The Season of Losses

A bit over three years ago I had a nose bleed that turned into a life threatening loss of liters of blood and weeks in the hospital, and I have never entirely recovered my bearings in the aftermath of that event. I was diagnosed with a blood condition about which there is little understanding (the tell-tale "ideopathic" term was part of the diagnosis from the beginning and remains to this day) and for which there is little in the way of treatment (I don't drink alcohol anymore or take blood-thinning painkillers, which means all the painkillers, and I do yoga and take long walks with Eric and so on, which means I lost about a hundred twenty pounds over the last couple years and Eric and I are closer than ever after eighteen years, all of which has been great, but to this day I get my blood-tests and the doctors look at the results and do their double-takes and say something on the order of, well, my, my, your blood platelet count sure likes to run low, now, doesn't it? which inspires enormous confidence). To this day, I have panic attacks when the subway stalls and I start to imagine bleeding again confined in a train car in the tunnel beneath the waters of the Bay surrounded by panicky commuters as I bleed from the eyes, as happened in the emergency room that night. The 2016 primary fights were taking place at the time of my bleeding incident, and as I lay in my hospital bed, getting poked with needles for test after test hour after hour, I saw the rise of Trump and the idiotic undermining of the already-vulnerable HRC by fauxvolutionary fanboys as a clear preview of the hell we have been living through for the last few years. Those nights in the hospital bed were the first of the long insomnia nights that have plagued me ever since from time to time. You know, the US has always been a disgusting racist conformist money-grubbing anti-intellectual shithole, but I wanted to believe the experience of George W. Bush's idiocies and crimes had inspired a diverse ascendant Obama coalition ready to assume responsibility for the governing of the nation, push the Democratic party in more sustainable and equitable directions, and force a GOP ever more beholden to a diminishing straight white Christianist-authoritarian Base to abandon its post-Nixonian rush into authoritarianism and reactionary conspiracism. That's not at all what happened as we all know by now and the loss of hope for an embrace of nonviolent progressive change in the face of a diversifying population, climate catastrophe, and the palpable failure of market ideological pieties felt a lot like my loss of blood: the loss of the force that keeps me going. In the years since, I've lost a lot of my joy and passion for teaching as I wonder whether teaching theory really contributes to clarity about historical change when so many privileged students seem to spout theory to rationalize their complacency or provide their cynical opportunism a self-promotional self-congratulatory gloss and also as I observe so many of my best students struggling under conditions of extreme psychological distress and economic precarity... does anybody really need to be reading the lovely but esoteric Walter Benjamin or that scumbag Sigmund Freud to understand the threat posed by fossil fuel companies or Trump's Education Secretary or gun-toting bigots in this historical moment we are struggling through here and now? I have adapted my syllabi to reflect these lived urgencies (teaching theory surveys usually means at least half a term of a parade that is relentlessly stale, pale, and male as Rebecca Solnit once put it), but I am forever bedeviled by discouragement and anxiety where before teaching was a real consolation and fuel for me. During this difficult season I also lost first my beloved cat of sixteen years Sarah, then I lost my long-estranged father to early-onset Alzheimer's, then just yesterday my Mother also died, after a completely unexpected heart attack and period of nonresponsive nightmarishness on a ventilator over the last week. So much loss, of connections, of support, of standards, of hope. Mariame Kaba reminds me that "Hope Is A Discipline." I have a few weeks of winter break ahead of me in which to rest and recharge my batteries, read escapist entertainments and prepare for Spring's renewed efforts. I am reminded, as ever, of Donna Haraway's admonition that nobody knows all that is happening in the world, even the most knowledgeable, and that this means none of us knows enough to be fully justified in despair. I am despairing a bit right now, but I know that I don't know many things that would answer my despair if only I connect with them and I know the space of teaching is a space in which those connections are as well fostered as any. The art world remains a place of frivolous predation but actual artists and their actual art can be a far different story. After so much loss, I await a season of gains by rising generations in a world educated by intersectional feminism, environmental justice, and abolition democracy. We can only do our best. I wish you all the best for the coming struggles. And, you know, happy holidays.

