Colin

Contempt of Cop: The Arrest of Skip Gates and the First Amendment

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:10:23 GMT

Sgt. Crowley acted stupidly in arresting Dr. Gates. He violated the professor's first amendment rights with absolutely no legal foundation. Regardless of whose story you believe in this mess, it is agreed that Crowley arrested Gates because of the words the arrestee had with the officer. Here's an excerpt from Crowley's police report.

The DAs office elected not to prosecute Gates in this instance, a decision that makes sense both in light of the public relations disaster this has been for the department and the law regarding disorderly conduct in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There are three things a prosecutor would have had to prove:

That Gates engaged in fighting, threatening, violent or tumultuous behavior or created a hazardous condition by an act that served no legitimate purpose;
That Gates’ actions were reasonably likely to affect the public; and
That the defendant either intended to cause public inconvenience, annoyance, alarm or recklessly created a risk of public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.

Specifically, these provisions need to be constructed in light of Massachusetts case law on disorderly conduct. In Commonwealth v A Juvenile, the court held that "in order to ensure that the [the disorderly persons] statute as limited not be susceptible of application to conduct which is expressive and therefore protected by the First Amendment, we further construe the section to relate exclusively to activities which involve no lawful exercise of a First Amendment right." In other words, protected speech acts cannot motivate a conviction for being a disorderly person. The court identified specifically what kind of speech is excluded from this protection: "...in order to satisfy present constitutional standards, a statute seeking to regulate what we have broadly termed offensive speech will stand only if that statute, in the words of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U. S. 568, 571-572 (1942), is so narrowly drawn as to be limited to "`fighting' words." Vulgar, profane, offensive or abusive speech is not, without more, subject to criminal sanction...." Fighting words. That's the only speech criminalized under the disorderly persons statute as construed by the Commonwealth. And the standard for fighting words is articulated with reference to US Supreme Court cases on the matter: "Fighting words as referred to in the relevant constitutional decisions are limited to "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. at 572 (1942). The words must be "personally abusive epithets which, when addressed to the ordinary citizen, are, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke violent reaction." Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, 20 (1971). In order to be personally abusive the words must be "directed to the person of the hearer" in the sense that they are a face to face personal insult. Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 309 (1940). Finally, the determination of whether words are personally abusive may not rest on subjective perceptions since an "undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression." Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community Sch. Dist. 393 U.S. 503, 508 (1969)."

So here's the simple question: does accusing somebody of racism rise to the level of fighting words? Is it "inherently likely to provoke violent reaction"? Does it "incite an immediate breach of the peace"? Clearly not. Gates' words were constitutionally protected speech. The behavior that Sgt Crowley identified as "tumultuous" was a lawful excercise of the right to criticize the agents of our government.

Of course, this speaks to a broader problem, namely the hubris and sense of entitlement that working as a cop breeds. "Contempt of cop" is not a crime, but our law enforcement professionals continue to act as though they have the god-given right to arrest innocent citizens just because they mouthed off. As the Ninth Circuit observed in Duran v City of Douglas: "The freedom of individuals to oppose or challenge police action verbally without thereby risking arrest is one important characteristic by which we distinguish ourselves from a police state... Thus, while police, no less than anyone else, may resent having obscene words and gestures directed at them, they may not exercise the awesome power at their disposal to punish individuals for conduct that is not merely lawful, but protected by the First Amendment."

An Anti-Capitalist Primer Pt 2: What's wrong with wage slavery?

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:11:05 GMT

Last time I talked about justice in distribution of natural resources. This time I'm going to talk about justice in exchange. The Locke/Nozick libertarian consensus we were taking as a starting point says that an exchange is just if it is voluntary, which is usually understood in this tradition as being uncoerced by either force or fraud. My argument will be first that wage labor in capitalism is unjust under this criterion and second that even if wage-slavery is just it is an undesirable organizing principle for our society - that is, even if individual acts of employment are voluntary and just, their amalgamation creates cultural, psychic and societal conditions that all of humanity should be opposed to.

It certainly seems at first blush that employment is voluntary. Nobody MAKES you work, after all. It's your choice to apply for a job, sign a contract, show up at work in the morning (or the middle of the night, in my case) etc. But this facile examination ignores the massive power differentials which exist in our society as a result of the fundamentally inequitable distribution of natural resources and their products I discussed in the last post. Privilege stems from this. Certain folks have, as an accident of their birth, significantly increased economic opportunities which make finding employment easier or harder, or which circumscribe the sorts of jobs which they can perform. The defender of capitalism must admit that - paraphrasing Orwell - even if employment is voluntary for everyone, but it is more voluntary for some than others. The fundamental injustice of acquisition bleeds into exchange. Even Ayn Rand, arch-defender of capitalism, frequently noted in her work that "morality ends at the point of a gun". And for most of the labor force around the world find themselves coerced into employment by the constant threat of starvation, eviction or disease. The man who goes to work at a job he hates with every ounce of his being in order to keep feeding his family is not acting voluntarily in any morally significant sense of the word, just as the man who has a gun pointed at his head and turns over his wallet isn't acting voluntarily.

