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Saturday, January 26, 2013

Anarcho-Transhumanoid Condemns My Rejection of Paramilitary Gun-Nuttery

The anarcho-transhumanoid author of the "Queer Singularity" website has predictably condemned my rejection of paramilitary gun-nuttery (for example, most recently, here and here). The following is edited and adapted from my response to this critique, the original version of which appears in the comments at the end of the link provided above (UPDATE: It hasn't appeared there yet, actually, it is apparently under moderation. UPDATE TWO: Apparently the text did not pass muster according to the stringent standards of this free-thinking self-critical anti-authoritarian total anarchist).

First things first. The declaration in your piece that I "promote bureaucratized coercion" is false. The further declaration that I repeatedly assert "the United States is a [fully accomplished] accountable and democratic state" is also false. The still further declaration that "Defending the U.S. state’s integrity means supporting settler colonialism" and presumably constitutes a celebration of this country's horrific history of genocidal territorial expansion is not only false, but also an arrant absurdity.

It is true that I refuse the facile anarchist identification of the state-form with violence as such: This is because I recognize that violence both precedes and exceeds the state-form and that not even the most tyrannical state is exhaustively characterized by the violence it undertakes and exacerbates.

And it is true that I refuse the facile anarchist identification of nonviolence with anti-statism, because I recognize that whatever measure of accountably elected leadership, accountably administered maintenance of public and common goods, protected nonviolent expression, free assembly and organization, equitable legal recourse, and public provision of general welfare to ensure actually legibly informed nonduressed consent to the terms of everyday commerce is available in any particular state-form is indispensable to provide alternatives for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes (including disputes over what is regarded as violence) and toward the attainment of the democratic value of equity-in-diversity.

These positions hardly lead me to deny the many conspicuous historical and ongoing instances in which particular states have undertaken particular acts of violence and exploitation. Indeed, I endlessly call attention to such acts and condemn them and actively educate, agitate, and organize in resistance to them.

I also take great pains to point out the permanent vulnerability of state-formations to corruption, abuse, violation, expropriation as an indispensable part of any substantial project to democratize the terms of public life. Such recognitions do not properly endorse infantile tantrums to smash the state, but should fuel our resolve to democratize the state.

In this post you identify in an unqualified way as a "transhumanist," although eugenicism, unsustainable hyper-consumerism, techno-fetishistic triumphalism, pseudo-science, and technofixated PR and apologiae for corporate-military elites are all prevalent throughout that movement, indeed are essential to it. You also seem to think it is not only valid but even cute to equate the politics of a lifelong activist and teacher of environmentalism, nonviolence, social democracy and democratic socialism, queer feminism, and art with the politics of white-racist patriarchal paramilitary gun-nuttery.

You have lost your way.

4 comments:

Summerspeaker said...

The declaration in your piece that I "promote bureaucratized coercion" is false.

So how do you propose to imprison traitors?

The still further declaration that "Defending the U.S. state’s integrity means supporting settler colonialism" and presumably constitutes a celebration of this country's horrific history of genocidal territorial expansion is not only false, but also an arrant absurdity.

I draw on both anarchism and critical Indigenous studies to make this assessment. The United States literally exists because of the dispossession of Native peoples, both historical and ongoing. Even within the nationalist legal framework I consider bogus, the United States stands out as an illegitimate occupier.

You have lost your way.

As should be abundantly clear by now, we ain't going to the same place.

Out of curiosity, would you describe Wounded Knee '73 as treason on the part of AIM folks?

Dale Carrico said...

So how do you propose to imprison traitors?

Do you believe that public liberty is diminished if people are not free to spray crowds with bullets, if every insurrection and riot is not joyfully facilitated, if children are not restrained from leaping unthinkingly into highway traffic? I am actually giving you the benefit of the doubt that yours is not the caricatural apologia for total criminality critics often ascribe to anarchists. If having any legal system at all -- even granting the inevitable vulnerability of the best of these to abuses and the necessity therefore of vigilance, accountability, ongoing review and reform -- is "bureaucratized coercion" in your book, then you're obviously just trolling.

The United States literally exists because of the dispossession of Native peoples, both historical and ongoing. Even within the nationalist legal framework I consider bogus, the United States stands out as an illegitimate occupier.