Here Is the Syllabus For My Upcoming Fall Queer Theory Survey Course, "Queer Manifestations"

Queer Manifestations

Wednesdays, 4.15-7 FM130, August 30-December 6, 2017

Dale Carrico; e-mail: dcarrico@sfai.edu Wednesdays, 1-3.45pm Room: FM SR2; August 30-December 6, 2017

Course Blog: https://queermanifestations.blogspot.com/

Office Hours: Before and after class, and by appointment. (I will also be available on Chestnut Street on Thursdays)

Required Texts: David J. Getsy, ed., Queer (On reserve in the library. Recommended purchase: Documents in Contemporary Art, MIT/Whitechapel Gallery, 2016 ISBN: 9780262528672.) All other texts are available online or will be made available as handouts.

Course Requirements: Attendance/Participation, 15%; Co-Facilitation, 15%; In-Class Report (10-15 mins.), 15%, Symposium Presentation, 15%; Seminar Paper, 10 pp., 40% (subject to contingencies)

Attendance Policy:  Attendance and punctuality are expected. Necessary absences should be discussed in advance whenever possible.

Course Description: There is something queer about the manifesto form as such, in its bringing to voice and vision a derangement in our sense of what is politically possible and important. In the deadening epoch of the closet the queer manifesto is an interruption of silence, but like every manifesto it is above all an unembarrassed and emancipatory eruption of desire into the collective work of historical and political worldmaking. Into the prosaic efforts of partisan organization and legislative reform, the ranting and raving of the manifesto is an invigorating and interfering infusion of political poetry. We will read radical manifestos flung from the scrum of insurrection and frustration across continents and through generations of lgbtiq civil rights and liberation struggles and we will contemplate hallucinations of promise and formulations of protest from visionaries in the belly of the beast, from Plato's Symposium to Solanas's SCUM.

Provisional Schedule of Classes

Week One | Wednesday, August 28

Introductions

Week Two | Wednesday, September 6
Plato, Symposium

Co-facilitations:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Natalie Clifford Barney, The Unknown Woman -- 2. Jean Cocteau, The White Book

3. Richard Bruce Nugent, You See, I Am A Homosexual -- 4. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
In-Class Report:

Week Three | Wednesday, September 13 
Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Co-Facilitation:
1. Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young -- 2. Preface for The Picture of Dorian Gray -- 3.Wilde on Trial

Also, from "Queer": 4. Jack Smith, Statements, Ravings and Epigrams

In Class Report: 

Week Four | Wednesday, September 20 
Susan Sontag, Notes On Camp / Bruce La Bruce, Anti-Camp

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Helio Oiticica, Mario Montez, tropicamp -- 2. Amy Sillman, AbEx and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism -- 3. Charles Ludlam, Manifesto: Ridiculous Theater, Scourge of Human Folly -- 4. Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous
In Class Reports:

Week Five | Wednesday, September 27 
Harry Hay, Mattachine, Radical Fairies (handout)
Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic -- Poetry Is Not A Luxury
Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk -- 2. Tee Corinne, On Sexual Art -- 3. Harmony Hammond, Class Notes -- 4. Elmgreen & Dragset, Performative Constructions: In Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

In Class Reports:

Week Six | Wednesday, October 4 
Valarie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto / The Combahee River Collective Statement

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Hudson, Sex Pot -- 2. Catherine Lord, Their Memory Is Playing Tricks on Her: Toward A Calligraphy of Rage -- 3. Hanh Thi Pham, Statement -- 4. Zanele Muholi, Isilumo siyaluma (Period Pains)

In Class Reports:

Week Seven | Wednesday, October 11 
Sandy Stone, The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Susan Stryker, Transgender History, Heteronormativity, and Disciplinarity -- 2. Renate Lorenz, Drag: Radical, Transtemporal, Abstract -- 3. Paul B. Preciado, Videopenetration -- 4. Ma Liuming, Fen-Ma Liuming

In Class Report:

Week Eight | Wednesday, October 18 
Eve Sedgwick, Axiomatic

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Zoe Leonard, I Want A Dyke for President -- 2. Ulrike Muller, Bulletin -- 3. Marlon T. Riggs, Black Macho Revisited: Confessions of a Snap! Queen -- 4. Allyson Mitchell, Deep Lez
In Class Report:

Week Nine | Wednesday, October 25 

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (This link brings up an entire book -- for our discussion you need read only the "Introduction: Acting in Concert" and Chapter One: "Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy," pp. 1-39.)

