Living On

Alex Hirsch

University of Alaska, Fairbanks

One popular view in contemporary democratic thinking holds that everything is densely interwoven in a field of public flesh. Everything is crossed and crossing over in a richly enfolded chiasm pulsing with togetherness. The world is seen as an active nexus where singularities merge and respond in mutual transfer. “We participate each other,” writes Norman O. Brown.

There is something highly seductive about this vision. But of course this is only half the story. The constant presence of friction, struggle and conflict – of politics – built into human affairs, belies all this conviviality. The idea that we are always already thrown open to one another misses the point that despite this situation we remain crucially at odds with one another.

This is the point of departure for what some are starting to call the tragic sensibility. To start, the tragic sensibility downplays rationality and especially rationality’s pretension to sovereign mastery over destiny and fate. It also casts doubt on the faith in the sufficiency and autonomy of the self. More specifically, the tragic sensibility names the rivalry between, on the one hand, what our will intends and, on the other, the worldly forces that conspire to thwart those intentions. In this way, it affirms the notion that we are vulnerable to powers not entirely within our control. But there is more. The tragic sensibility offers a searching reflection on the moral conflict generated out of contestations over the meaning of public pain.  

A haunting example of this can be found in Incendies (2010). A kind of Sophoclean tragedy, the film traces the journeys of twin siblings, Jean and Simon Marwan, through an unnamed Middle Eastern country (which we can safely assume is Lebanon) that is mired in a history of religious strife and catastrophic violence. Each sibling is tasked with tracking down an estranged family member (Jean, the twins’ father; Simon, their brother) when Nawal, their mother, posthumously leaves behind two sealed letters to be delivered to each by the twins.

As the twins work respectively to locate their father and brother they begin to unravel the mystery of their mother’s life. Weaving together past and present into an uncanny mosaic, the film gives the supple impression of a world where the consequences of what has happened endlessly open out. 

In a series of flashbacks to the 1970s and ‘80s we learn that as a young woman Nawal was a Christian who fell in love with and was impregnated by a Muslim (Palestinian?) refugee. She eventually gave birth to a son; but, having disgraced her family (once by bearing a child out of wedlock, again by loving a Muslim), the boy is abandoned to a local orphanage while Nawal herself is banished to Daresh, a fictional city on the brink of civil war. 

In Daresh, Nawal enrolls at the local university where she becomes a student activist and editor of a pacifist newspaper. Disgusted with the wanton violence committed by those who espouse the faith to justify hatred, Nawal disavows her Christian past in the name of promoting a peaceful future. 

In one of the film’s most wrenching scenes, we see Nawal riding a bus through a dangerous region of the countryside, frantically searching for her misplaced son amongst orphanages recently razed by Christian guerilla fighters. Along the way the bus is viciously attacked by the Phalangist, who spray a torrent of machine gun fire into its interior before setting the bus ablaze. Nawal, having survived the initial assault along with a handful of others, escapes by baring her cross out the bus doorway. Ironically, the Christian identity Nawal had repudiated saves her life but only at the price of making her the hapless witness and unwitting accomplice to a massacre. 

The tragedy of the scene can be viewed in light of what Bernard Williams writes of tragic situations: there was nothing Nawal could do and yet something had to be done. For Williams, what makes scenes such as this tragic is that Nawal is caught between an impossible choice (reclaim her Christian identity and live, or maintain her righteous contempt and die) and a no less compelling imperative to act (sacrifice her pacifist ideal and act vengefully against the Phalangist in order to prevent such massacres in the future). There is no right thing to do. Whatever Nawal does she is at once right and wrong. There is only the tragic happening and Nawal’s response to what that happening has rendered in her. 

Read in this light, one might say that the tragic sensibility is less interested in coming up with prescriptive standards of action (what should Nawal do?) than in asking questions about how to live on despite the lack of available options (how can Nawal survive such a scene with her moral integrity intact?). As Bonnie Honig puts it, the goal is “to salvage from the wreckage of the situation enough narrative unity for the self to go on.” 

 

There is plenty that can be said about what this modicum of narrative unity might be composed of (a self that is, as Kathleen Stewart puts it, a “fabulation that enfolds the intensities it finds itself in”). But what the tragic sensibility helps to supplement is a sense of what Hayden White means when, in a tragic key, he writes “History is not something that one understands, it is something one endures – if one is lucky.”

