What kinds of things do bad feelingsâsuch as disgust, horror, and anxietyâdrive in our society? How do bad things hold power structures together? What, asks Sianne Ngai, is our fascination withâour pull towardsâa feeling like disgust, such that we are simultaneously repulsed and allured by it? How, asks the sociologist Pierre Bordieu, does horror at the behavior, attitudes or attributes of others help us to shore up our own sense of distinctive taste and value? What, Natalie Wyn asks us, is the role of âcringeâ in cultivating self-awareness, and how is that used to police behavior? And, at the more ontological level, Julia Kristeva asks, how does abject horror at encountering things that blur the boundary between subject and object (such as a corpse or a nearly-realistic humanoid robot), or violate the boundary between oneself and the world (open wounds, bodily excretions, parasites, etc.), help us to understand the psycheâs permanent campaign to conceptualize the self as a coherent and self-contained entity?
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Angela Davis (General)Â
Uses + identifies the long history of black female resistance + contextualizes them to fit modern ideals/movementsÂ
Theoretical sense of a collaborative imagination of a world without racial/sexual/economic inequality
Reduced to a hairstyleÂ
A reduction/trivialization of what sheâs actually doingÂ
Capitalist urge to reduce everything into a commodified imageÂ
Davisâ work shows multiple forms of resistanceÂ
Angela Davis, Lectures on Liberation (1971).Â
âEven the man in chains remains free -- and for this reason: he is always at liberty to eliminate his condition of slavery even if this means his death. That is, his freedom is narrowly defined as the freedom to choose between his state of captivity and his death.â -- statement by Sartre that Davis cites
Authentic consciousness of an oppressed people entails an understanding of the necessity to abolish oppression. Â
the enslaved knowledge of freedom is more profound than that of the master, for the master feels himself free because heâs able to control the life of others. He is free at the expense of the freedom of another.Â
the enslaved are conscious of the fact that freedom is not a fact, it is not a given but rather something to be fought for. It can exist only through a process of struggle.
The path towards freedom can only be envisioned by the slave when he actively rejects his chains.
Davis on violenceÂ
The first step is rejecting terms / pushing back against itÂ
ALLEGORY OF FREDERICK DOUGLASÂ
Mutually determinant (physical voyage from slavery to free)
True recognition of his conditionÂ
Consciousness of alienation entails the absolute refusal to accept that alienation - enlightenment does not bring happiness but it does bring real freedom.
Christianity = censored version developed for slave
Old testament helpful for resultsÂ
Resistance was the lesson learned from the bibleÂ
âWe have to debunk the myth that black peopel were docile and acceptingâÂ
Literature should not be pieces in a museum of antiquity, especially when they reveal to us problems which continue to exist todayÂ
For slave, religion is pure ideology which is totally contradictory to his real day-to-day behaviorÂ
Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering --Fred Doug
The Master is always on the verge of becoming a slave and the slave possesses real, concrete power to make him always on the verge of becoming the master
Act of open resistance challenges very identiy of Covey (slavebreaker) / he is no longer the recognized master, the slave no longer recognizes himself as slave
Angela Davis, âReflections on Black Womenâs Role in the Community of Slaves,â (1971).
Slave system did not and could not engender and recognize a matriarchal family structureÂ
Rigidified disorganization in family lifeÂ
Designation of black woman as matriarch is cruel
Implies stable kinship where mother exercises decisive authorityÂ
Ignores profound traumas the black woman must have experiencedÂ
Unique relationship black women had to resistance during slaveryÂ
Only in domestic life could slaves attempt to assert the modicum of freedom they still retainedÂ
Domestic labor only meaningful labor for slave community as a whole
Black women in chains could help lay foundation for some degree of autonomy, both for herself and her men
In fields alongside the men, no protectionÂ
Sheer force of things rendered her equal to her man
Black women resist in different waysÂ
Poisoning food, set fire to masters houses
Sexual aspectsÂ
Purity of white womanhood could not be violated by aggressive sexual activity desired by white maleÂ
Black slave woman who would have to become his unwilling concubineÂ
âAs heirs to a tradition of supreme perseverance and heroic resistance, we must hasten to take our place wherever our people are forging on towards freedomâ p 14Â
Rejecting individualismÂ
Unless the black artist establishes a black aesthetic, the black artist cannot thrive
Create a new history/narrative
Black Arts Movementâs problem w/ James Brown was his appeal to white America
Davisâ goal
Remove âdouble-consciousness,â not to be defined in opposition to whiteness but to be something new and original
Black models of revolutionary behavior are entirely masculine, so Davis had to bootstrap a black female revolutionary aesthetic that had not existed
Sought to create herself as an individual, but a person connected to the black community that she sought to advocate for
Individual and collective
To merge the personal with the political to the point where they cannot be separate
To say âIâ while still meaning âweâ
Three Stages of Hegelian DialecticÂ
Undistinguished UnityÂ
When community and society is just an undifferentiated mass (like in a relationship, when you first get together and you spend all your time together)
Distinguished DisunityÂ
When society grows tension with individual and collective (the toughest period, the period of tension when youâre trying to work out your situation)
Distinguished UnityÂ
Highest stage -- where you can be both an individual and a member of the collectiveÂ
Rejection of American Revolutionary Tradition
Davis rejects any attempt to use Declaration or any founding document as a resource for revolution
Rejection of a sort of individualism that Lockian liberalism presumes
All individuals motivated by self interest (Davis canât buy into)
Believed that American Revolutionary system was hopelessly corrupted by its history of exploitation
Image of Thomas J. and founding fathers
What does Davis sees as engines of revolutionary responsibility?
