegades stones, but it is then that we will be moving directly towards the cliff.

 

Town Court of Reading, NY: Leaving the People Out in the Cold

There's a wind chill advisory in the Finger Lakes today and tomorrow. Tonight the temperature is supposed to drop to four degrees. Arctic winds will make the wind chill around nineteen degrees below zero.

32 civil disobedients from We Are Seneca Lake will be arraigned this evening at the Town Court in Reading, NY. They were arrested for blockading the gates of Texas-based Crestwood-Midstream, a company that wants to store methane, propane, and butane in salt caverns next to the water supply of 100,000 people. These arraignments could take a while.

If tonight is anything like December 17, a lot of us are going to be left out in the cold. On December 17, apparently under orders from the Sheriff, supporters and press were barred from the court room for the 5:00 hearing. After well-known activist Sandra Steingraber negotiated with police, the court was opened for the 7:00 hearing. Fire code was strictly enforced, so the total number of people in the court was limited to 49. Those allowed in were not allowed to bring in bags or cell-phones (even turned off). The rest of us were barred from the building, made to stand out in the cold rather than assemble in the large waiting area inside the building yet outside the courtoom. 

There is plenty of room in the building for supporters to assemble. Presumably the room is large because central New York has frigid winters and the building was designed with the people in mind. The Town Hall is supposed to be a public building. Yet We Are Seneca Lake is being singled out for exclusion from this space. Local officials -- from the District Attorney to the Town Board -- are trying to suppress free speech and assembly, specifically of those fighting against Crestwood. Not only have police barred people from entering the building, but they've blocked off nearby parking, requiring cars to park long distances away from the Town Hall, along dark, unlit, rural roads, some of which also restrict parking. When the will chill is 19 below, as it will be tonight, the trek from car to court will be brutal.

In a show of the deep solidarity that the community has with We Are Seneca Lake, a local resident has offered to provide parking and to shuttle people to the Town Hall. Local officials have not received us so warmly. They want to freeze us out, to block expressions of legitimate protest, and to let the court continue with its arbitrary proceedings. Rather than overseeing fair judicial hearings, the officials associated with the Town Court of Reading, NY are using low-level tactics designed to stifle political dissent. 

I Cite is 10

10 years ago today ...

Learning, liveliness, and expanding the world

The anti-fracking movement in New York is remarkably organized and solidary. I've learned a lot as I've gotten involved in the effort to stop the storage of methane gas and liquid petroleum gas in salt caverns on Seneca Lake. Sometimes I feel like, as a political theorist, I don't have much to contribute. Since humility is not a known occupational hazard affecting political theorists, this doesn't bother me too much (just a little). Instead, it cultivates in me an appreciation for the knowledge, skills, and dedication of those around me. It is teaching me why planning and organization are so crucial in climate struggle (and of course why climate struggle is ultimately anti-capitalist): corporations rely on the fragmented and distributed regulatory environment to do their nefarious deeds. Engaged struggle brings to life the actuality of political multidimensionality as and through the generation of political power. 

For example, that railroads and pipelines are private and that regulatory supervision has been dramatically cut over the last decades even as there has been a boom in oil and gas production in the US means that it is difficult to get accurate information about routes, track conditions, leakage, etc. That companies break themselves into different companies with different legal structures and then enter into various kinds of ventures and partnerships makes its hard to establish liability and responsibility. 

Here's a list of some of the knowledge and skills important in the battle for Seneca Lake:

1.  Knowledge of shale formations. 

2.  Knowledge of salt caverns. This includes comparative data on salt cavern stability and use for gas storage over time.

3.  Knowledge of the eco-system of Seneca Lake. This includes the relation of the lake to the surrounding lakes, farms, and industry. It includes as well the array of lake uses (water supply, recreational, energy, waste site).

4.  Knowledge about salt mining.

5.  Information and data on the history of the lake: geologic and human. Necessary information includes data on salinity over time.