This is not to say that with tragedy there is no hope. The tragic sensibility is not tantamount to resignation. Rather, it is about finding ways to live with the intractable quality of conflict endemic to human experience. Not in order to be free of the troubling questions such conflicts evoke. Instead, the tragic sensibility is about grappling with the predicament of yearning for redemption and yet always failing to become redeemed. This is what Paul Gilroy means when he defines tragedy as “suffering made useful but not redemptive.” The tragic sensibility is all about finding ways of being lucky (in White’s sense); not merely to survive, but to live on (an important difference) even when mourning and redemption read like so much messianism. More, it is about marshaling creative forms of aesthetic responsiveness, political judgment, and critical imagination germane to the shared precarity such a condition entails. 

Think of Palestine, where the tragic sensibility of Incendies has taken hold. The goal of reconciling the sectarian conflict between Israeli settlers and Arab aboriginals has long been abandoned by most everyday inhabitants of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Instead the accent is placed on harnessing ways of living with what has turned out to be irredeemable. 

Neil Hertz talks about this in his recent ethnographic travelogue, Pastoral in Palestine. In 2011, Hertz lived in Ramallah, a Palestinian enclave settled in section A (according to the Oslo Accords of 1993/1995) of the West Bank, while teaching in neighbouring Abu Dis. He writes that of the many people he met, people whose occupied cultures were constantly under threat of erosion and collapse, few expressed any wish for reconciliation; only a desire to invent new modes of being / becoming in the midst of catastrophe. Hertz recalls encounter after encounter with people for whom “There is no solution, only ‘The Situation.’” Salim, a dinner guest, explains this to Hertz one evening: “It will just go on…One must live with it.”

This isn’t pessimism. Nor is it complacency. Indeed, one might say Salim’s position is akin to what Jonathan Lear means by “radical hope.” By this Lear is referring to a hope that is directed toward some future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is: “Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.” A hope that looks forward despite the future’s unpredictability; a hope without guarantees. Only a tragic sense that if we persevere, and act to sustain ourselves, we may get lucky. 

It is important that we recognize all the ways that we are borne out in thick expressions of mutual active witnessing that take shape in everyday rhythms of life. In the flux of a complex world, we really do “participate one another.” But this way of speaking must be complemented by a tragic sensibility sensitive to all the ways that we are connected as well as separated by what is happening and what the happening’s breaking down is doing to us. And we must listen carefully to those like Nawal and Salim who have been quietly inventing modes of staying power, techniques for committing to living on with the tragic sensibility when the deus ex machina of redemption remains an empty promise.  

Asian Girlz, White Patriarchy, and the Politics of Aesthetics

Chad Shomura
Johns Hopkins University

Recently, a music video called “Asian Girlz” by a talentless band has inflamed Asia America. It is not worth attention. But in this age of viral videos, it's difficult to heed the advice of Nietzsche's Zarathustra to pass by what we cannot love. I likewise am unable to pass by the racism and sexism expressed by the video that are ordinary features of Asian American life. That said, I address the video to criticize its expressions of White patriarchy. I also use it to comment on the politics of aesthetics framing racism and sexism in the Asian American contemporary condition.

In the video, a tattooed “Asian girl” comes home, turns on the lights, and uncovers a bird cage containing the Day Above Ground band, its members miniaturized. They serenade her with stereotypes—to her delight. She smiles to lyrics like “I love your creamy yellow thighs / Ooh your slanted eyes / It's the Year of the Dragon / Ninja pussy I'm stabbin'.” She undresses, dances, carries the cage into the bathroom, and bathes with the band. She leaves the bath, locks up the band, and turns off the lights, leaving the room as the camera zooms in on a “Shrinking Potion.”