The ideological magic trick Capitalism pulls off is convincing us that this state of affairs is somehow natural, that our need to labor like beasts of burden for our survival is an immutable fact of our society. I call it a magic trick because it manages to make millenia of human history dissapear. Work simply wasn't always as pervasive an aspect of our society as it is now. Bob Black writes in his essay "Primitive Affluence":

'The data on the Bushmen--or San, as they call themselves--were the result of fieldwork in the early 1960's by Richard Borshay Lee, an anthropologist. Lee has subsequently published a full monograph on work in a !Kung San band in which he augments, recalculates and further explains the statistics relied on by Sahlins. As finally marshalled the evidence supports the affluence thesis more strongly than ever--and includes a couple of surprises. "Why should we plant," asks Lee's informant/Xashe, "when there are so many mongongos in the world?" Why indeed? Originally, Lee studied the San equivalent of what is conventionally accounted work in industrial society--hunting and gathering in their case, wage labor in ours. This was the comparison Sahlins cited. In terms of our standard eight-hour workday, a San adult works between 2.2 and 2.4 hours a day--well below the provisional four hour figure Sahlins references. Not that the San work a seven- or even a five-day week at these ludicrously low levels of labor, for they spend "less than half their days in subsistence and enjoy more leisure time than the members of many agricultural and industrial societies." For many Lee might better have said any. More often than not a !Kung San is visiting friends and kin at other camps or receiving them in his own. ...The poor devils are too rich to work. Cruelly denied the opportunity to accumulate capital, what else is there for the benighted savages to do but create, converse, dance, sing, feast and fuck? '

Wage slavery is a historical event, not a natural inevitability produced by scarcity and human desire. Most of humanity's brief tenure on this planet was spent in a state fairly similar to that of the San. Now, this essay isn't a naive paen to primitivism or a call to return to gathering mongongos and hunting gazelles (an option that is probably hopelessly lost at this point anyways, due to the encroachment of industrialization and environmental devastation on the last remaining havens of natural plenty in the world, not to mention our own virus-like propagation as a species). This look at our shared affluent past is merely intended to illustrate the contingent nature of our current societal arrangement. How has this happened? It runs entirely contrary to our intuitions about technology and productivity. We should be working LESS not MORE than the folks who don't have all our labor saving contrivances. But instead we work 40 hour weeks where the so called savages work 4. Today he average American male will work more 8 years worth of time over the course of his life than his counterpart in 1900. The answer has to do with the inequitable distribution of natural resources which undergirds our economy.

Let's go back to the desert island from last post. Person A washed up yesterday and claimed all the fruit trees. Persons B through Z washed up today and want some. "Sure," says A. "Pick as many as you want - but each of you have to give me the first 4 fruits out of every 5 you pick." Obviously the rest of the crowd complains, but A has a ready retort: "What, you want something for free? You think you deserve to just have whatever the hell you want? You know, you don't have to work here. It's your call. I'm doing you a FAVOR giving you a job like this. These are my fruit trees after all." Because A was able to monopolize access to natural resources and he had so many potential laborers at his disposal, he could pay an outrageously low salary to his employees and extract their extra labor as surplus value. And the army of the unemployed, aka Messrs B-Z, would take it, because they have to eat. This same fundamentally unjust structure is what forces us into wage slavery. Unlike the surroundings of the San, our resources are private property, that is property seized by the State, auctioned off to wealthy corporations and then used as instruments of exploitation by our equivalents of Mr. A. Our only option is then to compete to sell our days off to employers at as miserable and crushing a price as possible, desperately trying to outdo our neighbors in our willingness to abase ourselves and gut our lives of meaningful activity for the privilege of being paid back a small fraction of the value of the work we perform. And what happens as we develop labor saving technology? We certainly don't work less. Technology acts as a force multiplier, increasing the value of a single man-hour of labor in terms of its productivity. So our employers just have more incentive to work us harder, because now the amount of value they get by increasing our labor productivity is marginally higher than it was before the invention of whatever it was that was supposed to save us time.

Not only is our labor coerced, its just fucking awful. Since the industrial revolution, our jobs are increasingly dominated by the repetition of mindless tasks which alienate us totally from whatever it is we're actually doing. We have hierachical systems of bosses as complex and authoritarian as any feudal lordship. I don't have to tell you this shit, because YOU ALREADY HATE YOUR FUCKING JOB. This doesn't need high postmodern theory or investigation to discover. It's the defining feature of the lives of late capitalist first world workers. Their jobs are inhuman and debasing. At least hunting, pre-industrial agriculture and artisanship allowed for the use of your brain, the enjoyment of the products of your labor and a sense of pride in your work.

Next time is Pt 3: Circle A OR Why an anticapitalist must be antistatist.

An Anti-Capitalist Primer Pt 1: What's wrong with private property?

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 02:04:41 GMT

This series of posts is going to be equal parts polemic and autobiography. At some point in freshman year or so, I went from being an Anarcho-Capitalist to, well, more or less just a plain old Anarchist. I've never really articulated this transformation in any kind of systematic way. These posts will hopefully show why I made this fairly radical shift, while at the same time serving as a critique of some ideas that pass without question in our at least nominally capitalist society (along with some of the equally insipid leftist notions they've generated in reaction).