Co-Facilitations:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Toxic Titties, The Mamaist Manifesto -- 2. Holly Hughes, Breaking the Fourth Wall -- 3. Wu Tsang, In Order To Fall Apart As Complex Beings, We Need First To Be Able To Live -- 4. Carlos Motta, We Who Feel Differently: A Manifesto

In Class Reports:

Week Ten | Wednesday, November 1
Jaspir Puar, Homonationalism and Biopolitics (Introduction to the book Terrorist Assemblages)
(supplemental) Jaspir Puar, I'd Rather Be A Cyborg Than A Goddess

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. K8 Hardy, amifesto -- 2. Emily Roysdon, Queer Love -- 3. Richard Fung, Beyond Domestication -- Prem Sahib, To Make Queer Art Now
In Class Report:

Week Eleven | Wednesday, November 6
Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Malik Gaines, A defence of marriage act: Notes on the social performance of queer ambivalence -- 2. Vaginal Davis, Twee & sympathy: A manifesto -- 3. Alexandro Segade, On Queer Reenactment -- 4. Gordon Hall, New Space Education

In Class Reports:

Week Twelve | Wednesday, November 13

Workshopping Final Paper

Week Thirteen | Wednesday, November 20

Our Symposium (first panels)

Week Fourteen | Wednesday, November 27

Our Symposium (second panels)

Week Fifteen | Wednesday, December 4 
Sara Ahmed, Feminist Killjoy and Concluding Remarks.

In Class Reports (Last Call)

YES! Warren Proposes A Public Option for the Internet

Along with her plan to provide reliable low-cost non-predatory financial services via the post office, this is another long-cherished pet policy proposal I always wanted but never expected to see an actually-viable candidate proposing in a Presidential campaign. I've got quibbles, but the more often "public option for the internet" circulates as a phrase in public the better off we are all likely to be, the more likely breaking up Amazon, Google, facebook, Apple, and media giants gets. Follow the link for a whole article, here's an excerpt:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) announced a plan Wednesday to create a public option for the internet, aiming to ensure universal broadband access... To enact her plan, Warren hopes to first pass a federal law preventing state-level restrictions that have hampered municipalities that want to pursue a public internet system. She would then create an $85-billion federal grant program to shoulder 90% of the costs for utility cooperatives, nonprofits, cities, counties and Native American tribes interested in laying the fiber needed to bring broadband -- contemporary high-speed internet -- to the mostly rural regions that do not currently have it. The entities applying for the money -- for-profit utilities are notably ineligible -- would have to agree to serve as internet service providers for residents they serve, offering at least one high-speed plan and one plan affordable for low-income people. [Whether this actually qualifies as a fully public option on my undersanding depends on the details, whatever they are this is likely a great improvement on the status quo and nudges this regulatory/governance discourse in socially democratizing directions --d] “I will make sure every home in America has a fiber broadband connection at a price families can afford,” Warren writes in a Medium post introducing her rural investment plan. “That means publicly-owned and operated networks -- and no giant {internet service providers) running away with taxpayer dollars.” ... About one-quarter of the population living in rural areas and one-third of the population living in Native American tribal lands lack broadband access, according to the FCC. Warren also hopes major cities will take advantage of her plan, noting that even in urban areas where infrastructure is robust, the cost of high-speed internet keeps it out of reach for many low-income families...

Let Them Eat Disruption

After a generation of Reagan Republican neo-feudalist Randroidal asshole "Idea Guys" dismantled the New Deal and Great Society for short term-cash, the next generation of neo-feudalist techbro VC "thought leader" hustlers dismantled what was left of society for short-term cash again. We praise and coddle them to this day, as they kill us day after day after day after day. It isn't exactly a mystery how we got here or where this is all going.

Wilde on Impeachment

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

Compostable

via BBC:

Washington has become the first state in the US to legalise human composting. Under the new law, people there can now choose to have their body turned into soil after their death. The process is seen as an alternative to cremations and burials, and as a practical option in cities where land for graveyards is scarce. At the end of the composting, loved ones are given the soil, which they can use in planting flowers, vegetables or trees. The bill was signed into law by Governor Jay Inslee on Tuesday...  Katrina Spade, who lobbied for the law to be introduced, founded a company that could be the first to provide the service. "Recomposition offers an alternative to embalming and burial or cremation that is natural, safe, sustainable, and will result in significant savings in carbon emissions and land usage[.]"