6.  Knowledge of gas and oil production, processing, transport and storage. This includes knowledge of relevant leaks, collapses, and explosions and their effects on workers as well as on their environment and communities. It also includes knowledge of carbon and methane emissions and their impacts. And it includes knowledge of the health effects associated with gas and oil production, processing, transport, and storage.

7.  Knowledge of truck traffic, railroad traffic, and pipelines. This includes safety concerns as well as comparative volume over time.

8.  Legal knowledge at multiple levels: laws for trespass, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest; firecode at the county courthouse (so we know how many people are allowed in); court procedures (what to ask for, what to expect in terms of penalities and adjournments, who is allowed in); processes for appeal; conventions and practices at jails in four different counties (inmates have to get a TB test and remain separate from the general population for about four days until they are cleared); the larger structure of the NY state court and appeals system; laws for the regulating of commercial businesses (a ban is different from a regulation); laws for emergency management and preparedness; environmental protection regulations; the policy apparatus as it is divided between federal and state agencies (for us, FERC and the DEC); corporate and tax law (what kinds of corporate structures are associated with what kinds of liability); how to understand corporate tax filings; regulations on the shipping of hazardous materials (how are these enforced?).

9.  Local knowledge of the political apparatus in Schuyler county: who was on the Schuyler county board of legislators when they agreed to let Crestwood expand its storage facility into damaged and abandoned salt caverns? What is the relation of the Schuyler county judges to Crestwood? Who was behind giving Crestwood a tax break and why? What is the relation of Congressmen Tom Reed to Crestwood? What is the relation of the DA and ADA to Crestwood and the judges? 

10.  Local knowledge of the activist environment: who has worked together productively on what actions and campaigns? what did they learn? which places are good for holding events? which places are good as look out points? where do we find more allies? who knows whom in different counties and groups? which sorts of actions have gotten community support in the past? what sort of actions might help us all move a little further? Which journalists are allies? which newpapers and blogs cover and are likely to cover the issue? 

11.  Local knowledge of the economic environment: what sorts of state and regional development strategies have been promoted? where has there been state investment? what regional economic ventures have been recognized as vital and sustainable? which ones are in trouble? what is the economic character of the region? whom does it benefit and whom does it exploit? How many people does US Salt employ? Which local vendors work with Crestwood? What is the price of propane gas in the region? Where is the gas stored on Seneca Lake ultimately sold? Who are the buyers? 

12.  Skills at keeping, designing, and maintaining databases -- particularly important for organizing petition drives and keeping a list of voters in multiple counties.

13.  Skills at website design (not to mention time to keep websites and social media up to date).

14.  Knowledge of national and international efforts (both for building connections that can amplify and strengthen one another and for learning from what has worked in other places). Examples here range from specific -- Crestwood's multi million gallon spill of salt brine on Native American lands in North Dakota -- to more general, like the 1800 mile march of climate activists across the country and this fall's enormous climate justice demonstration in NYC.

15.  Skills at action planning and strategy (from non-violence training, to songs, slogans, and chants, to logistics -- WASL brings its own portable toilet so that we won't get charged with vandalism).

This is a preliminary list. Being surrounded by people who have developed and continued to develop this knowledge is helping me learn how understanding the relations between multiple components of complex processes enlarges the world. Because the possibilities that emerge are tied to an ongoing action, they have an actuality that lets them build from another. This building exceeds the action to build the group and ways of life. Engaged knowledge becomes active power through organized political will. 

Feminism and its limits

I've been wondering how and in what ways I might return more explicitly to feminist theory. It doesn't seem likely that I will be able to write explicitly any time soon. Return, though, is not quite the right word: it's not that I have not been writing as a feminist. It is that it has seemed to me that the only way to be a feminist is to be a communist. 

