My comrades in the Situations collective have a TV show and I’m the guest on this episode. Check it out!
Zizek
wow, I never used to understand the big deal about Zizek, pro or con. But last night at Left Forum, I got it. He’s brilliant and funny and his energy is actually really fun to be around. He gave a well-argued and super smart defense of coarse language as part of what solidarity looks like. (Then of course dumb people said, how dare you use coarse language!) He talked about not fetishizing the oppressed and their roots or their “essential goodness” but struggling in solidarity with them for the commons of humanity.
For instance, refugees — it’s not because they are perfect humans that we demand open borders, but because mobility is everybody’s right. And when everybody can go everywhere, then we talk about the cultural issues and clashes that are real and that come up when we treat people like our fellow human beings and not like fetishized objects of our white savior complexes.
I disagreed with plenty that he said, but Zizek is provocative and funny and I am surprised how much I enjoyed his talk. It could have been called “against paternalism, for solidarity.” Or “against bourgeois middle-class bullshit moralism and for laughter.” I highly recommend your watching it on youtube and the Left Forum website when it goes up in a day or two.
the patron saint of slacker politics
nice interview with my all time film idol, Richard Linklater. a couple of highlights:
“After Slacker, he was regarded as a spokesman for Generation X, but Linklater never saw the slacker generation the same way as the establishment did. “Slacker means two different things to me and the rest of the world,” he says. “The slacker world was the world I found myself living in. The 1980s underground was pretty interesting. Everyone I met was an artist of some kind, a musician or writer or painter; lovers of life, appreciators, and punk rocker-type people, who you didn’t know what they did but you could tell they sure liked their music. Nobody talked about their jobs, what they had to do to pay their rent. It was no surprise that mainstream culture decided these were a bunch of lazy do-nothings, because, by their judgment, they were not productive. They weren’t fitting into the free-market society…”
also
“I’ve waited for a candidate like Bernie Sanders my whole adult life, so when there’s a guy there who’s actually professing it, you have to support him. I’m a natural socialist.”
Scary Indeed
I guess I must have a number of Facebook friends, acquaintances from high school, who are stay at home moms. Because I constantly see posts about the hellish everyday life of these frazzled ladies, and all of them, without fail, frame the issue as though the sadomasochistic nightmare they describe is the only possible way that Americans in the twenty-first century could go about the business of raising and loving our little ones. Consider the blogger “Scary Mommy,” just one representative of a cry for help from every desperate corner of the internet:
http://www.scarymommy.com/im-not-taking-a-break-im-breaking/?utm_source=FB
What a goddamn nightmare. And the really scary thing is, in neighborhoods all over this country, the very same thing is happening (read the comments section if you don’t believe me). Which is crazy, because without a doubt the kids would be so much happier in a group setting with lots of other kids and the mom would be so much happier doing something more fulfilling than cutting plums and trying not to yell. This is a structural problem in our society, and until we all figure out together that the old immigrant urban extended family had something right — with a bunch of mixed age kids hanging out pretty independently, playing together and learning from one another, with parents, grandparents, and neighbors nearby to mellowly supervise and also enjoy each other’s company — these little hells will be all too common. It’s such a bad scene, for the moms and the kids. In the meantime, perhaps this unfortunate person could think about getting a co-op going with other parents, and trade off so that a couple of the parents take all the kids one day and the other parents can do something else on their “off” days. And then there’s always the demand for free high-quality European-style subsidized day care, which would solve this lady’s problem straight out.
What these bloggers and their commenters never seem to acknowledge is that the isolation of the nuclear family, especially in its super privatized suburban iteration, is a stupid way to raise children and a waste of (largely) female energy. They ought to be reminded that in the 1970s, women realized that this was a fucked up situation for all involved, and they fought to transform it. Not successfully enough, since what most women got instead of liberation was the chance to be doubly stressed at home and now at some stupid job too. So lots of (mostly upper) middle class women decided just to stay home and here many of them are, back in the 1950s. But this is a retreat from women’s liberation that is bad for everyone.
All of us need to take up the fight for a domestic life that breeds happiness rather than neurotic people — cuz if you think these kids aren’t internalizing your repressed resentment, Scary Mommy, you’re dreaming — and the first thing we have to do is to stop pretending that this state of affairs is anything but a defeat of liberatory feminist political struggle. Mommy bloggers, like so many today, are incredibly good at articulating the minutiae of the personal. Sadly, far too many seem to have missed the memo that the personal is political.
The Mediterranean Imaginary
My essay on austerity, philosophy, and the Mediterranean Sea, in the new issue of Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination. Check it out!
Slackerpolitics on Althusser
Hey check out the Left Forum panel sponsored by Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination and Verso Books, publisher of the new translation of Althusser’s On the Reproduction of Capitalism. My analysis of Althusser’s newly-translated text comes in at about 16 minutes, but the whole panel was super cool… Enjoy!
Slackerpolitics at the Left Forum
I’ll be on a couple of panels at this weekend’s Left Forum in New York City… the details are here. I remember when it was called the Socialist Scholars Conference and it was just a couple of hundred lefties… now there are nearly 5,000 participants and it’s super fun! Hope to see you there.
Racism, Free Speech, and NBA Player Power
Things I hate about the Sterling “scandal”:
1. it’s only the obvious, old-fashioned, individualistic racism that Americans have any sense of how to oppose. But the big stuff is less personal, more complex, more structural and cultural, and takes a different angle to oppose.
2. um, freedom of speech.
3. nobody went apeshit over his blatant housing discrimination, which actually caused major material harm
4. again, freedom of speech, which is precisely about the freedom for people to say things you DON’T like
What I love about the whole thing:
* Sterling is being removed as boss by a group of powerful workers — the richest, most powerful group of black workers on planet earth, in fact — who threatened to withhold their labor during the busy time if they didn’t get what they wanted, which was for Sterling not to be the boss anymore.
I’m a bit torn here , but the power of the NBA players — when they even intimate the possibility of a work stoppage during playoffs — to expropriate the property of a dickhead boss… I think that one’s got my heart.
Free riding and the slacker politics of energy
The man says solar energy is bad because it’s “free riding.” Well, the cats behind ALEC may be evil, but they certainly ain’t dumb.
ALEC calls for penalties on “free rider” solar panel owners
As usual, the representatives of capital are crystal clear about the fact that the slacker ethic is an enormous threat to their bottom line, perhaps the biggest one they face. They deploy the Protestant work ethic to attack energy sources that are unprofitable, but this line only works as politically effective discourse if we all buy the idea that free riding is somehow bad. Shameful, even. That’s why there is no more important political goal for those who oppose the logic of capital, than a transvaluation of precisely these values.
Because ALEC is absolutely right — solar energy is free riding. But rather than shy away from this reality, we have to embrace just this characteristic of solar — which is exactly what makes it so environmentally superior. It’s passive. It’s free. It’s slacker energy.
Resentment against free riding is not so hard to stir up among an overworked population. But how difficult is it, really, to help people tap into just how much they want it? I mean, free. riding. Sounds like surfing, like taking a motorcycle on the open road, like rock and roll, like good times. People love that shit. So for starters, I think that all our pro-solar enviro ads should now be set to the classic track “Free Ride.”
What solar panels show us is that there is simply no scarcity of energy on earth. There’s plenty. And it’s basically free. Time to lose the resentment and work ethic — generated by an artificially perpetuated scarcity — that ALEC is relying on to continue profiting from the creation of this fake scarcity. Free riders: don’t beat em. Join em.
slackerpolitics 