Sign me up the minute it is legal in California. Feed me to a plum, ginkgo, apple-pear, or maple tree, and I might manage to facilitate after death some small beauty in and healing of the world. Would go some way to compensate my many ineptitudes trying the same in life.

Syllabus For My Upcoming Berkeley Intensive: "What Is Compelling?"

Rhetoric 10: The Rhetoric of Argument 

"What Is Compelling? Argument, Reconciliation, Obligation"

Summer 2019, Session A, 2-4.30pm., Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 88 Dwinelle Hall

Instructor, Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edy; ndaleca@gmail.com;
Course Blog: http://whatiscompelling.blogspot.com

Participation/Attendance/In-Class Activities, 25%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Mid-Term Exam, 30%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 30%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)

Course Description

The arc of the moral universe is a longing... and it bends from just us.

This course provides students with tools they can use to make better, more compelling, arguments and also to read arguments in better, more critical, ways. We will draw the tools for our argumentative toolboxes from the long history of rhetoric, from sophistical dissoi logoi, to the Aristotelian appeals, to Quintilian's four master tropes, to the rich archive of formal and informal fallacies, to argument modeled on litigation via Toulmin's schema, to argument modeled on mediation via Rogerian synthesis, to the pragmatism of the ends of argument. All the while we are workshopping these technical skills we will also be reading and discussing a range of texts that tackle questions of the reach and forms of violence and nonviolence in historical struggle and in everyday life. These texts will likewise draw from a long history, from Immanuel Kant, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt to Arundhati Roy, Judith Butler, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. We will also talk through a play by Euripides, an essay by Nietzsche, a novel by Octavia Butler, a film by Cronenberg… The crucial thing to understand about the course is that we will not be taking on two separate projects, one practical and another theoretical. This course proposes that there is an indispensable relation between the traditional focus of rhetoric as instruction in the art of making compelling arguments and the theoretical preoccupation of many rhetoricians with questions of what violence or compulsion ultimately consists. It is commonplace to see Persuasion offered up as an alternative to the violent adjudication of disputes or hear Argument idealized as a space "outside" of violence. But the truth is that many arguments rely on the acceptance of a violent status quo or depend on conventional assumptions that deny marginal testimonies to violation. Also, many arguments stealthily threaten violence while at once congratulating themselves on their peacefulness. Ultimately, the course proposes that it is rhetoric's definitive concern with the traffic between the literal and figurative dimensions of language and its situated understanding of truth-telling that connects the work of rhetoric with a project of reconciliation that resists violence even as we cannot help but risk it.

A Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One

May 28 SKILL SET: Key Definitions
[1] Rhetoric is the facilitation of efficacious discourse as well as an ongoing inquiry into the terms on the basis of which discourse comes to seem efficacious or not.
[2] A text is an event experienced as arising from intention, offered up to the hearing of an audience, and obligating a responsiveness equal to it.
[3] An argument is a claim supported by reasons and/or evidence.
Introductions: Rhetoric as occasional, interested, figurative; The literal as conventional, the figurative as deviant.
May 29 SKILL SET: Reading Critically/Writing Critically; Audience/Intentions -- Audiences: Sympathetic, Unsympathetic, Apathetic; Intentions: Interrogation, Conviction, Persuasion, Reconciliation
Euripides: Hecuba (Here is a link to the last few lines of the play, cut off from the online version for some reason)
May 30 SKILL SET: Aristotelian rhetoric; Ethos, Pathos, Logos; Writing A Precis
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

Week Two

June 4  SKILL SET: Four Habits of Argumentative Writing: 1. Formulate a Strong Thesis, 2. Define Your Terms, 3, Substantiate/Contextualize, 4, Anticipate Objections; Performativity
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
June 5 SKILL SET: The Toulmin Schema
William May, "Rising to the Occasion of Our Death" (In-Class Handout)
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Arundhati Roy, War Is Peace

June 6 SKILL SET: Rogerian Rhetoric
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Logan Rimel, My "Nonviolent" Stance Was Met With Heavily Armed Men

supplemental/referenced texts this week:

Henry David Thoreau, A Plea for Captain John Brown
Howard Zinn, On Henry David Thoreau and When To Resist An Immoral State 

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
Ella Baker, Bigger Than A Hamburger
Combahee River Collective Statement

Week Three

June 11 SKILL SET: Logoi Dissoi

Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish The Body of the Condemned, Docile Bodies, Panoptism

Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? Chapters 1, 2, 6

June 12 SKILL SET: Propositional Analysis; Enthymemes, Syllogisms, Formal Fallacies, Informal Fallacies (short day)
June 13 SKILL SET: Literal/Figurative Language; Figures, Tropes, Schemes; Four Master Tropes
Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

supplemental/referenced texts this week:

Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy
Nietzsche, selections from The Gay Science

Week Four

June 12 Mid-Term Examination
June 13 Screening and Discussion of the Film, "A History of Violence," dir. Cronenberg
June 14 Hannah Arendt, Reflections On Violence and "Must Eichmann Hang?" (In-Class Handout)

Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence from The Wretched of the Earth

supplemental/referenced texts this week:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations

Hannah Arendt on forgiveness from The Human Condition

Week Five

June 19 Octavia Butler, Kindred (Purchase in time for class. ISBN-10: 0807083690 ISBN-13: 978-0807083697)
June 20 SKILL SET: Debate
Correspondence of Tolstoy and Gandhi
Jane Addams, New Ideals of Peace: Passing of the War Virtues 

June 21 SKILL SET: Workshopping Final Paper: Producing a Strong Thesis; Anticipating Objections; Providing Textual Support

supplemental/referenced texts this week:

Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Meaning and Practice of Ahimsa
Karuna Matena, The Power of Nonviolence
Gene Sharp, How Nonviolent Struggle Works 

Rev. William Barber, The Third Reconstruction

Week Six

June 26 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Introduction, pp. [1]-44.). 

Robert Bullard, Poverty, Pollution, and Environmental Racism 

John Bellamy Foster, The Four Laws of Ecology and the Four Anti-Ecological Laws of Capitalism

June 27 Carol Adams, Preface from Neither Man Nor Beast and Manifesto {Bacchanal}

Final Paper Due

Onboarding Offputting

With each passing year the process of "onboarding" to teach my summer intensive at Berkeley has required more and more and more steps, taken more and more and more of my time, has become more complicated, more opaque, more belligerent. During this time the process has been "automated" (which just means already overstressed overburdened underpaid adjuncts doing more and more stuff we used to get support for) while also an explosion of officers and counselors and support staff have been hired none of whom can be reached, none of whom can do anything to help but smile blandly while you fume. The hostility to teachers in teaching settings by corporatized-administrators is almost as surreal as the general proposition that enslaving a generation to student loan debt then throwing them into insecure unbenefited low-paying work is giving them "tools for a bright future" in the first place -- something I was sold myself and then sold to a generation of promising, righteous, brilliant, beautiful students. Higher education is becoming (to the extent that it wasn't always already) a vast slaughterhouse in which I am being chewed up into hamburger meat while collaborating in the chewing up of my students into hamburger meat. I sincerely cannot recommend this way of life to anybody anymore.

Corpse Compost

I have always found Frank Herbert's rather incidental observation of the Bene Gesserit practice of planting the dead beneath fruit trees in burial orchards a rather lovely sfnal conceit, and tho' I often declared it my own preference I knew there was little chance the option would be on offer when my own time comes. It turns out, however, that the state of Washington is on the verge of making available the next-best option I've heard of: In last year's Record of a Spaceborn Few Becky Chambers managed to make composting the dead seem quite a congenial prospect. It seems a safe bet that California will take this up soon enough if Washington reveals there is a demand for it without unforeseen downsides. Definitely I think being returned quickly to the living world after I die as compost sounds more appealing than cremation or coffin confinement, and as zany disposal methods Californians go for it sure beats pharaohnic cryonics, or getting shot into orbit, or compressed into costume jewelry (well, I can appreciate the high camp appeal of that last, even if it's not my sort of thing).

Ten Theses On Taxes And Democracy

An Amor Mundi Tax Day tradition:

One 

Hostility to taxes is commonplace among self-styled anarchists, as well as for right-wing "conservatives" whose advocacy of "smaller" or "more limited" government might as well be anarchism, since always only advocating ever smaller, ever more limited government without ever indicating what good government actually should be and alone can accomplish is substantially equivalent to blanket anti-governmentality in principle. Exploitation of discontent over taxes is also commonplace among neoliberal/neoconservative right-wing politicians and thinkers who want to ensure taxes subsidize primarily the fortunes of incumbent elites through extractive-industrial-financial corporate-militarism backed by complacent consumerism and organized violence. I for one do not want to smash states, but to democratize them. And an understanding and championing of taxes should be no less indispensable to the work of democratization as its obfuscation and demonization is indispensable to the work of anti-democratization.