In "Anarchy, State and Utopia", Nozick outlines a way of thinking about private property that I used to find very persuasive and that constitutes something almost like common wisdom in libertarian circles. A given distribution of resources is just if it has come to be via a series of acquisitions and exchanges which are in themselves just. Back when I was a good little neoliberal, I'd say that an exchange was just if both sides agreed to it voluntarily - if it was non-coercive. And this was basically how I justified my laissez faire economic principles. The free market is (in its ideal) just non-coercive exchange, after all.

This sort of reasoning is actually really common in the popular debates over redistribution of wealth, taxation and regulation. It's what's being appealed to every time you hear somebody talk about how they've worked for what they've earned and other people don't have any right to it, or when sweatshops are defended on the basis that the workers have agreed to the awful conditions by virtue of accepting employment there, or when the repulsive exploitation of the third world is defended as the natural result of market forces at work, or when a banker says that his debtors agreed to the sliding subprime mortgages that are now putting them on the street. In all these cases, it's the voluntary nature of the activities in question that is presented as a defense. And so I used to go around saying that all sorts of apparently exploitative and vicious things were OK - because they were voluntary!

The problem I eventually became conscious of is that voluntary exchange is really only part of the picture. Accepting a Nozick-esque picture of exchange requires that the initial acquisitions of the various things being exchanged is just. And for Nozick (like Locke) it really boils down to a sort of first come first serve arrangement. You gain ownership of something by mixing your labor with it - so for instance, the products of the farmers field is his because they are the products of his labor and the field itself belongs to him because he came along and mixed his labor with it.

So what's the problem? Basically, none of our current property distribution came to be in this idealized way. Take something simple, like the sugar on your kitchen table, and ask some questions about its origins. How did it get there? Well, it was grown on a farm somewhere - say Florida. How did the farmer get that land? They bought it from somebody. And how did the previous owner get it? They bought it from somebody else and so on and so forth. Except that once you go back far enough, you inevitably find bloodshed. Florida was bought by the US from the Spanish, who had in turn seized it forcibly from the native populations. We continued their work by expatriating the Seminole tribe. Every commodity (even capital like the machinery in factories or land itself) is grounded in some natural resources that constitute it, and these resources are on land that humanity has killed over for millenia. At best, a vanishingly tiny quantity of the world's resources have a provenance that is untainted by imperialism, nationalism, war and other coercive efforts. And that taint morally all future production and exchanges that are rooted in those ultimately ill-gotten properties. There are no immaculately conceived commodities. Just because it has been a long time or lots of exchanges have taken place doesn't annul this issue. There is no statute of limitations on genocide. A "moral money laundering" that would let passing the goods in question around a lot dilute their fundamentally vicious genealogy would be senseless.

But there's a deeper issue which is best shown with a story. Let's say that you crash on an island. The first day, you find some fruit trees and a fresh water source. The next day, another survivor washes up. Under the first-come first-serve model, those trees and the water are yours. You can use them as you please, just as you can dispose of your own body and labor however you please. You could give the second survivor a share - or you could negotiate a deal where he would have to be your slave to eat and drink and survive. It would be voluntary, after all. Or you could just burn the trees and destroy the well and kill you all. Some of these seem obviously unjust. In fact, I think that most people will agree that washing up a day early doesn't give the first survivor any particular moral claim to the natural resources of the island. The second survivor has just as great a right to them.

Obviously this is a toy-like demonstration of the principle in question. But it shows in miniature what is so odd about the first come first serve model. The model attaches a moral significance to something that seems totally nonmoral. It also points at another problem: the just acquisition model described assumes that the world starts out unowned by anybody. There is, of course, another possibility, namely that the world's natural resources are owned by everyone. The notion of a mostly unowned world ready to be claimed made sense in the Enlightenment, when blatant imperialism was the order of the day and the world outside of western civilization was imagined as an empty wilderness broken by the occasional tribe of brown people waiting to be exploited just like all the other natural resources out there. Today, in a world increasingly filled to the gills with the competing claims of individuals it seems significantly less plausible. And moreover, it's fairly likely that even in the Enlightenment this view of the world was pretty flaws. There is substantial evidence that by the time European powers claimed most of the Americas, they had already reduced them to something like 5% of their original numbers via the spread of disease. It's easy to think the world looks a little empty when all your neighbors have just died with leaking sores all over their bodies.

So where does that leave us? We have good reasons to believe that virtually none of the resources in our society were originally acquired in a just way. Therefore, all of our future exchanges of those goods are unjust. Moreover, it seems like we don't even have a good theory of how an individual could justly come to own a natural resource in the permanent way our legal system allows. It was these sorts of serious questions about original acquisitions of goods that made me begin to slip away from my pro-capitalist beliefs. I began to read more and more about imperialism and the exploitation of non-western peoples around the world, as well as the authoritarian development of European social structures critiqued by the revolutionary tradition there. I became convinced that if our current distribution of goods was grounded in injustice, then no amount of self-interested voluntary exchange could correct that. Some kind of rectification of that injustice is required, a radical reworking of our current property arrangements and social order.

Next is Pt 2: What's wrong with wage-slavery?

Edit: Hi 420chan.