Radical Critical Theoretical Engagement
Radical - getting to the root
In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist
Never harbor or express the desire to be white, nor should she rely on whites for her liberation
Goal is not cultivation of acceptance or tolerance but the destruction of racism itself - racism is the root and must be destroyed.
ResistanceÂ
Looking at this through criticizing Michael Walzer, to see what critical thought misses while excluding black female revolutionary voices
An aesthetic understanding
Her resistance is a positive resistance, pushing forward - one whose political possibilities are greater than identified by Walzer
Walzer
Revolution as a form of accommodationism, bolsters existing social and political structures - wrote in 1960
Suggests idea of revolution emerged from resistance, involved civil disciplined disobedience
Resistance was a form of collectiveÂ
Calls resistance a defensive politics, but we need a politics of âoffenseâ (winning elections, seizing power)
Resistance could play an important role in political engagement, but its only half politics / incapable of inciting change
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Abolition is both a vision and a strategy. It requires, as Avery Gordon writes in The Hawthorn
Archive, both âacute patienceâ and âurgency.â Abolitionist budget strategies pull at the columns
and rows of allocations to ask bigger questions about what gets prioritized and why. Proposing
peopleâs budgets is one tool for turning bolder demands into common sense. Current calls to
defund the police have deep roots in decades of organizingâthrough coalition-building, humor,
outrage, desire, practice, and simple proof that policing, imprisonment, surveillance, and borders
do not make people safer, but that the many supports we build and sustain for well-being do.
â Shana Agid, Woods Ervin, and Molly Porzig
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Title: I hope the fact that I voted makes this an easier read đŹÂ
By: Miliaku Nwabueze
 Part One: Examine the Self
I was appalled at the cognitive dissonance in movement thinkers this summer. I witnessed âradicalâ organizers, activists, and thought leaders encourage members of the rebellion to channel their rage and frustration with state sanctioned violence into voting. Simply and unilaterally, âVote!â, was the universally agreed upon call to action. Folks rarely identified whom to vote for or on what which ironically symbolizes the meaningless nature of their compulsing. The investment into state infrastructure puzzled me.Â
Organizations and individuals that do land acknowledgements before meetings know whose territory theyâre on, but insist on realizing freedom through participating in state systems of governance that further solidify the stateâs occupation. Iâm not feeling that folks can legitimately have a decolonial or anti-coloniality orientation while they are actively advocating for voting and other methods of change-making that involve the state over autonomous, localized, and collective organization of meeting human needs: the commons.Â
The work of feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, Nancy Hartsock and others teach us that we know our world from what identity-as-spaces we occupy. Marginalized people have insight to build consciousness about their worlds and their oppressorâs because their positionality within them is defined in relationship to the violences of structural hegemony (i.e. woman to man, colonized to colonizer/settler, undocumented to citizen, black to white, etc.). Mahmoud Keshavarz builds on this theory by asserting âOneâs class gender and/or ethnicity shape [their] being, interactions and inhabitations in the world...âÂ
Aspiring revolutionaries âoften present themselves as being critical, political and radical yet, in practice, and by what they produce, remain innocent, neutral or, merely well-intentioned.â People trying to design existences different from our status quo consistently give way to reform. I feel this is because we have not collectively nor individually interrogated our cognitive dissonance. We have not killed the cops, the state, the capitalist, the oppressor, the aspiring winner in our own heads. We have treated the means of allowing for the emergence of generative deviations from our trajectory of global, ecological collapse as somehow separate from the ends. Kehavarz continues: â...designers cannot simply engage in such complicated issues without a complex political understanding of their own position in terms of gender, class and ethnicity as well as how the contemporary orders of capital and the bodies serving those orders are organised by dispersed material articulations such as passports, camps, and borders, all configured by design.â Our failures to develop self awarness are the precursors to reform.
