Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

Like, if the point is just "we are not purely rational agents. We need to interrogate our positionality and how it informs how we think/interface with society" then i agree and am on board. But caputo seems to be saying more than that.

in that piece imo caputo isnt saying enough, in parts.

fwiw i think there's a longer tradition of this type of thinking, its not just starting from zero. frantz fanon & post colonial studies generally for ex

but then i find this stuff to be p convincing, to a point, if a bit deterministic
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wanderings-slave-black-life-and-social-death

they consider the slave to be in a state of 'ontological death,' actually, and posit that race is not a conflict but an antagonism; that western society is built upon the existence of a slave class

think about how insufficient ending the war on drugs would be at reversing the current paradigm ... think about michelle alexander saying the same % of ppl who were enslaved in 1860 are currently in prison or under court surveillance ... etc

http://i.imgur.com/Rwpe669.png

roasted

http://i.imgur.com/4sDAaJO.png

freddie gotgored

not a response to TNC:

Freddie ‏@freddiedeboer May 13
I think it was Mao who said "Political power grows out of the barrel of a sick burn."

fuck!

r they gonna fight

http://i.imgur.com/b7Euy0y.png

freddie's twitter pic looks like he's about to cry

This is a bad look for our friend freddie

today is kick freddie day

on one hand i'm sure he knew/knows the amount of blowback he's going to get from attacking tnc, esp this week of all weeks, which makes it some kind of pyrrhic opportunism - i almost respect how quickly + willingly he is to take whatever damage this crusade might do to his reputation / online persona / whatever. all publicity is good publicity. otoh what a fucking moron.

i cld possible kinda admire him for it if his whole schtick wasnt so entry level and self righteous

no magazine covers no aspen friends just you and me mano y mano, broooooo

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CJ-q7stUcAA-v7h.png

vulnerable? what exactly r u talking abtttttttttttt

You + me + my tenure application, hosa

surprised Freddie didn't just call him "uppity"

give him time

In the old days they would've exchanged nasty articulate letters in The New York Review of Books

srsly just caught myself fantasizing abt rubbernecking an epic online meltdown lol

more like freddie da boor

his "media criticism" reduces to fidgety anxiety about what the popular kids are doing; this li'l episode isn't much different

otm

lagoon r u making the popcorn or will i

coat the world in popcorn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK3ZP6frAMc

goole otm

i just winced all the way into my chair

nice

@useful_noise
dude's following his m.o.: warn about dangers of a strawman "consensus," then claim any argument against him proves his point

this seems like a suicide mission

http://i.imgur.com/BxZHXgZ.png

Jesus even his posts about his sick dog are pedantic and fucking endless

irl grimacing
watching horrible slow-motion intentional car crash

literally no idea who freddie deboer is but i went to his website and it has a link to an amazon wish list full of vinyl and video games and stuff that has been constantly updated for the last five years?? is this a normal thing for professional ppl to do??

camgirls sure

Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using R: A Step-by-Step Approach (Springer Texts in Statistics)

lol

when i was a teenager i tirelessly edited my livejournal profile’s interests to appear smart and cool

DeBoer is one of those writers who is even more annoying for potentially discrediting his better positions I would also espouse by being such a dope in general. Thanks a lot.

campgirls don't deserve this treatment.

His post a few days ago complaining about liberal gays who believe they're Born This Way was so tendentious that I suspect he's a frustrated pop critic who wants to write about Lady Gaga

omg love this wasteman

had never heard of him before but from the moment I first laid eyes on his loving description of how judiciously he would read this book uncritically praised by all other people I knew that this was a useless drooping prick that wasn't done applying its clown makeup

He'll read you the right way

I doubt it, nobody else seems capable

(non sequitur post, please ignore)