An alternative set of procedures.

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:19:17 GMT

“We knew that Abu Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking…. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures.... The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it—and I will not authorize it.” - President GW Bush

"After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about 3 months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited. The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress.

I was then placed again in the tall box. While I was inside the box loud music was played again and somebody kept banging repeatedly on the box from the outside. I tried to sit down on the floor, but because of the small space the bucket with urine tipped over and spilt over me…. I was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.

I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.

This went on for approximately one week. During this time the whole procedure was repeated five times. On each occasion, apart from one, I was suffocated once or twice and was put in the vertical position on the bed in between. On one occasion the suffocation was repeated three times. I vomited each time I was put in the vertical position between the suffocation.

During that week I was not given any solid food. I was only given Ensure [a nutritional supplement] to drink. My head and beard were shaved everyday.

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor." -Abu Zubaydah, who was detained at secret CIA facilities for 4 years before being transferred to Gitmo

I cried reading this. Not for Zubaydah, but for us. Because there really was a time in my life when I thought we were better than this. The sheer lack of surprise I felt reading the report this comes from is the coldest feeling I've experienced in a long time.

A Personal Request

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 23:21:01 GMT

I need to write more. A lot more. As in, I should be reading and writing all the time if I'm serious about professional philosophy.

So give me topics! Give me one or ten subjects that you would be interested in having me write a short piece (probably no more than 1000 words) on from a philosophical perspective. It can really be anything - something classically philosophical (write about the difference between killing and letting die!), a moral dillema (is stealing from Wal-Mart morally different from stealing from your neighbor), something from literature or popular culture that you want be to examine or consider (write about "The Bachelorette" and what it shows about contemporary views on romance and love!), two seemingly unrelated things that you want me to discuss a connection between, a political question, whatever! I need you all to give me prompts! I'll post what I generate from those prompts in this space.

A historical note on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:00:28 GMT

In 1858, the Ottoman Empire changed the way it regulated private land ownership. Large areas of agricultural land were governed by communal or traditional land tenure. The Ottomans required the registration of this land by individuals. Upper class Ottomans were able to buy registration for lands that they often had never even seen, that had existing communities using them. Later in the 19th century, Jews began buying up land in Palestine to create Jewish communities. From the Jewish perspective, this land was justly acquired from the legal landowners. From the perspective of the Palestinians, they had the land taken out from under them as part of a Zionist plot. A combination of Jewish and pan-Arab nationalism, both of which were strong in the late 19th, early 20th century, exacerbated this land dispute and has led to over a century of armed conflict.

Something roughly equivalent to a protracted zoning law dispute is responsible for the situation in Gaza today.

Live from Greece

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:47:57 GMT

Anarchism is not an irrelevant political movement by any means. Anarchists and students have taken to the streets in Greece in reaction to the brutal murder of an unarmed teenager by police. Thousands of demonstrators have thrown cities across the country into chaos.

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:17:51 GMT

Go to www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/maps/obama_vs_mccain/ . Play for a bit. Look at the poll numbers listed below. Let's work this out, shall we?

Be gracious and give McCain two of the electoral crown jewels, Ohio and Florida. Florida will almost assuredly go his way given poll numbers over the summer and simple demographics of the electorate there. Ohio is more competitive, but we'll grant it for the sake of this exercise.

Let's also grant McCain swing states that by all rights shouldn't be: Virginia, Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina.

We'll even give him Nevada. Despite recent successes here by Obama, it will probably still swing the way it did all summer, to the right.

Give Obama only ONE of the swing states - Colorado. Obama polls over McCain consistantly and with significant margins going back all year. I don't know why RCP has it as swing state.

Oh, and if you're still operating under the delusion that PA or MI are sweet electoral vote goldmines for a McCain who will appeal to the white working class: McCain hasn't polled above Obama in PA since April. Only 2 out of over 20 polls in MI since May have given McCain any lead. They're going blue, no matter what happens between now and Nov 4.

Final score in our very R-friendly world: OBAMA 273 MCCAIN 265.

This is why I'm fairly unexcited about the next month. The fundamentals of this election have been solidly behind Obama since before he considered his candidacy. Bush's unpopularity and the flagging economy have created a situation that is very bad for any elected official with a little 'R' next to their name on TV. This isn't an election, or even a coronation. It's an execution. More about what that means later.

Intermezzo II

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:44:53 GMT

"More generally, when one is passionately in love and, after not seeing the beloved for a long time, asks her for a photo to keep in mind her features, the true aim of this request is not to check if the properties of the beloved still fits the criteria of my love, but, on the contrary, to learn (again) what these criteria are. I am in love absolutely, and the photo a priori CANNOT be a disappointment - I need it just so that it will tell me WHAT I love… What this means is that true love is performative in the sense that it CHANGES its object - not in the sense of idealization, but in the sense of opening up a gap in it, a gap between the object’s positive properties and the agalma, the mysterious core of the beloved (which is why I do not love you because of your properties which are worthy of love: on the contrary, it is only because of my love for you that your features appear to me as worthy of love). It is for this reason that finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent, traumatic even: being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me which causes love. Everyone knows Lacan’s definition of love (”Love is giving something one doesn’t have…”); what one often forgets is to add the other half which completes the sentence: “… to someone who doesn’t want it.” And is this not confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declared passionate love to us - is not the first reaction, preceding the possible positive reply, that something obscene, intrusive, is being forced upon us?"