The video's belittling of racism and sexism made me angry and disgusted, but not shocked—it screens a catalogue of orientalism that is too familiar. The intensity of my feelings was due not only to what the video depicts, but also to the effects of how the video shapes depictability itself. The video's frame functions as what Jacques Rancière calls a “partition of the sensible,” filtering what is seeable and sayable.  In the frame, we see an Asian woman enjoying the fetishism lavished on her. We do not see what Asian women outside the video don't enjoy—all the cat calls, unwanted gropings, and harassment on the street, at work, online, and just about everywhere, really, and all the sexual violence in cahoots with orientalism. Refract all that through what the video wants us to see—enjoyment—and we get an image of Asian women as wanting White patriarchy.

Of course, women's pleasure and play can be political, but the video doesn't connect fun to politics. Instead, it exaggerates the political agency available to Asian women at the cross-section of racism, orientalism, patriarchy, and empire. Responding to accusations of racism, the video's director Michael Steinberg insists that the Asian woman is “fully in control and in power;” she is aware that the men “have been captured by and held prisoner” to an “obsession” that she uses “for her own amusement.”  That is rape culture logic. It says that men cannot control desires sparked by seductive women, who could've dressed appropriately or just tried to enjoy being raped if it was happening anyway. That this logic circulates in courtrooms and police precincts highlights the video's continuity with US state patriarchy in the pseudo-agency it gifts women. Contemporary patriarchy depicts white men as diminished and contained in comparison with Asian women's gargantuan agency. It frames racism and sexism as playthings that can be left in the dark at the flip of a switch. It imagines that hardened histories can be upturned by a spot of fun. In short, the video misrepresents White sexist fantasy as Asian women's agency, establishing the former as fact while reducing the latter to having a good time. The orientalist partitioning of the sensible faced by Asian American women today says: White patriarchy is here to stay and you had better learn to like it.

Indeed, the band aims to control the seeable and the sayable. Its members respond to accusations of racism: they have Asian friends and girlfriends, and live in Asian communities (hell, one of the band members is himself Asian!); their video didn't intend to offend but is satire that people don't get; with artistic license, they sought to provoke controversy (wait, I thought they didn't intend to be offensive...); the video doesn't disparage Asian women, but worships them as gorgeous goddesses  (wait, I thought the video is supposed to be satire...). The band sounds like liars who trip over their own confused, sorry tales. It offers messy, desperate denials of the possibility that the video could be racist and sexist. That refusal has involved deleting accusations of racism from their Facebook and YouTube pages. In doing so, the band claims that it alone knows what racism and sexism look like. The band has been happy to play police, whose function, according to Rancière, is to close spaces of dissensus: “Move along, there's nothing to see here!”  By restraining what is sayable about racism and sexism, the band reifies White patriarchy.

How might Asians address both denials of orientalism and partitions of the sensible that enable those denials to work? I offer a few considerations.

First, our responses should beware the amplification of our anger into violent resentment. Zarathustra warned of the dangers attending ressentiment, and we who suffer the sting of abjection would do well to draw out its poison from our hearts. I hear ressentiment in the slut-shaming of Levy Tran,  the video's “Asian girl.” I hear ressentiment in calls from some Asian men for a video that disparages white women to see how “they”—presumably, white men—like it. Ressentiment-fueled responses hazard adopting White patriarchal violence as our own, and our ground for antiracism cannot be sexism.

Second, we must consider how to hold people accountable for the racism and sexism that runs through them. Ressentiment shapes a punitive stance towards those we blame for offending or damaging us. I worry that ressentiment works through a partition of the sensible that refocuses our struggles against orientalism on orientalists as targets responsible for long-standing histories. But White patriarchy operates subtly, shaping us well before we become aware of, let alone can work against, the process. It is easy to forget the class privileges of education, contingencies of upbringing, and circles of sociality that have long cultivated our capacity to sniff out racism and sexism. White patriarchy is so visible to our trained eyes that we get frustrated if others don't readily “see the light,” making ressentiment-driven responses appealing as quick fixes.

But some who invoke racism and sexism may come to acknowledge rather than deny, listen rather than speak, learn rather than refuse. With them, we might develop what William Connolly has called “relations of agonistic respect.”  Rather than vilifying them as sovereign and hence blameworthy, we might engage them as part of capitalist and orientalist histories that no one has authored. In this way, we distinguish between holding people accountable and holding power accountable. The latter reshapes the former by resisting the temptation to be punitive. We cultivate some patience, knowing that individuals don't change overnight, while putting hard pressure upon them to check their orientalism.