By the mid-nineties, there didn't seem to be anything else to say in feminist theory. For the last couple of decades, I've asked my friends: what's the best book you've recently read in feminist theory. My own last favorites are Lynne Segal's Why Feminism? -- especially as it pulls together different lines of critique --and Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch for its alternative to "intersectional" analysis (which strikes me as the name of  a theoretical failure more than an insight insofar as it takes as its presumption distinct lines or identities that have to be made to intersect rather than economic systems and ideological formations). 

And yet while my back has been turned, real life, popular life, everyday life, has gotten increasingly worse for women and girls in the US with the Republican war on women, intensification of economic inequality, and pornofication of popular culture. Real practical political questions are intensifying, yet they don't seem theoretically all that interesting: is this a failure of theory or a kind of reversion, regression? 

Capitalism turns everything against itself. Feminist goals become turned round upon themselves so as to hurt women -- choice becomes market choice in every domain of life such. Increasing competition, increasing individualism, increasing brutality, increasing desperation.

I am skeptical with the US government, armed agent of capitalism, tells us that it is trying to help girls and women. I don't believe there is good evidence for this. When the US government--whether executive, judicial, or legislative--starts expressing concern about rape, something else is at stake. But what?

Colleges and universities are battlegrounds. They are sites where the remnants of the middle class hold on to their position for dear life. Is this holding on becoming manifest in the legal apparatus being built in the name of educational equality for women? And even if this is the case, is skepticism and resistance the only response or might the apparatuses, policies, and procedures being put into place themselves be used or occupied for actually egalitarian ends? 

Invested in inequality

It's become striking to me over the last few weeks how people seemingly committed to social change in fact hold on to privilege and inequality -- even if it is not their own.

This is not a new insight. Activists struggle over this question all the time. I've just come across it first hand in ways that I didn't expect. It seems like some people just like to protest. When the opportunity arises to do something with the capacity that protesting enabled, they fold, providing all sorts of excuses as to why the basic order should be maintained.

I didn't expect people committed to gender equality to defend the continuation of structures premised on inequality. Somehow I didn't expect that they, too, would enjoy hierarchical power. Maybe I can be clearer on this: I am not talking about people at the top of the food chain holding on to power. I am talking about people with relatively little power wanting to maintain the status quo that they in fact critique. It's as if they enjoy what power does to others; they enjoy seeing some people hurt or injured or shamed.

What I'm trying to describe (albeit necessarily vaguely) is not Nietzschean ressentiment. It's more like enjoying through the other.  So, for example, people say they are against the exclusionary practices of group X, but when it comes down to changing the structures that let these practices persist, they balk. There are things that they admire about group X. They enjoy what the wealth and status of group X can accomplish, even when, especially when, it becomes violent and transgressive. Maybe a way to say this:  class privilege sometimes persists because those who say they are against it are actually invested in it and enjoy inequality.

And the vehemence of the rhetoric and the anger that arises amidst the confusion is in part anxiety over the confrontation with enjoyment. They don't want to be people that, say, secretly tolerate an undercurrent of sexual violence--Zizek's obscene supplement or nightly law. This has to be repressed. Anger at authority is not anger over authority's failure to prevent violence. It's over authority's failure to prevent violence's exposure. 

I think I have new appreciation for the power of the nightly law and how hard it is to address, how it can derail reformist as well as revolutionary energies. This may also go some way in accounting for the prevalence of 'awareness' as a left and liberal goal. By making us more aware of a variety of things, the left liberal leaves the obscene supplement in place. We get preoccupied with information and media campaigns instead of changing institutions and policies. It's one thing to be aware of inequality. Eliminating it is another thing altogether.

Excited to be in the Discourse of the Otter!

#AB14 Day One: "Does anyone know the Internationale in Arabic?"

The title of this post comes from a question asked by a Greek comrade on our bus back to the hotel tonight after dinner. Dinner was excellent, lots of appetizers (mezze) and then mixed grill. The bus smelled of gasoline, had velvet curtains blocking the windows, and red lights with mini glass beads around them. Someone joked that the curtains were for security. Apparently the hotel is the site of a bombing that killed the director of the movie, "Halloween." It was also one of the first high rise hotels in Amman, renown for its prostitutes. 