Slavoj Zizek

Intermezzo

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:38:10 GMT

No useful or interesting work worth posting. So here's somebody else's. These are all quotes from "On The Poverty of Student Life", a situationist essay published in 1966. Most of it has only gotten more true with the last 50 years. Your thoughts are appreciated.

"Modern capitalism and its spectacle allot everyone a specific role in a general passivity. The student is no exception to the rule. He has a provisional part to play, a rehearsal for his final role as an element in market society as conservative as the rest. Being a student is a form of initiation. An initiation which echoes the rites of more primitive societies with bizarre precision. It goes on outside of history, cut off from social reality. The student leads a double life, poised between his present status and his future role. The two are absolutely separate, and the journey from one to the other is a mechanical event "in the future." Meanwhile, he basks in a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his initiation group to hide from that future. Protected from history, the present is a mystic trance.

At least in consciousness, the student can exist apart from the official truths of "economic life." But for very simple reasons: looked at economically, student life is a hard one. In our society of abundance," he is still a pauper. 80% of students come from income groups well above the working class, yet 90% have less money than the meanest laborer Student poverty is an anachronism, a throw-back from an earlier age of capitalism; it does not share in the new poverties of the spectacular societies; it has yet to attain the new poverty of the new proletariat. Nowadays the teenager shuffles off the moral prejudices and authority of the family to become part of the market even before he is adolescent: at fifteen he has all the delights of being directly exploited. In contrast the student covets his protracted infancy as an irresponsible and docile paradise. Adolescence and its crises may bring occasional brushes with his family, but in essence he is not troublesome: he agrees to be treated as a baby by the institutions which provide his education. (If ever they stop screwing his arse off, it's only to come round and kick him in the balls.)"

...

"The student is a stoic slave: the more chains authority heaps upon him, the freer he is in phantasy. He shares with his new family, the University, a belief in a curious kind of autonomy. Real independence, apparently, lies in a direct subservience to the two most powerful systems of social control: the family and the State. He is their well-behaved and grateful child, and like the submissive child he is overeager to please. He celebrates all the values and mystifications of the system, devouring them with all the anxiety of the infant at the breast. Once, the old illusions had to be imposed on an aristocracy of labour; the petits cadres-to-be ingest them willingly under the guise of culture."

...

"The real poverty of his everyday life finds its immediate, phantastic compensation in the opium of cultural commodities. In the cultural spectacle he is allotted his habitual role of the dutiful disciple. Although he is close to the production-point, access to the Sanctuary of Thought is forbidden, and he is obliged to discover "modern culture" as anadmiring spectator. Art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac. He peeks at the corpse in cine-clubs and theaters, buys its fish-fingers from the cultural supermarket. Consuming unreservedly, he is in his element: he is the living proof of all the platitudes of American market research: a conspicuous consumer, complete with induced irrational preference for Brand X (Camus, for example), and irrational prejudice against Brand Y (Sartre, perhaps).

Impervious to real passions, he seeks titillation in the battles between his anaemic gods, the stars of a vacuous heaven: AIthusser -- Garaudy-Barthes -- Picard -- Lefebvre -- Levi-Strauss -- Halliday-deChardin -- Brassens... and between their rival theologies, designed like all theologies to mask the real problems by creating false ones: humanism -- existentialism -- scientism -- structuralism -- cyberneticism -- new criticism -- dialectics-of-naturism -- meta-philosophism...

He thinks he is avant-garde if he has seen the latest happening. He discovers "modernity" as fast as the market can produce its ersatz version of long outmoded (though once important) ideas; for him, every rehash is a cultural revolution. His principal concern is status, and he eagerly snaps up all the paperback editions of important and "difficult" texts with which mass culture has filled the bookstores. (If he had an atom of self-respect or lucidity, he would knock them off. But no: conspicuous consumers always pay!). Unfortunately, he cannot read, so he devours them with his gaze, and enjoys them vicariously through the gaze of his friends. He is an other-directed voyeur."

This summer is for getting "out" of philosophy.

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:07:40 GMT

“There is really no need for philosophy: It is necessarily produced there where each activity extends philosophy’s lines of deterritorialization. Get out of philosophy, do anything in order to produce it from the out- side. Philosophers have always been other things, they are born of other things.”

« Il n’y a aucun besoin de philosophie : elle est forcement produite là où chaque activité fait pousser sa ligne de déterritorialisation. Sortir de la philosophie, faire n’importe quoi, pour pouvoir la produire du dehors. Les philosophes ont toujours été autre chose, ils sont nés d’autre chose. »

(Deleuze & Parnet, Dialogues)

Second Amendment Jurisprudence

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:52:02 GMT

DC v Heller is the first test of the Second Amendment to reach the Supreme Court in well over 50 years. The Court is expected to rule on a very simple question: does the Second Amendment prohibit the federal government from restricting gun ownership?