But what about those who, like the band, persist in their denials? Nietzsche warned against staring into the abyss for too long, lest its darkness seep into our hearts. Perhaps a little passing by is needed after all. So I think, finally, that our politics should not be only or foremost a “response.” Instead, we might affirm the vicissitudes of history and power that have made us complex meshes of violence, othering, and silencing, but also of expressivity, belonging, and thriving. This aesthetics of the self refashions the pieces of our broken, beautiful identities into something tragically joyful that can be paraded publicly and proudly. We march by those who continue to deny their orientalism.

Asian American affirmation can become a politics of aesthetics that repartitions White patriarchal sensibilities. I see an affirmative politics of aesthetics practiced by Asian Americans who have spent their energy on their own art or in promoting Asian American talent. Acknowledging that direct criticism may secure the attention desired by the band, Terry Park and Sean Miura have curated and circulated a YouTube playlist and Spotify channel of Asian Pacific American women musicians. This politics of aesthetics aspires to retune our eyes and ears to what is laudable rather than reprehensible, curbing the dangers of ressentiment and repartitioning the Euro- and Asian American sensible. It upsets the conditions of seeability and sayability that support White patriarchal policing of what counts as racism and sexism. It does not show that Asian Americans, like an afterthought of White American liberalism, can also be talented artists; rather, it wants to reframe the conditions of what counts as “talent” and “art.” It spotlights Asian women artists, not Asian girlz.

Many people may find these sentiments to be soft, apolitical, or just plain naïve. By asking us Asian Americans to be cautious and self-critical, I may be accused of splintering the minoritized to the benefit of White patriarchy. I am not against a hard-edged political response shaped in part by anger, demand, and calls for accountability. Still, I follow Zarathustra's desire for a hate that springs from love (agonistic respect) rather than from the swamp (ressentiment). Of course, relations of agonistic respect are untenable with persistent deniers of racism and sexism, and Nietzsche warns that changing others happens rarely and soils us often. So I end with a call for a multi-faceted politics that calls out orientalism whenever and wherever it appears, that derails White patriarchal efforts to control what counts as racism and sexism, that militantly holds accountable the most egregious denials, and that patiently and agonistically engages those who come to listen and learn, passes by the trolls who do not, and, above all, affirms ourselves through and through—through music, or performance, or writing, or any aesthetic that expresses our persistent, resilient, lovely lives.

My thanks to Jenny Hoang and Terry Park & his Facebook friends for help in fine-tuning these thoughts and words.

Nationalism, Tech Giants, and Spy States

John Buell is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book is Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age.










Despite persistent efforts by the US media to cast Edward Snowden as a traitor the affair has managed to expose not only abusive surveillance practices but also (even) the supportive role of strange bedfellows in these practices.

Consider first the tech giants. Silicon Valley's leaders project an image of support for market freedoms and open communication. And they trumpet the growth of high tech as the key to the restoration of our democracy. This image is, however, historically inaccurate and hides the role of the major tech giants today.

The telecom industry grew out of government funding and support for computers and the Internet. These companies in turn have enabled government intelligence agencies to solve some of their thorniest intelligence problems. We have here, then, an incestuous relationship with ugly consequences for a democratic citizenry.

In a recent post in her "Naked Capitalism" blog Yves Smith points out that such government surveillance plans as the infamous PRISM "depict the major telecom and technology players like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo as 'partners'. That's no misnomer... If you think ordinary customers are all that important to them, given that most of the markets they compete in are oligopolies, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you... The NSA, and the Department of Defense in general, have long been sponsors and funders of advanced technology. Need we say DarpaNet?... The NSA is an important customer and validator of tech products."

Companies like Google tout cooperation with government. Smith cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt's recent claim in The New Digital Age: "What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century, technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st."

Smith adds: "If the technology companies were really concerned [about customer privacy], lobbying dollars would go a hell of a lot further than money spent in quixotic fights in the FISA star chamber. But where has Silicon Valley been spending its money?" From a June 2013 story in the Atlantic: So far the fruits of Google's lobbying efforts have resulted in a huge win in an anti-trust case, but the company has even bigger plans...Google is working on updates to the Electronic Communication Privacy Act ­ that pesky bill the government uses to justify spying on your Gmail without a warrant."