Part Two: âWe Want to Do More Than Surviveâ: Self Examination
As Imani Scott-Blackwell penned so eloquently in a Facebook status about the 2020 Presidential election:
âWhile yâall mourn the results, Iâll continue grieving the fact that rather than using our resources, time, and talents to fortify local mutual aid networks that can sustain and protect us regardless of who the elected official are, we instead put that into elections, pamphlets, yard signs, social media tech company coffers, Halloween candy and snacks for the sake of âvoter outreachâ.
âŚâŚ
Iâm really just confused like what are we actually doing.....what is it we actually want? Because impact > intent and we seem collectively committed to the wrong solutions and though I do see people that are critical of electoral politics few seem ready to talk about what we really need to do here.....divest from electoral politics all together.â
The amount of people encouraging other people to vote this year was historic. In my personal experiences, strangers with my private information texted and called me, knocked on my door, and hand wrote me letters urging me to engage in the spectacle of emergency voting. In meetings with grassroots and change-oriented organizations, people are doing land acknowledgments, and discussing indigenous sovereignty. These same meetings that begin with land acknowledgement often ended in encouraging attendees to vote.Â
But, arenât the state and its power inherently colonial? So how does a strategy that envisions freedom and/or sovereignty for black, incarcerated, indigenous, and/or undocumented people include actions that codify state hegemony?
The first type of cognitive dissonance that âhit me in the headâ was W.E.B DuBoisâ Double consciousness in high school; in an English class with the only black teacher. It applied so directly to my experiences as a working class black girl packaged and scholar-shipped into a wealthy, predominantly white private school with a college acceptance rate of 100%. I took so much pride in this despite constantly having to be âtwice as good to get half as muchâ. I spent so much time explaining I tested into Detroit Country Day, that I wasnât there because I was good at sports. I spent so much time laughing on the outside while crying on the inside at insensitive jokes and comments. I spent so much time embarrassed by being dropped off in my fatherâs rumbling work van. Upon understanding W.E.B DuBoisâ theory I realized all that time was wasted. I made an instantaneous shift in my consciousness. Learning about my positionality disrupted how I speculated my future.
In becoming aware of my own cognitive dissonance I was able to immediately re-imagine myself off of the trajectory of becoming a black femme agent of white supremacy. I leaned into my queerness, I continued to wear my hair as it grew out of my head, I defended myself and others against racism, and became increasingly disinterested with seeking the approval of my white classmates. One might have seen a Condeleeza Rice as my future, but I became an unemployed, overworked, weed-smoking, mushroom tripping (okay, only like twice), hippie dippie black abolitionist, gay ass radical. I changed my belief system and praxis to incorporate what I was learning about myself in relationship to the structures that dominate our lives, and the trajectory of my life was disrupted.
Part Three: The TheoryÂ
Again, can we who believe in freedom from US hegemony have a decolonial orientation while encouraging engagement in state infrastructures? Is channeling mass frustration with state violence into voting a decolonial framework? I ask, declaratively. Decolonization is a speculative disruption and a deviation from the trajectory laid out before us, requiring the abolition of the state. I believe this is an issue with speculative design - itâs failure to disrupt our thinking and how we might imagine life after now.
Professor Jamer Hunt at The New School once summarized a point by Arjun Appadurai from his piece âDisjuncture and Difference in the Global Economyâ: âWe lean on sameness, really, to understand if weâre doing things right.â We do this in the most mundane of ways. If you got the same answer as me then I must have gotten it right! Right?... In her iconic work, âThe Masterâs Tools will Never Dismantle The Masterâs House,â Audre Lorde teaches us difference is a practice of discovery. However, we respond to differences -not the status quo as difference within marginal contexts- as if it's a disruption. As a deviation in need of discipline. We then, sometimes, rely on our conceptions of hierarchy to determine ârightnessâ: young over old, literally any racial-ethnic identity over black, teacher over student, man over woman, etc.