The Court has been surprisingly reticent on questions concerning the second amendment. It has never ruled on whether the right to keep and bear arms is a right retained by individuals or by the people collectively. Some have argued that the first clause has a limiting effect on the second, restricting the right to bear arms only to those who are members of the militia (i.e. the National guard). Most proponents of gun control back this interpretation or some variation on it. There are significant problems with this view, however.

The first clause is a nominative absolute, a construction used in English largely to imitate the ablative absolute from Latin. It describes conditions attendant to the following clause. That is, it attests to the truth of the second clause given the truth of the first clause. For instance, "Bush being president, there's really no realistic way to end the war." The second clause is true so long as the first is true, or at least that's clearly what the sentence means. The second amendment should be interpreted in a similar way. This interpretation isn't just my bloviating, it's in the literature: "The linguistically correct reading of this unique construction ... is as though it said: Congress shall not limit the right of the people (that is, the potential members of the state militia) to acquire and keep the sort of arms appropriate to their military duty, so long as the following statement remains true: "an armed, trained, and controlled militia is the best — if not the only — way to protect the state government and the liberties of its people against uprisings from within and incursions or oppression from without" " (Merkel, William G.; Uviller, H. Richard (2002). The militia and the right to arms, or, How the second amendment fell silent. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, Page 150, emphasis in original).

So clearly the first clause can't motivate a collective rights reading of the Second Amendment. What about the second clause? Perhaps "People" can be read collectively, that is, the "people" as manifested in state-sponsored militias. But this reading is problematic as well, because precisely the same construction is used in the Fourth Amendment ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." -US Constitution, Amendment IV) We certainly don't interpret that as some right that's held by the people collectively, but rather individually. Anyone who reads "the people" collectively in the second will be obliged to do so in the fourth, a plainly absurd conclusion. It follows that the second amendment should be interpreted as ascribing and individual right.

There is, however, an important caveat to this. In Barron v City of Baltimore the Court held that the bill of rights constitutes a set of restrictions on federal power - not on state power. From the decision:

"The constitution was ordained and established by the people of the United States for themselves, for their own government, and not for the government of the individual states. Each state established a constitution for itself, and in that constitution, provided such limitations and restrictions on the powers of its particular government, as its judgment dictated. The people of the United States framed such a government for the United States as they supposed best adapted to their situation and best calculated to promote their interests. The powers they conferred on this government were to be exercised by itself; and the limitations on power, if expressed in general terms, are naturally, and, we think, necessarily, applicable to the government created by the instrument."

Moreover, a historical perspective supports this view. The bill of rights was a concession to anti-federalists who were otherwise extremely suspicious of the new central government and called for restrictions to be placed on that new authority. It was not intended to limit the power of the states in any respect whatever - otherwise, why would the proponents of increased state power been the ones to agitate for its passage?

The court subsequently ruled in Gitlow v NY and other cases that the 14th amendment's due process clause had incorporated many of the provisions of the bill of rights. That is, it made the restrictions on the federal government apply to the states as well. For instance, it made states obliged to protect freedom of speech. Let's look at that clause: "No State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." -US Constitution, Amendment XIV. On my reading, the view that somehow this amounts to a blanket protection of arbitrary liberties is more than laughable, it's plain disingenuous. But, it is what the court has held. Now, given this view - that the due process clause incorporates the bill of rights and makes it apply to the states - there can be no principled reason to argue that the second amendment should be excluded from this treatment. It would follow that the states would be prohibited from violating the right to keep and bear arms. Ironically enough, the very people who will be tirelessly opposed to this result are the same persons that will support the Incorporation Doctrine in every other area of federal law. Remember: Incorporation Doctrine is the basis of Roe, Miranda, Brown and many more iconic liberal court decisions of this century. But if, as I argue, Incorporation Doctrine is completely mindless, then this entails that the states are largely empowered to regulate the possession of firearms as they see fit, this being a power reserved to them by the Tenth Amendment.

So, does the Second Amendment protect the individual's right to keep and bear arms? Sure. With respect to the federal government. But because we live under at least a nominally federalist system that splits the authority of the state and national governments, that legal right exists at the pleasure of the various state governments which are empowered to manage their territory and militias largely as they see fit.

The Politics of Inner Life

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:09:12 GMT

A few folks took issue with my claim that even introspection is political, so I thought I'd pick through that a bit. First, an illustrative example from Deleuze:

"...Anorexia is a political system, a micro-politics: to escape from the norms of consumption in order not to be an object of consumption oneself. It is a feminine protest, from a woman who wants to have a functioning of the body and not simply organic and social functions which make her dependent. She will turn consumption against itself: she will often be a model - she will often be a cook, a peripatetic cook, who will make something for others to eat, or else she will like being at the table either without eating, or else multiplying the absorption of little things, of little substances. Cook-model, a mixture that can only exist in this assemblage, this system, and which will be dissolved in different ones. Her goal is to wrest particles from food, minute particles with which she will be able to create her void as well as her fullness, depending on whether she gives th;em out or receives them. Anorexics are enthusiasts: they live treason or the double turning away in several ways. They betray hunger, because hunger tricks them by making them subject to the organism; they betray the family because the family betrays them by subjecting them to the family meal and whole family politics of consumption (to put in its place an uninterrupted consumption, but one that is neutralized, sanitized); finally they betray food, because food is treacherous by nature (the anorexic thinks that food is... fundamentally bad, hence the need to select and extract particles from it , or to spit it back out). 'I'm starving,' she says, grabbing two 'slimming yoghurts'. Trick-the-hunger, trick-the-family, trick-the-food. In short, anorexia is a history of politics: to be the involuted of the organism, the family or the consumer society...." (Deleuze & Parnet, Dialogues II. pp110-111)