Two 

Taxes are not really the price we pay for a civilized society -- in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s, influential phrase -- for civilization is priceless. This is just to say that commonwealth is not a private commodity but a public good. Taxes are not, for example, fees for discrete services that might be provided otherwise, nor are taxes a price for which there might be discount alternatives. Perhaps the true spirit of Holmes' phrase is captured best in a negative formulation: anti-tax zealots would appear to believe that civilization is the only free lunch.

Three 

Certainly taxes are not theft, as anarchists of the right and the left are so pleased to declare, since taxation is a precondition for the constitution and ongoing intelligibility of the claim to ownership on which notions of theft depend in the first place.

Four 

Neither should taxes be mischaracterized as forced contributions to what might instead be charitable causes, since the basic rights secured through taxation cannot be regarded as matters of charity else they are not truly rights but mere favors bestowed by privileged elites.

Five 

Taxes are not, however annoying they may seem, burdens on our freedom so much as essential enablers of freedom. Taxes, government bonds, and public fees support the public investments maintaining the legal, infrastructural, and administrative material conditions alone within which political freedom can abide.

Six 

Taxes ameliorate undemocratic concentrations of wealth and authority to secure sufficient equity among citizens of diverse fortune. The equity valued by democracy ensures that the diversity also valued by democracy does not disable the demanding and costly democratic processes facilitating collective responsibility, expression, criticism, problem-solving and the interminable reconciliation of the aspirations of all the people with whom we share and contest the present world.

Seven 

Taxes pay for the maintenance of institutions providing nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes. Taxes pay to secure basic needs to ensure that the scene of consent to everyday association is reliably informed and is non-duressed by the threat of deprivation, inequity, or insecurity. And taxes pay for the accountable administration of commons and public goods without which they are inevitably violated and exploited for short-term profit-taking by minorities to the cost and risk of majorities. Far from representing quintessential state violence, taxes are the enabling condition of a democratic state facilitating nonviolence.

Eight 

Taxes coupled to representation itself ("No Taxation Without Representation") tie the maintenance of government as such -- an organization invested with legitimate recourse to force with all the clear dangers inhering in that state of affairs -- inextricably to public accountability and democratic legitimacy.

Nine 

Taxing more those who profit more by their personal recourse to the shared inheritance of human knowledge and culture, to the shared substance of precarious environmental resources on which we all depend for our survival and flourishing, and to the ongoing benefits of collaboratively maintained infrastructure, institutions, norms, trust, legitimacy, and security is not unfair in the least. Progressive taxation follows quite simply from a recognition of the indisputable fact of our radical inter-dependence as both productive and vulnerable beings in the world. This same recognition, of course, is also the foundation for fairness.

Ten 

Whenever a right wing politician declares all government wasteful, criminal, or corrupt you should pay close attention, because he is revealing his intentions. Wherever government is meant to be of by and for the people, to be anti-government always means to be against the great majority of the people.

Wildthyme

Reading Paul Magrs's Phoenix Court quartet as I fall deeper down this literally lifesaving Whovian fanhole that has sustained me and re-invigorated me since last summer, at this point extending to every Doctor, across the Sarah Jane Adventures, through Elizabeth Sandifer's Tardis Eruditorum essays (I've bought three of the books and await re-issues of the later ones) and still chewing through volume after volume of About Time. It's an old and familiar strategy, when I was bullied and battered as a kid I retreated into Tolkein and Herbert and Heinlein and Star Trek, and now coming out of the panic and depression and rage of my health-scare and then this whole Trumpmerican fiasco I find the insanely rich ramifying worlds of Whovian fandom to roll around in and fall in love with falling in love with again. Thank the billion billion goddesses for sfnality.

Married, Unburied

After seventeen years together, Eric and I got married this Wednesday afternoon at the Alameda County Clerk Recorder's Office. I still regard heterosexual marriage as a vestige of human trafficking and I still disapprove the commercial romance industry and its indoctrination of people through fantasies of dysfunctional completion via matrimonial control, etc etc etc. But I'm in my early-50s now, Eric's in his mid-40s and cobbling together taxes and scattered savings accounts and insurance policies and so on in the time of Trumpublican shenanigans seemed practically useful, more or less for the same reasons getting our domestic partnership made sense fifteen years ago when we did that. This was just a supplementation and clarification and expansion of that earlier status. That is what we have been telling each other. And yet. And yet.