My approximation of how black studies would respond to this is that the slave class--which is contiguous with the system now referred to as blackness--is denied a subjectivity; the Cartesian subject is a white subject. The structures of race are themselves ontological

largely agree with treeship’s response (though don't think caputo’s position is what treeship ascribes to him)

skimmed metamute piece, wd have to read more patiently, find myself objecting to a lot of it (but maybe my objections just/mostly philosophical/academic)

my problem maybe (in response to this piece, tnc re ‘bodies’, & yr post, deej) is absoluteness of linguistic/conceptual formulations, unbridgeable dichotomies, what seem like false either/ors (in their own way falling prey to form of conceptual 'purification')

v necessary to critique— historicize, genealogize, deconstruct— philosophical constructs like pure reason, cartesian ego, kantian transcendental subject

part of that is seeing how constructs involve (invisibly) operations of exclusion, difference from/ negation of other(s) (nonrational, nonmale, nonwhite etc)— ‘absences’ which, when made visible, typically, not coincidentally, are/ appear as bodies

critique all the more important bc such constructs likely involved (invisibly) in present structures of injustice

but it’s one thing to say “the Cartesian subject is a white subject,” or that blackness was “denied a subjectivity”
& another to reject e.g. notion of ‘subjectivity’ entirely

don’t like when language is reified, overregulated, for (even well-intentioned) political reasons
think there’s more power in having plurality, diversity of language-games (language-games which can be (re)appropriated, reinterpreted, reinvented) through which to articulate experience

nb none of this is criticism of tnc; his choice of language is deliberate directed effective
just questioning pervasive adoption of ‘black bodies’ formulation

quite like the sound of that book on r but I've not time right now to give it the full attn

my problem maybe (in response to this piece, tnc re ‘bodies’, & yr post, deej) is absoluteness of linguistic/conceptual formulations, unbridgeable dichotomies, what seem like false either/ors (in their own way falling prey to form of conceptual 'purification')

Isn't this where someone points out that blackness is an absolute? In its social function? Like, Rachel dolezal is white and that's an absolute

Anyway, I don't think the idea is to reject that subjectivity exists in the individual but in the individuals systemic identity, a slave to a skin tone

Idk I'm not the ideal person to argue this, I've only read a few chapters of wilderson and never went to grad school but

Metamute piece isn't what you're disagreeing with, it's a dispassionate qualitative description of a movement w/in black studies that has garnered a lot of traction win the last decade

Re afro-pessimism, I don't get why rationality/subjectivity is posited as *necessarily* defined against blackness, to a degree that can't be overcome except through a total revolution or what Wilderson calls the "end of the world." Passages like this seem to draw the worst conclusions from the observations of clearly accurate observations about the colonialist and racist subtext of Western notions of "pure" rationalism:

In relation to riots in particular, calls for ‘social justice’, ‘rights’, ‘police accountability and transparency’ obscure the essence of these movements, whose meaning resides entirely on the surface. They are fundamentally demandless and intentionally destructive. There is no ‘point’ except for utter dissolution of the current state of affairs. As viewed by the Afro-pessimists, the demandlessness of these struggles cannot be reduced to any single empirical aspect – freedom here and now must be absolute not relative. An irreconcilable antagonism produces black existence positioning it against humanity. This antagonism can only be resolved by the cathartic purge of violence. It is the use of violence that must first be expropriated, both materially and symbolically.

I think it misunderstands the recent riots to see them as a cathartic purge of violence against ontological imprisonment. They are a display of righteous anger against literal imprisonment - the imprisonment of bodies. African Americans are political agents, if oppressed and marginalized ones. These struggles are about claiming agency; they're not fundamentally antisocial.*

*maybe i misunderstand what's being said, always a risk with critical theory whether you've been to grad school or not

Me too.

I'd note first off that this is a classic move by privileged intellectuals: The People (We Love Them But They) don't understand what they want; they need us to explain it. "They are fundamentally demandless" it says - UM, REALLY? Like, wanting to actually hold cops to what is supposed to be the law is no demand of rioters responding to police violence? They're just throwing up their hands in the air like they don't care?

Interesting how this "liberating" view doesn't differ in many ways from appalling racist views of rioters as thugs. "An irreconcilable antagonism produces black existence positioning it against humanity." Charles Krauthammer might phrase it a little differently, but hey.

It's not like there aren't any conventionally rational & reasonable arguments against racism or police violence. Actually, I don't know of any conventionally rational & reasonable arguments FOR them.

Ergo, rationality and reasonableness wouldn't seem to be the prime oppressor here. What exactly is proposed as a replacement anyway, besides more grad school?