I chose this example just because I finished reading the book last week and had it fresh in my mind, but it's at least fairly relevant. Things as fundamental as our conception of the self and our relationship to our bodies are constituted in political terms. But this should almost be a truism - I think almost anyone on reflection will admit that even these sorts of things are historically and socially situated. For in all seriousness, what could actually be absolutely interior? Nothing cognitive, that's certain. The bare neural fact of experiencing hunger, perhaps. Raw sensation. But even sense-perception is culturally mediated - our context partially determines what colors we can pick out in the world, and certainly determines how we carve up our bare perceptions into objects that we ascribe properties or features. And introspection seems by definition a cognitive event: we "look in" at our self from our self and analyze or evaluate. And those evaluations are, of course, mediated by social location and context.

And I'll add my own thought - there's an economy of anorexia. The anorexic makes bargains and deals with herself. She'll put dressing on her salad at lunch - telling herself that she'll go without dinner. She'll have a slightly larger portion at dinner - telling herself that it means going without yoghurt at breakfast. This negotiation between anorexic void-desiring and fullness-desiring multiplies and alienates desire from the self. The self that consumes isn't the same self that refuses, and the anorexic alternates between experiencing either hunger or the desire to refuse food as a stranger and an imposition on her experience. This is a second way in which anorexia constitutes a political system: it makes evident the multiplicity of selves that constitute subjectivity and frames some of those selves as Other. Is the Other is inside you, than your inside is clearly political.

I want to take a moment to warn against reading this in a particularly destructive way, that is, as me just saying that what's REALLY important is the society or culture and the individual is irrelevant (I say destructive because it would be a reading that would preserve everything I'm critical of in putting forward this analysis). Neither should some of my almost solipsistic rhetoric in other places be taken as me saying that what's REALLY important is the individual and society is in some kind of weird inaccessible realm. Nor should I be understood as taking a compromise position ("Well, of course it's both! Duh!" If I ever hear somebody say this in a classroom setting, I almost alwasy want to shoot them. Right there, right then. Why? Because it's the most vacuous response one can ever have to a question of that sort. I think the paradigmatic case is in high school history classes, when the question is something like, "Was it economic interests or political beliefs that started the American Revolution?" And somebody thinks they're so totally fucking clever and can see the big picture, so they lean back and say "Well of course it's both!" And then I let out an inarticulate scream of rage and blow their head off with the .45 I keep in my messenger bag for this sole purpose. And while the asshole bleeds from the gushing stump where their head used to be, I explain: The question isn't as dumb as you want it to be. The question "which was the cause" is big people code for, "let's have a discussion about the relationship between and relative importance of these various causes, preferably through the form of debate in which some of us defend the importance of one, some of us defend the importance of the other, and then through a process of articulation and opposition we discover some interesting readings of the historical data we have at our disposal." Saying "it's both" is just a conversational abortion. It's a transparently obvious fact that short circuits the real discussion that's to be had). My stance is that the entire radical opposition of individual and society isn't particularly interesting or useful. It's true that you have no kind of access to a transcendental realm of the Other. It's also true that your most interior features are structured by your relationships with others (little o). The implication ought to be that this sort of radical division of mental space between what's mine (my emotions, my thoughts, my dreams) and what is external to me (my job, my studies, my hobbies - the practices in which I'm engaged) should be discarded. My last post should be read in this way - not as privileging the social over the individual, but deflating that distinction.

e.e. cummings:

so many selves(so many fiends and gods
each greedier than every)is a man
(so easily one in another hides;
yet man can,being all,escape from none)

so huge a tumult is the simplest wish:
so pitiless a massacre the hope
most innocent(so deep's the mind of flesh
and so awake what waking calls asleep)

so never is most lonely man alone
(his briefest breathing lives some planet's year,
his longest life's a heartbeat of some sun;
his least unmotion roams the youngest star)

—how should a fool that calls him 'I' presume
to comprehend not numerable whom?

Anti-Manifesto I: Towards the Micropolitical

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:21:30 GMT

Politics does not begin with system building or grand proclamations. It begins with you. The political is not something that happens on Beacon Hill or in Washington DC, it is something that we are engaged with on an almost constant basis. One can almost imagine the personification of politics saying in the words of the gospel of Matthew, "Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them". Music is political. Television is political. Sex is political. Conversations are political. The family is political. Friendships are political. Even introspection is political, because the Other is always already present in your thoughts, and at the point where you enter into a relationship of whatever kind with the Other, the political is born. Aristotle called human beings political animals. What, then, is a person who says they are "apolitical"? Or "not interested in politics"? Deluded. The leopard can't change its spots, and the human being cannot ever divorce itself from human relationships, not without denying its own humanity. We must therefore face the problematic of politics, whether we want to or not.