Smith also highlights the (most omit) ominous aspects of these revelations:" The extensive cooperation between commercial companies and intelligence agencies is legal and reaches deeply into many aspects of everyday life,... Company executives are motivated by a desire to help the national defense as well as to help their own companies."

I draw several conclusions from these disturbing revelations. US politics has long been characterized by a mindset that political theorist  Bonnie Honig, drawing on the work of the late Michael Rogin, labels countersubversive: "That mentality casts the United States not as a political actor enmeshed in political conflicts with a concrete history, but rather as a hapless victim of alien monsters who appear inexplicably out of nowhere, who might be hiding anywhere, and whose threatening actions justify extreme, often mimetic, (re-)actions on our part."

She quotes Rogin: "Both the postwar Soviet Union and the radical labor movement of [the 1910s] posed genuine threats to dominant interests in American society, although the nature and extent of those threats are a matter of controversy. .. But the countersubversive response transformed interest conflicts into psychologically based anxieties over national security and American identity. Exaggerated responses to the domestic Communist [we could now say Arab] menace narrowed the bounds of permissible political disagreement and generated a national-security state." Indeed, we should say that linking labor to national security issues plays a major role in the defeat of welfare Keynesianism and the later hegemony of neoliberalism.

Perhaps the strangest revelation so far from the Snowden affair is the role of our erstwhile enemy in dismissing or denigrating his principled exposure of government lies and abuses. In his first response to Snowden's request for political asylum, Russian president Vladimir Putin demanded: "He must stop doing work aimed at harming our American partners, however strange that may sound coming from my lips." Putin, like the US corporate media, seemed to feel no need to explain just how Snowden's disclosures had harmed his "partner." Though Putin has now granted Snowden temporary asylum, his long term situation remains quite tenuous. Apparently, however much these national security states may see their opposite numbers as threats, each uses these threats to defend their own abusive bureaucracies, practices and secrecy from their own citizens.

Today, spy agencies all over the world, both whether governmental or private, accumulate reams of personal data with which they can denigrate or disrupt any dissenting politics, regardless of how nonviolent. And here in the US with the especially close ties between private corporations and the national security state, an already strong tendency among elites to identify all anti-corporate dissent as inherently violent and destructive will only intensify.

Even citizens who proclaim they "have nothing to hide" will  lose the stimulation and challenge of a venturesome culture and politics. Eventually, denied any outlet and opportunity to express and refine with others, those creative thoughts themselves may no longer come.

Finally, so much for both classic laissez faire and countercultural hopes for American democracy. The former, most notably Milton Friedman, argued that free markets and capitalist development nurtured freedom of speech and thought. Not only do markets often require the coercive power of the state in order to form, once formed they hardly ever remain free. Corporate power grows in tandem with and through government. And the state is then called upon to join other institutions in  helping to shape workers, consumers, church goers, the poor and so on to fit "the roles" the system has defined for them. this is an imperative of neoliberalism, not one of its side effects.

That's is one reason it is hard today to remain aloof from politics. But for those who seek to do so the message is just as clear. If the Internet has progressive possibilities, their realization will not be automatic. Today a countersubversive culture nurtures and is nurtured by an evolving alliance of high tech giants, government bureaucrats (whom Smith calls securecrats), the older more established military industrial complex and powerful private corporations that benefit from close ties to the state, including especially the oil  and investment banking community.

If the most repressive outcomes are to be avoided, the best course might be an evolving counter-coalition that would emerge from moral and historical critiques of and alternative to the countersubversive tradition. In Emergency Politics, Honig argues that the very focus on the question of the rules that should govern declarations of emergency and the protections that can be revoked in emergencies reinforce a notion of sovereignty as unitary and top down. Thus they "marginalize forms of popular sovereignty in which action in concert rather than institutional governance is the mark of democratic power and legitimacy." Unitary and decisive sovereignty committed to its own invulnerability is "most likely to perceive crisis where there may only be political conflict and to respond...with antipolitical measures."