And yet... Okay, so Eric and I have been together for nearly twenty years now (our 18th anniversary is just a few weeks away), we've been through a lot together, Eric matters to me in a way nobody else or anything else does. I don't even make sense as a person apart from the story of Eric and I and our years together at this point... And, okay, yes, there was indeed something more than administrivially and pragmatically useful in the marriage license and ceremony as it actually happened... It's hardly something I can recommend as a universally useful or relevant experience, certainly, there are lots of ways of making a sexual, romantic, social, personal life that makes every kind of sense than getting married (not to mention many ways of being married), but just being there with my best friend and holding his hands and saying the words in front of a judge, having my friend (and teaching colleague) Carolyn there as our witness -- she took the great photo you see at the end of the post! -- all the wonderful clerks and volunteer judges who walked us through the forms and ceremonies with their beaming smiles and professionalism, even just the very idea of this public affirmation of the reality of our shared love and our shared lives as a force the community is built of and building of was unexpectedly powerful... Eric and I both got misty-eyed holding hands and promising we'd support one another, it was hard not to think of recent illnesses, and breakdowns, and political fears, and economic struggles, and how strong we are together now, and just feeling that being recognized in an institutional way was weird and odd and powerful and moving...

Again, there are lots of reasons to be suspicious of marriage as an institution. Its history is patriarchal, the intergenerational transmission of power over the world by men through their possession of the world as property via their possession of women as property. To this day, marriage is suffused with reprosexual, cisheteronormative, possessive, paranoid, reductive, sentimental norms and forms that have done far more harm than good, been far more falsifying than truth-enabling. Maybe queering the institution renders it less harmful, more capacious. I don't know. Be all that as it may, however, it turns out marrying Eric was not just a handy lifehack. It was a wonderfully validating recognition of what matters most to us in a world we didn't expect that to matter to, a world that is, in this respect at least, a better world than the one we were born in and grew up in. It was bolstering. It was lovely. It was a good day. I love Eric. I got married to him this week. I love Oakland, California. That's where we live together and where we are loved together. Take that, all y'all Trumpmerican bullybigot greedhead knownothing motherfuckers!

State of the Blog, State of the Blogger

In years past, I followed the usual custom of offering up in the first days of the new year a list of posts from the prior year that had either attracted the most attention or which I thought deserved more attention. But, again this year like last year, I haven't really used the blog to post longform reflections or polemical critiques as I once did here, so there seemed little point in all that.

While I still teach histories and philosophies of "technology" and devote quite a lot of my pedagogy to critiquing the bigotry and fraud of reactionary tech-talk, design-talk, innovation-talk, cyborg rugged-individualization, and all that, it is also true that I haven't felt like sparring with stoopid transhumanoids and futurologists hereabouts for a few years. As I already testified last year, the lies of the futurists are exposed in mainstream media publications on an hourly basis these days now that "the singularity" turns out to have been little more than the stupid refeudalization of the postwar economy while we were distracted by the spectacle of Jeff Bezos re-inventing the Sears catalogue and google/facebook turning cyberspace, "Home of Mind," back into broadcast television. Also, too, there are Nazis and racists and evangelicals and patriarchal pricks online. You may have noticed this. Books like Pasquale's Black Box Society and Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression are the sorts of serious scholarship called for by this moment, not the sorts of jeremiads of satirical demolition and conceptual engagement I liked to specialize in.

Maybe the EU's GDPR is indeed a starting point rather than an end-point after all... maybe regulations, rights protections, nationalizations/public options, platform monopoly breakups, perhaps in no small part through California code of regs strong-arming, can turn the generational reactionary tech-tide of the venture-capitalists and austerian technocrats and bigot code that has driven me to distraction for a quarter century. But I don't know that symptomatic readings of futurological follies in their techno-transcendalizing and counter-revolutionary screeds of the kind I used to revel in here are really as useful as they might have been in that earlier moment -- certainly that sort of thing feels less enjoyable to me these days. The ideology of individualism, articulated in the context of white supremacy and patriarchy, expressed in a culture suffused by the deceptive, hyperbolic, toxic norms and forms of PR and advertising discourse seems to me the Big Bad at the root of so much that I used to rail against. A fatal tendency to scientism and reductionism misrecognizing instrumental rationality as political rationality, technological capacitation as political freedom is also a part of that story. Perhaps there is more for me to say elaborating these connections...