Sameness can build a nation. Appadurai asserts a nation is a set of communities based on shared cultural values. In the US that culture is whiteness. That is the ânationâ in the ânation-stateâ on Turtle Island. The dash is the âarticulatoryâ piece. âNationâ and âstateâ were intentionally intertwined and can be separated and destroyed.Â
The job of the âstateâ in ânation-stateâ is to spread itself. Colonization (direct and indirect) is what makes/made this possible; coloniality is what makes it enduring. After all, a state is simply a condition or what âisâ, and white supremacy is what articulates and unifies this being. Therefore, one can only conclude that on turtle island, the âUnitedâ âStatesâ is the product of spreading white supremacy in all shapes and fashions, enduringly. This has shaped identity, positionalities, and mobilities and thus speculative design(ers). Statist thinking is thwarting possibility and distorting it into limited likelihoods. This is a trap door to reform. This is where decolonization, returning land to the not only indigenous people, but indengous life--the commons--is transformed into a metaphor to live in infinite land acknowledgements and celebratory, meaningless court decisions. The endurance of the stateâs illusory nature forces us to endure, feeling as though nothing will change nor end. Right? Nope, thatâs not the answer I got.
In Design Politics: An Inquiry Into Passports, Camps and Borders the most fire book on design right now, Mahmoud Keshavarz asserts the non enduring nature of statehood: âThe State is designedâ. He says, âRefugee, settlers, displacement,â and I would add colonization and racism etc. is realized via statehood. Statehood will not be the liberating variable in these narratives as these positions are diametrically opposed to the ever demonstrating settler, colonial, capitalist, and violent interests of the nation-state.
Advocating for divestment from state infrastructures is unfamiliar, different, and possibly unsettling. Unsettling is our future state if thereâs anything real behind your land acknowledgements. To summarize Yang and Tuck in Decolonization is Not a Metaphor: âWhat is unsettling about decolonizationâ is the literal unsettling. To âUnsettleâ is to disrupt. As designers think about futures we must be aware of our standpoint, reorient, and think about what decolonization, anti-racism, undocumentedness, anti-capitalism, etc. wants - designing from this standpoint is where speculative disruption is born.
Part Four: Speculative Disruption
Speculative Disruption begins where reform ends. Speculation, unimaginatively, has become a practice of prediction. A space weâve let our data-driven culture of determining likelihoods colonize (Lol, jk.) imagination in service of accuracy. We let our obsession with predicting outcomes, performing certainty, and being ârightâ be conflated with and distort possibility.Â
Thereâs a saying circulating around radical communities: âabandon the capitalist, king, and the economy to govern an empty houseâ. Designers can materialize the future right now. â...Zoom out and start with new realities (ways of organizing everyday life through alternative beliefs, values, priorities, and ideology) then develop scenarios and possibly personas to bring it to life (173)â
This is deeper than designing what we âwantâ. Folks love to metaphorize colonization in the following phrases: âdecolonizing our desiresâ or âdecolonize our mindsâ though I think they mean our thoughts have been co-opted by the enduring nature of the nation-state and reinforcing of sameness and correctness. What we want is influenced by what we want to destroy as evidenced by the cognitive dissonance rampant through change making institutions. âVOTE!â But âPolice are badâ, âSo we have to vote for the people who vow to hire them!â [Iâm not making this up]. Or immigrants or black people who defend their piece of the settler pie while feeling âitâs a shame what happened to the ânativesââ.
My friend Sasha once said we need to organize to make things possible and impossible. This is the speculative and disruptive process of designing the unfamiliar -- the being that does not replace what we have and is not an evolution of the existing. The word unfamiliar comes from the Latin and Old English words for servant and family, respectively. Humans need to prepare for freer worlds that donât currently serve our present ways of thinking and that are non-proximal to us. The designs for free worlds will come from the wants of the subaltern who have consciously refused to endure. We need to design the abolitionist mechanisms that will make a commons possible while making the empire impossible.Â
Speculative disruption speculates the unsettling, the deviation from where we are headed and the orientation towards the directions in which we hope to journey. I ask declaratively: How can we learn to be okay with what is not familiar to us and how can we allow that which does not serve the current and dominant trajectory to inform what we create? How can we engage in a radically feminist practice of embracing uncertainty by acting without fear of consequences we are also uncertain of?Â
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The Comprehensive Radical Guide to Shoplifting
[working title]
âThat white man, baby, and may his balls shrivel and his ass hole rot, he want you to be worried about money. Thatâs his whole game. But if we got to where we are without money, we can get further. I ainât worried about they money --they aint got no right to it anyhow, they stole it from us-- they aint never met nobody they didnât lie to and steal from. Well, I can steal, too. And rob. How you think I raised my daughters? Shit.â
-James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