The best answer lies not merely in challenging the constitutional status of this surveillance state but in building a political coalition that embodies the forms of popular sovereignty of which Honig speaks. This would include labor, consumer and environmentalist critiques of and alternatives to the role of the state and markets in fostering inequality. It would be attentive to the possibilities and risks of the social media and the limits of its own interventions in these.  The coalition might advance more democratic forms of enterprise and media as well as decentralized and more sustainable forms of energy production and transportation.  And in an era where hyper nationalism erodes so many democratic impulses, cross border initiatives in the interest of widespread access to an open Internet with robust privacy protections would be paramount. (Let's hope that) Edward Snowden's travels (in a world dominated by the state passport and surveillance system) helps to highlight the stake citizens of many lands have in a democratic Internet but a more exploratory and democratic polity.

Gay Love Conquers All

Dean Mathiowetz
UC Santa Cruz

Recent Supreme Court decisions regarding same-sex marriage, United States vs. Windsor and Hollingsworth vs. Perry, were greeted with celebration by LGBT people, by American liberals, and most of all, by American LGBT liberals. Polls indicate that support for gay marriage is quickly becoming a centrist issue in American politics, a fact that has Republicans scrambling to triangulate for the midterm elections. In light of the historic nature of Windsor, and the groundswell of public support for gay marriage, leftist and queer critics of marriage have been mostly subdued.

Queer critiques of marriage have, in the last two decades, become a part of a well-known political theory critique of rights. According to this critique, rights privatize; rights individualize; rights normalize. Therefore, they undo much of what these theorists regard as most promising about political action—its collective moments, its way of creating public spaces and events, its way of bringing disagreement to the level of perception—at the very moment that the demands for rights succeed. Perhaps no critic of rights has made this point, regarding gay marriage in particular, so succinctly as Michael Warner. His book The Trouble with Normal shines klieg lights on the conservative impulses and entailments of the fight for same-sex marriage. With critiques like his in mind, many political theorists have come to regard struggles for rights, rather than their achievement, as the setting for genuinely political—that is, collective, contested, and powerful—events.

I have been inspired time and again by Warner’s analysis (it’s particularly brilliant in the hands of undergraduates), and I find a great deal of truth in the larger critique of rights that animates it. When the first analyses of George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential win identified (wrongly, it turns out) his party’s mobilization of anti-gay marriage sentiment as the linchpin of GOP victory, it seemed that the gay marriage movement had done double damage to its putatively progressive politics. But now I find myself compelled by the striking political rebound of the LGBT movement, in and since the November 2012 elections, a turnaround that has pivoted on same-sex marriage. What should we make of this push for and attainment of rights? What is its political potential?

While these questions have been in the back of my mind, I happened to read “Flagrant Conduct” by Dale Carpenter, which describes the background, events, and legal strategy behind Lawrence v. Texas. That case, handed down 10 years ago to the day of the Windsor decision, struck down “homosexual conduct” laws everywhere as unconstitutional. It’s worth taking a moment to remember Lawrence, because it stands behind something we now read and hear everywhere (especially in the last weeks), when it comes to how Americans are writing and talking about gay people. In the era of homosexual conduct laws and Bowers v. Hardwick, public discussion of homosexuality was carried out almost exclusively in terms of sex acts. While this discourse lives on, both in the far right and in pornography (a coincidence that’s worth pondering), everywhere today we are hearing and speaking of gay lives as a matter of relationships, affection, and love.

Carpenter’s account makes clear that changing the legal discourse in this direction was Lambda Legal’s core strategy in Lawrence. This strategy was strikingly successful, as judged by Justice Kennedy’s Opinion, in which he frames “homosexual conduct” entirely in terms of developing intimacy and establishing relationships. In fact, neither sex acts nor the vaunted privacy of the bedroom were ever even mentioned in the opinion or the oral arguments, despite these having been the very matters upon which Bowers had turned. Proponents of gay marriage broadly embraced the new discourse of relationships, affection, and intimacy that Lawrence validated.

Queer theorists and activists were apt to be wary of this shift, especially as talk about intimacy became ever more centered on the validation of marriage. Throughout decades of vilification of same-sex erotic and sexual expression, many had fought to promote sex-positive messages in their communities, and to the general public. This strategy was crucial in the face of the AIDS crisis, given the urgent need for frank talk about sex to counter the epidemic. Overall, one might worry that the coupling of intimacy and state recognition that marriage preforms threatens to push non-normative expressions of same-sex affiliation back into the shadows.