Meanwhile, twitter finds its way to all the obvious snark about the idiotic awfulness and obvious lies and ugly bigotry of Trump Republicans within seconds: As I have already said many times these long last couple of ugly awful frightful years through, I have nothing smart to say about any of it, and further, there is nothing smart to say about any of it, nor do I think finding one more smart thing to say about any of it is much help to anyone anyway when everybody capable of seeing anything already always sees everything anyway. It's obvious what people have to do -- just vote for Democrats, the better they are the better, but vote for them all whoever they are until the Republicans are diverted from their current conspicuously authoritarian path.

The midterm elections confirmed that this is as well understood as it is likely going to be in this country. It remains to be seen if Trump responds with the ruinous authoritarian instincts we have come to expect from him, exhorting his Base to further violence in his rallies and tweets, seeking illegal remedies through firings and firesales, erratic declarations, states of emergency, whether the whole GOP will continue to enable him in this criminal nonsense, and whether the "Resistance" will remain in force with sufficient coherence and energy to respond to all this in the streets if it comes to that, even with the distractions of a divisive presidential race and lots of newly elected Democratic scapegoats to pillory via the usual fauxvolutionary vs. mushymiddle cabaret. You don't need to read critical theory like I do to grasp these dangers and dynamics. If anything, my kind of theory is as distracting as clarifying of the stakes of partisan struggles on the ground, honestly.

Now, last year when I posted my year-end summary I was suffering from a crippling couple of months of insomnia in which I was sleeping less than three hours most nights and beginning to think I wasn't going to survive that. The crisis eventually sent me into a few months of therapy early last year, and though I remain a fitful sleeper to this day I am no longer struggling as I once was with insomnia. Last year when I posted that New Year's report I had lost ninety pounds since my hospitalization the year before, and now this year I weigh fifteen pounds fewer still, and have maintained that weight without difficulty most of the year, sticking to my diet and yoga and exercise and long weekend walks with Eric. I'd go so far as to describe myself these days as fit, after a decade of... not. Last year at this time I was still reeling from the raw recent loss of our beloved cat Sarah -- and yet in a few month's we'll be celebrating the first year of Penny's life with us here. Watching our bold and brilliant little gray and orange-spotted kitten grow into a full cookie-jar bellied adult cat has been a delight all this year. Teaching in the City with the comparative security of a hard-won better-paying three-year union contract has been an improvement in so many ways as well. We paid off the last of my student loans this year. Having few assets feels way better with no debts, I must say.

Although 2018 was a terrible year, full of terrible and terrorizing events, kids in cages, endless mass shootings, Brexit and Trumpian chaos, authoritarianism globally ascendant, gross crowing bigots, accelerating Greenhouse Earth derangements, I am heartened by the results of the election, the radicalism of proposals coming from elected Democrats and the discursive traction they are managing to receive in the face of so much awfulness. The language of raising the social security cap, a federal jobs guarantee at a livable wage, a Green New Deal, post office banking as a financial public option, a new and improved voting rights act, renewed antitrust applied to platform monopolies as well as financial institutions, all ideas I have pitched as ideals in essays and classes for years and years are becoming a chorus at last, especially among the rising generations, and are suddenly getting wide and respectful hearings from high-profile elected politicians. Again, this is a terrifying time, climate catastrophe is upon us and the planetary 1% are quite prepared to go full fascist to re-install their feudalist fantasies. But they're outnumbered and we're out-organizing them for now, even as time's up and there are no guarantees. So, 2018 was a bit better politically and a lot better personally. I'll take it.

All that said, I did post to Amor Mundi more this year than last year, hundreds more posts in fact, and I'm hoping to amplify that re-engagement this year still more. Maybe I'll manage to do more than re-post Barbara Lee tweets on the news of the day amidst a sprinkling of Wildean quotations, though the first couple of years of Amor Mundi weren't so very different from that, come to think of it. I enjoyed writing more here when I was -- I'd like to find my way back to that enjoyment in the coming year. Let's see.