No shit. Meanwhile, activists are struggling to get funding and legal protections in the violence against women act being blocked by Republican racist-misogynist bigots in Congress right now to actually extend the imperfect actually existing US rule of law into reservations where real women are dealing with real violences in ways that can really be redressed by the real administrative apparatus of the real polity in the real world. But, sure, Summer, you go right ahead and indulge instead in the more "radical" "politics" of pretending our genocidal history is going to lead to the dis-invention of the United States.

we ain't going to the same place

Quite to the contrary, we are both citizens in the same country with the same actually existing responsibilities (which, as an anarchist, you may disdain, but they are still there anyway), and we are both mortals who are going to die (which, as a transhumanist, you may also deny, but it is still going to happen anyway). You are deluded and expect to be applauded for it. Bored now.

About Wounded Knee, and obviously this is a ridiculous simplification even if less so than the one you're framing demanded of me -- the protestors were obviously right to point to the corruption of Wilson and his goons and were right to point out the repeated betrayals by the US of treaty obligations. You will be unsurprised to hear me say I think organized non-violent civil disobedience would have been a better and more effective response to these injustices. The fact is that such a form of resistance would have exacted high costs -- as the alternative chosen by the protestors also did -- especially given Wilson's violence and the obvious willingness of the US to engage in violence as well (indeed the military response to the occupation seems to me as obviously counterproductive as the occupation itself). I was not there, and it is not for me to fling such judgments around. My personal view of nonviolent resistance is inflected as much by Fanon as by King, and it seems to me that no act of civil disobedience is is immune from the retroactive assignment of "violence" and hence these matters are especially fraught ones. I could go into it more deeply -- and indeed have done in posts available under the heading "Against Anarchy" in the sidebar -- but I don't think you are a good faith interlocutor or a serious person worthy of this kind of attention. That is a judgment I am sorry for, but you have earned it. You could win back my regard, I prefer to offer it than to withhold it -- but it would take a real and extended effort on your part I think you presently and possibly permanently incapable of. Prove me wrong.

Summerspeaker said...

If having any legal system at all -- even granting the inevitable vulnerability of the best of these to abuses and the necessity therefore of vigilance, accountability, ongoing review and reform -- is "bureaucratized coercion" in your book, then you're obviously just trolling.

You're marvelously obtuse here. As even you have previously acknowledged, nearly everybody who contemplates modern nation-states and their legal system recognizes that they rely on coercion. Robert Cover, for example, writes that the law is staked in blood. Disagree if you want, sure. Tell me how anarchism would reduce the species to savagery. Quote Hobbes. But don't accuse me of insincerity. Bureaucratized coercion stand out as a fundamental feature of modernity. This may come as a shock to you, but humans exists long before prisons. We can do so again.

Meanwhile, activists are struggling to get funding and legal protections in the violence against women act being blocked by Republican racist-misogynist bigots in Congress right now to actually extend the imperfect actually existing US rule of law into reservations where real women are dealing with real violences in ways that can really be redressed by the real administrative apparatus of the real polity in the real world.

At the same time, real Native people also organize beyond the U.S. legal framework that proposes putting more folks in jail to solve heteropatriarchical violence. Survivors and communities take justice into their own hands. Some - such as Gender Anarky's Amazon - seek the total destruction of the settler state.

But, sure, Summer, you go right ahead and indulge instead in the more "radical" "politics" of pretending our genocidal history is going to lead to the dis-invention of the United States.

This I will do.

Dale Carrico said...

Dis-inventing the United States is what you are "doing" is it? Your answer is a celebration of armed vigilantism and warlordism? That's fine, the world is full of idiots and assholes, but you have the nerve to peddle your recipe for more violence as hippy queer love? What was that word you used again, again, "obtuse"? But far from marvelous, you're comepletely full of shit. Everybody knows every state originates in a scene of violation, ever read Aeschylus? You keep repeating that "insight" like it is a magic formula endorsing the narcissistic performance art you like to congratulate yourself on as sooper-radicalism even when nobody materially benefits from it in any way. Violence inheres as a permanent material/epistemic possibility in the fact of human plurality itself, violence both precedes and exceeds the state. The work of resisting, reforming, responding to state violence is indispensably indebted to the work of democratizing the state. You are not an ally in the work of democracy, you are a thoroughly frivolous and unreliable person, you are a reactionary in fact, you are exposed. Best of luck to you.