âCapital is dead labor, which, vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucksâ
-Karl Marx
I love shoplifting. In fact, I would not be able to maintain many aspects of my life/style without stealing from places like Kroger, Target, Loweâs. Shoplifting makes me feel powerful, agentic, and it helps me heal from the omnipresence of ownership. To be an entity under capitalism, is to be owned, we are each owned. When I steal a beautiful plant from Home Depot, I whisper to myself and my ancestors slyly as I walk past the check out, this is the earth, my mother and my lover, and I would be a fool to buy the earth from anyone, she does not belong to anyone, I do not belong to anyone.Â
Capitalism is a religion of theft. Attempts at cataloging the breadth of what has been stolen from us populate a social-scientific discipline in their own right. The capitalist class, their progenitors, and likely their descendants have robbed us of things for which there is no process on earth that will allow for complete remuneration, there remains only a gnawing hole where our human potential should lay. As our planet screams out at us in warning of what shall come to pass if we do not win, I am chilled realizing that capitalism has outdone itself again and is attempting to steal the very future of the human race from us.Â
My role on earth is to struggle towards liberation, and I will do that until I die. Our ancestors are magicians, creating and evolving so many strategies of resistance such that today, young radicals treat our work in Movement as if it were a classical art style, forever to be stylized and improved upon. Our struggle is shapeless, taking on the form of whatever is most needed and convenient to the people fighting back. There is a place for everyone in this ever evolving movement and a strategy for each of us to practice with; there are strategies that are yet to be dreamt of, even. In my eternal pettiness and spite, gifted to me by my ancestors, my tool of choice is theft.Â
Shoplifting captures all of the elements of my personal politic, especially, and with emphasis on, pleasure, developing a sense of luxury that is anti consumption and anti capitalist, and my theory of brilliance: Not only is there a better life out there for us, a better life than what has been dealt to us, but that we are deserving and worthy and willing to simply walk up to the beauty section of Target, or march to the rotunda freedom flags burning, and take it.Â
At first, when I started shoplifting, it was to feed myself. Hunger, which drives so many of us to struggle and resistance, is an important part of many liftersâ stories. My first summer in Atlanta at 19 years old, I saw an opportunity in the fact that our local Kroger served Black people so naturally they were understaffed, poorly organized, and open 24 hours. At 3 am you could walk out of that grocery store with entire carts of food, toiletries, and other supplies at will. Of course, I hadnât the courage or skill to do such a thing back then, so I started small. Iâd slip small fruits in my pockets while switching aisles, and scan things the wrong way. My political development and study grew at the same rate as my gumption in that grocery store; even as I was bringing in more income, something about stealing from companies that arenât paying their workers internationally or in my neighborhood felt like a giant fuck you to the CEOs. Regardless of the thrill of my personal disrespect, my growing skill was rooted in nothing. No politic, principle, or larger meaning. I simply shoplifted to feed myself and my roommates or to get trinkets that I otherwise wouldnât have been able to afford.Â
I cannot pinpoint what pushed my thinking around shoplifting towards understanding it as a possible liberatory tool. With some certainty, I can admit that some of it was inspired by watching the cycle of police terrorism, rioting and looting that happens in America just about every summer. When the Baltimore uprising happened (I had just turned 18 a few months prior), it was the first time Iâd ever been to a Black led protest or seen in person the level the state would go to to repress Black liberation efforts. It was also the first time Iâd ever witness someone looting. While the dogs, the helicopters, the blockades terrified me, there was something so right about watching a young man grab a rock and shatter the entire glass front window of a CVS. That rightness spread from my stomach through my nervous system as exhilaration when I watched a group of people peel off from the protest route to flood that CVS -- despite the people at the mics beckoning for them to stop. America steals family members, community leaders, neighbors from us. Why should we not destroy and steal from the embodiments of that theft most accessible to us?Â
My commitment to movement work is rooted in collective empowerment, which happens through mutual aid. Shoplifting sits at the axis of strategy, privilege, marxist thought, finesse, and usefulness. It is both a method of survival for many of us, and a tool we can use to radicalize our peers. It is dangerous. It is a statement to the gluttonous pigs who seek to keep us low, that we will steal as much laughter, as much joy, as many moments back from you as we do mascara, cheezits, and nice candles. Shoplifting recognizes that none of the beauty or conveniences on Earth belong to just one person or corporation, they belong to the workers, they belong to the afro indigenous descendants, they belong to the artisans, they belong to each of us. Weâll steal to feed each other, then weâll steal to arm each other, and one day, we will reclaim this planet and our future, right as we are stealing heads.
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