But reading Carpenter’s book alongside the reactions to the more recent Supreme Court rulings has pulled me back from that conclusion. Carpenter argues that, despite the claims of Houston police officers, John Lawrence and Tyron Garner were not having sex when the officers entered Lawrence’s apartment. (The men never entered a statement about this, since disputing the charge of homosexual conduct on factual grounds may have foreclosed the constitutional question.) Lawrence and Garner’s relationship was “platonic;” they were not a couple. In other words, even friendship among gays and lesbians was subject to criminalization by homosexual conduct laws like Texas’s. Bringing this back to the critique of rights, the right articulated in Lawrence (something like intimate affiliation) is, effectively, quite the opposite of individualization, of privatization, and perhaps even normalization. Could Lawrence have been a step toward the queering of rights?

While Windsor is the logical extension of Kennedy’s Opinion in Lawrence, it may appear to narrow the conversation from the broad array of relationships forged by gays and lesbians, to those validated by the legal pairing—to represent, in other words, the recrudescence of rights’ normalizing and privatizing power. But this view would put the carriage before the horse. Sex bounded by procreation is no longer what the law hails as the primordial source of relationships. Instead it hails human love, with its power (celebrated by Augustine and vaunted by romantic moderns everywhere) to exceed boundaries of every kind. While the state may regulate sex, it declares that it must not regulate human love; indeed, the state now figures itself as responding to it.

To be sure, this discourse of love in its own way conceals the material privileges of marriage, including its historical and practical relation to property. But this shift to a discourse of love brings with it openings for queering marriage. There is, of course, the scrambling of the gender codes and hierarchies that long defined marriage along with normative sexual conduct. And the reaction to Windsor of conservatives now fearing the legalization of plural marriage —and of polyamory activists in favor of it —hints at further queer potential in the new discourse framing gay identity in terms of friendship, of intimacy, and of love. Not surprisingly, liberals are quick to dismiss this possibility, perhaps out of anxiety that polyamory might spoil the wedding party—but a queer radical might take heart in conservatives’ insistence that same-sex nuptials can transform marriage beyond their recognition.

More to the point, however, the fight for a right to same-sex affiliation and marriage has unleashed forces that cannot be normalized, individualized, and privatized away as gay marriage wins further legal victories. The move away from a discourse that frames gay identity in terms of sex, to one that speaks of affection, intimacy, and love is itself the most important aspect of recent legislative and legal victories. This is particularly so because of the language it gives to the young.  Discovering oneself to be gay is no longer framed largely in terms of a desire for certain acts that are mainly represented in the pornographies populating the right-wing imagination and profiting the sex industry. Instead, new generations will articulate themselves in terms of how a person relates, feels affection, befriends, and loves. This, more so than formal legal equality, is the heart of the matter we are witnessing in these times.

“The East” and Corporate Terrorism

William E. Connolly
Author of The Fragility of Things: self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, democratic activism, Duke, fall, 2013

As I compose this I am sitting on a gorge in Ithaca, New York, a gorge formed over endless centuries by the loud, cascading falls situated at one end of it. I sit here the day after seeing “The East,” a May, 2013 film on corporate eco-terrorism, private intelligence firms that secure them, and the closeted eco-warriors who stalk both by adopting parallel tactics. The title is meant to recall the underside of the privileges bestowed upon the corporate east in America and the mess in the middle east today. But the geological resonance is also pertinent because some geologists contend that the Biblical story of Eden, situated in “the middle east” 6000 years ago, is actually a mythic condensation of faint memories passed down to later generations of a bygone era when an area stretching from the Arabian peninsula to the current Sahara had been a vibrant, fertile, green zone. Over a short period a radical change in climate transformed it into a desert. There are even remains of a sophisticated structure reminiscent of Stonehenge through which the leading intellects of the day tried to figure out what in hell was happening to their climate and world. 