No one knew the words to the Internationale in Arabic, although an Italian said that he heard it a lot in Cairo in the first Eygyptian revolution. To be sure, he said, some of the singers were Stalinists. Someone said a lot of older Algerians knew it--after all, Che Guevara came to Algeria--but  not so many anymore. The younger folks aren't so interested; they've lost contact with this part of their radical history, are interested in something new.

It could be that this is the wrong crowd for that song. The key sponsers are Global Voices Advocacy, Heinrich Boll Stiftung, Hivos, EFF, Tactical Technology Collective, Soros (Open Society Foundations), and a few others. My sense the first day (which may well change) is that this is a human rights, civil society, NGO, democracy, advocacy and awareness sort of crowd. The topics for the breakout groups: security, story-telling, internet governance and policy, and information visualization. I think most people went to story-telling today. There was some very smart and important work being done to help people know what sort of details and verification was necessary for reports to be able to have evidentiary value in different legal environments.

The morning began in a style that I can't quite place: is it NGO-activist or US Silicon Valley corporate? I've seen the same in university settings, and it seems to me that activist students like it. It's the stand up, move your body, introduce yourself in 3 sentences, answer a funny question, do crazy motions sort of thing. I don't particularly like it. I was interested, though,in the exercise that had people step to the center room if they answered yes to a particular question, for example, had kids, were bloggers, were new to the meeting. It worked well in that it made people pretty cheerful and relaxed.

The day was structured very loosely. After sleeping some this afternoon (I expect I will regret this tonight), I showed up about fifteen minutes before my session. We were told it was running late, people weren't sure if anyone would show up, they would have to cut it short, maybe we should do it tomorrow, structurelessness's small cuts and redirections. After all that, we started less than half an hour late and had terrific attendance. The organizers kept us on point and on time. People seemed interested and engaged. We had heard that some had been very, very skeptical about having academics here--reluctant to be research subjects, not interested in being lectured to. From my standpoint, the vibe seemed good, an actual conversation.

I talked about communicative capitalism and the way it can open us up to thinking about social media and US imperialism. A brief quote from the notorious Jared Cohen helps establish the point quickly. Arguing that the internet and mobile phones can help reach the "disaffected youth of the Arab world" (and keep them from becoming terrorists which seems to be what he takes to be their default mode), Cohen writes:

Because the digital and technological world offers young people opportunities to generate their own media and entertainment, they are learning critical thinking through self-exploration, and they are practicing digital democracy on a daily basis, even if they claim to despise the very concept of democracy. Without their keyboards, remotes, and telephones, they assume a real-life political, religious, ethnic, or nationalist identity. Behind the technology, many of these “digital natives” are beginning to identify with a transnational youth identity. 

Global consumer or terrorist. Those are their options. With that as a way to approach communicative capitalism, I went through a few of the features of the idea. My initial sense was that people thought the concept was relevant to the MENA, although in need of some alteration to make it fit with the neoliberal autocracy of a place like Syria.  One of the Palestinian bloggers spoke powerfully of the affects of individualism on Palestinian bloggers, providing as well examples of some of the ways they try to work around that feature of the format. An Egyptian blogger expressed a sense of capacity to steer the mainstream media conversation.

At dinner I learned that there was not much of a discussion of climate or environmental issues in the Middle East. One question, issue, problem overdetermines all the rest. 

Jordan

 I'm heading to Jordan tomorrow for the Fourth Arab Bloggers Conference. I'm pretty thrilled (albeit distressed already by the gesture to entrepreneurialism -- makes me think that communicative capitalism is global). I'm hoping to blog about the experience. It's been a while since I've done much first person blogging. And, this feels particularly risky since I have never been to the Middle East, don't speak Arabic, and don't know very much about the region. My posts, then, will be those of a naive observer. 

Fingers crossed for tomorrow's flights.