The New Underground Railroad
A poem that expresses what has been betrayed by way of clinical and critical discourse in these dispatches.
Proxies and Redeemers
Let us (re-)create ways of living otherwise than becoming proxies for power, otherwise than becoming redeemers for power, otherwise than becoming redeemers for power's redeemers, otherwise than becoming common victims of power, and otherwise than forming rival powers that can compete for supremacy.
Late Davosian Holocausts
The latest report from the IPCC betrays the fact that incipient “Late Davosian Holocausts” are poised to do by way of neocolonialism what the “Late Victorian Holocausts” did by way of colonialism, marking a new inflection point in the history of the havoc wreaked by imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Ecoregionalism
This week, the nation of Russia attacked the nation of Ukraine in what is widely and rightly being regarded as a brazen act of nationalist imperialism. The liberal news media in the West has tended to criticize Russia’s actions in the name of the sovereignty of the nation of Ukraine, taking the inviolability of sovereign national territories for granted.
In this dispatch, I propose that we criticize acts of nationalist imperialism otherwise than affirming the inviolability of sovereign national territories. In brief, I propose that we criticize acts of nationalist imperialism by affirming nations’ shared concern for ecoregions and by affirming more or less permeable ecoregional boundaries.
Planning to Flee from Profiling
Once upon a time it was the paid administrator’s task to profile subjects under administration. In today’s deathly world of suffering, subjects under administration are tasked with profiling themselves without pay.
We are all becoming unpaid administrators, engaged in compiling and reviewing profiles about ourselves and others, and desperately trying to find ways to advantage ourselves in administrative rat races by exploiting the (mal)functioning of automated and networked systems that record, sort, filter, and match profiles.
Planning to Flee from Calendaring and Clocking
If my desire to flee from calendaring and clocking seems fanciful, it is only because we have become accustomed living in a deathly world of suffering that privileges machinic measures of time and abstract tabulations of days, months, and years.
Planning to Flee from Financing
“If it don’t make money, it don’t make sense.” — That is gist of the domineering statements, implements, and environments that form the capitalist powers that prevail over our deathly world of suffering.
Planning to Flee from Schooling
Why do we live in a deathly world of suffering in which schooling is considered to be more important than learning?
Fugitive Planning
Fugitive planning is what enables us to makes sense of direct action and due process in defense of direct action.
Another Black Man in America
My own lived experience has revealed to me how the workings of optimizing powers are meant to be experienced as being taught lessons and having to teach lessons, as needing protection from oneself and needing to protect others from themselves.
A Case in Point
I happened to write my previous two dispatches, “Entrapment” and “Ethnocide and Ecocide”, while re-reading the preface from Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. As I re-read Mike Davis’s text, it struck me that I might use the events he describes as a case study, qualifying my propositions regarding power formations generally and regarding the specific power formation that is imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Ethnocide and Ecocide
So as not to forget what is at stake in the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project, this dispatch seeks to boldly articulate what it is that concerns me whenever I write any dispatch — halting the advance of ethnocidal and ecocidal power formations.
Entrapment
A brief dispatch on the ways in which my readings of detective stories have inspired me to think of statements, implements, and environments as furnishing motives, means, and opportunities.
Convivial Statements
I write that domineering statements are the condition of possibility for the effectiveness of violent communication, and I write that convivial statements are the conditions of possibility for the effectiveness of nonviolent communication — but what do I mean by this?
Black Mythologies
I have been thinking a great deal about an essay by Jacques Derrida titled “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”. In this essay, Derrida speaks of a coin so old that the images stamped on its heads and tails have worn away. This coin still has some currency, but its provenance is uncertain and, as a result, its value is considered increasingly suspect by those who give it and take it in turns. Derrida holds that philosophical concepts that do not bear any mark of their cultural provenance or any mark of the facticity of their issuers are similar to such coins: such concepts may have currency but their value is suspect.
Greg Saunier
I’ve learned far more about time by enjoying Deerhoof’s live shows than I’ve learned by reading philosophers like Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, and Bernard Stiegler.
For bell hooks
The recent passing of bell hooks has inspired me to reconsider the clinical expression that she often used to name the deathly world of suffering that prevails over us, “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.
Multiplying Confluences
Rather than working to prevent the formation of powers, counterpowers work to prevent the stabilization of power formations.
Blackness and Primitiveness
The black radical tradition is not the tradition of a crisply defined set of peoples that can be said to fall under the designation “Black”. Rather, the black radical tradition is the tradition of a blur of peoples, a fuzzy and indeterminate set, perpetually engaged in the process of troubling the designation “Black” that has been imposed upon them and staying with the trouble. This is to say, in other words, that the black radical tradition is a counter-cultural tradition: it is a tradition dedicated to countering the imposing power formations of dominant cultures.
Freeing Time
All powers first establish themselves over us by determining the rhythm and tempo of our lives. This is to say, in other words, that power can only rule, discipline, normalize, and optimize our lives if it succeeds in ruling, disciplining, normalizing, and optimizing the rhythm and tempo of our lives.
It follows from this that countering the powers that determine the rhythm and tempo of our lives is decisive to countering any and all powers.