So consider the micro-politics of your everyday life. How do you interact with your friends? With your colleagues and co-workers and comrades? Presumably it is not on the basis of some kind of hierarchical structure. Imagine it: directors and sub-directors of optimal fun distribution, carefully arranging times for you to meet, scheduling activities, assigning responsibilities - this should sound absurd. Clearly hierarchical arrangements are not ideal for this kind of relationship. Circles of friends are diffuse groups with unstable memberships, in which no individual has anything like authority over the others. Power relations may emerge, but they are dynamic, fluid and informal. And in some way, we feel this is as it should be. The introduction of hierarchy destroys those things we find valuable in friendship. The spontaneous joy we take in meeting another as an equal suffocates under the weight of dramatic power imbalances. And when those imbalances are formalized and static, they remove even the bare possibility for friendship as such.

As proof of this last claim, consider your relationships with those who occupy positions of superiority or inferiority with respect to you in an organization: your manager or employee or teacher. It is impossible to ever truly be a "friend" of one of these people without dissolving, wholly or partially, the power imbalance that defines your relationship in that organization. Because as long as you interact with Rob, your manager, in his office as manager, you aren't interacting with Rob at all. Rob is reduced to his function in the organization - if Rob is willing to look the other way for you when you violate policy because he likes you, he actually ceases to be a manager, a functioning member of that organization, insofar as he is being your friend in helping you. Or perhaps the case of a teacher will make the principle clearer. Think of the teacher in high school with whom you were/are closest, to whom you were something resembling a friend. In all likelihood it is precisely because in some way that instructor was willing to forgo framing his or her relationship with you in organizational terms. He or she dealt with you as something closer to an equal, not an object of discipline.

As a final piece of evidence, turn to relationships that best exemplify raw authority - the disobedient student and the school principle, or the lawbreaker and the cop, or the corporation and the customer. Here friendship has no place. Both participants interact not as individual human beings speaking to the Other, but as members of a hierarchical structure that assigns roles to each. Stated differently, each person just fills a slot. The person at the register scans the customer's purchase, hands them their bag, and moves on, just like she did to the last 100. The cop arrests the lawbreaker for their infraction, the cop's view of the law and the people involved in the situation pushed aside. What's crucial here is the element of dehumanization that is necessary for the exercise of unadulterated power.

Why do we enter into relationships with others that are profoundly dehumanizing? Largely because we have no choice. Nobody finds being treated as an object or an entry in an organizational chart enriching or fulfilling. We do so to eat, to get by, to get a paycheck, to live up to expectations, or because of the threat of violence. What value we find in these places - school, say - is wholly separate from their hierarchical structure. People who enjoy their classes do so because of the material and the personal strength of the instructor, not from the power structures in which they happen to be situated. Anyone who has ever learned something new or exciting from a friend in an egalitarian environment realizes this. We are bribed, coerced and threatened into mortgaging our humanity.

This first anti-manifesto ends with an old, old meditation: "As above, so below." The converse is also true. Our micropolitics can form a lens with which to consider hierarchy on a grand scale - even the State itself. Readers are invited to reflect on the implications of taking seriously our political position as individuals.

Prolegomena to the Anti-Manifestos

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:08:22 GMT

The word "manifesto" is derived from the middle French "manifeste", meaning "written declaration of views, explanation of conduct, etc., by person or persons in authority" (OED). The anarchist tradition (a contradiction in terms?) has had too much of manifestos. Too many proclamations of revolution. Too many vanguard movements. Too many people's parties. Too many impotent scribblings. Too many squabbling self-titled revolutionaries bickering over whose vision of liberation is the One True Revolution. The anarchist tradition has had too much of the anarchist tradition. A declaration or an explanation isn't needed or available to us. Declarations and explanations are ostentive, they point beyond themselves, to actions or to ideas or to lives. They are, by their nature, incomplete. But what is there to point to? The question that the anarchist must face after two centuries of theorizing is, "Whence the Revolution?" It hasn't come. There have been revolutions (small r) in Russia and Spain and Mexico and on the streets of France - but the anarchist society hasn't emerged. Whether it's been the Stalinists, the Fascists, the central state, or the anarchists themselves, something has always co-opted or crushed revolutions. And so there is nothing to point to but the tired protest politics that have become stripped of their raw power by decades of reading from the same script. Nothing to declare except the same stale principles that reek of the 19th century. Nothing to explain but failure.

So these will be anti-manifestos. Their aim will not be to declare or justify, but to be self-justifying. Because at the end of history, in the shadow of political liberalism, simply expounding the principles of universal emancipation and autonomy has become an empty gesture. The only way they can be made meaningful again is to direct them towards concrete political action. And preparatory to revolution there is one form of political action that necessarily precedes all others.

The goal of the anti-manifestos will be to make you revolutionaries.

Departure

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:43:19 GMT

"This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight..."

-Deleuze & Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus

"As for us, He has appointed the job of permanent unemployment.
If he wanted us to work, after all,
He would not have created this wine. wine
With a skinfull of this, Sir, this
would you rush out to commit economics?"

--Jalaloddin Rumi, Diwan-e Shams