The condensation of that climate event in Genesis, at least as interpreted by Augustine, is one in which the first humans in the garden rebelled against God and we were all punished severely for their rebellion: labor in child birth thereafter for women, toiling in barren fields for men, and the experience of death for all. Climate change, human willfulness and divine punishment. The story is often used as a lesson in obedience, but also lurking in it, especially in the earliest J version, is a sense of powerful natural forces  which we must tend as best we can. The Book of Job puts both stories into play too. Here is a somewhat different story: The first humans did not deserve what they got; we may deserve what we are sowing; future generations may reap the effects of our original sin.

“The East” is directed by Zal Batmangli and stars Brit Marling (who also co-wrote it). It co-stars Ellen Page and Shiloh Fernandez. Sarah works for a spooky corporate intelligence and undercover agency that infiltrates and breaks up eco-warrior groups. Our heroine is assigned to infiltrate an undercover group devoted to locating corporate eco-terrorism and enacting “jams” to make them experience precisely what their policies do to others. Does you pharmaceutical company produce a medication that creates severe mental dissociation? Do you then deny it?  Let’s infiltrate the company celebration and pour the same medication into their drinks. Does your manufacturing company pour toxic wastes into the river at a precise time every night? Let’s capture the bosses and compel them to swim in the river just as the toxic brew gushes out of the huge pipe above them.

Reviews of the film so far often ask whether the suspense works well and whether the infiltration strategy is realistic. Demote those questions. The key thing is that Sarah soon becomes a double agent, not in the sense of playing both sides against the middle for her own gain. But in the sense of finding that part of her comes to identify with the goals and practices of the eco-warrior group and that part clings to the cool, more cynical analyst loyal to the firm. Also, part of her is mesmerized by the warrior tactics—who would not feel a thrill as you see those corporate cads swim in the slime they have brewed?—and part of her is drawn to bring the cool, technical knowledge and tactics she has learned at the firm to a new cause. She is a doubly identified agent. In this way she captures the predicament many of us are caught in today. We are appalled by corporate eco-terrorism; we find our responses to it to be inadequate; we fear for ourselves and families when we consider other options; and we don’t want to become as dogmatic and punitive from our side as the corporate terrorists are. We think that the latter approach will backfire. And yet we are dissatisfied with our current modes of double agency. 

Eventually Sarah develops a strategy of public expose and activism that draws some sustenance from her two identities and resists the traps each sets for her. I will let that part unfold when you watch the film. Is it enough?  Probably not. Could more of us participate in such acts to augment the potential they hold? Yes, we could. Many of us are what Michel Foucault called “specific intellectuals”, people with special knowledges and skills because of the work we do in law firms, medical practices, college teaching, blog writing, pharmaceutical companies, intelligence agencies, the media, school boards, churches, geological research, corporate regulatory agencies, and so on, endlessly. Each of us has specific modes of strategic information and critical skill linked to our role assignments. We can expose horrendous practices, as Snowden has done recently. We can also support others who do so as we seek to build a critical assemblage of public insurrection together. 

Sarah provides a metaphor and exemplar for our time. Those two innocent children in the fertile garden did not deserve the fate imposed upon them. They therefore suffered a double injury: the fate and their sense of deserving it. And we today? We either contribute to the fate that will befall us or withdraw from fights against corporate eco-terrorism. The next generation will not deserve the fate bestowed upon it, but we are saddled with differential degrees of responsibility. I have explored multimodal kinds of action to be pursued under such circumstances in a recent post on “The Dilemma of Electoral Politics”.  The cool Sarah does much more. She acts in ways that inspire us to think and act differently.

What about the warrior clan she infiltrates? To me, they simultaneously inform us, slide too close the adversaries they oppose, and pursue some actions that are apt to backfire under the glare of publicity. Are they, though, also invaluable prods? Yes. They are, perhaps, the Antigones, Nat Turners and John Browns of today. They force us to rethink, with Sarah, how we remain caught in oh so carefully crafted circles of self-protective pessimism, or cynicism, or innocence, or indifference. They spur us on. They press us to consider again just what mix of courage and tactical wisdom are appropriate to the fateful issues of today. We need the intensity they exhibit joined to multimodal critical practices, ranging from role experimentations through exposes to social movements and electoral politics—each of these enacted as an indispensable contribution to the others. Check out the film. Exacerbate, in the company of others, the double agent circling within you.