Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

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?

freddie died for our sins http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/07/15/i-still-like-em/

rationality/subjectivity is posited as *necessarily* defined against blackness

i think a significant part of this is that 'race' as a category at all doesn't really exist in its current form until the 18th century, and then it's right there in the foundations of the rational enlightenment individual as a category of separation and exploitation. under these terms race is nothing but exploitation. but i dunno

in spite of it all... i still kinda like freddie tho

Rational/logical thinking invented well before 18th C. More to the point, the critique of rational/logical thinking is generally presented as a form of....rational/logical thinking.

I get that Merdeyeux but why is blackness destined to *always remain* the other of rationality? And if this thinking is still latent in how we think (which it is, and often not too latent either) why is the solution not just deconstruction and critique? Why would this specter if the denial of black humanity mean there can be no black politics today? (This I think is implied in the afro-pessimist account, which seems to deny the substantive content of the recent movement against police brutality.) The whole thing seems, like drash said, way too eager to make final declarations about the meanings of things, and also does so in a way that forecloses on real political possibilities. I criticized caputo too along a similar line -- assigning out view of the subject wholly to a colonialist perspective/context -- but to his credit he doesn't draw these conclusions.

Sry for the typos

Also merdyeux i understand u were just unpacking the point, sorry to have addressed my critique to you and not the article

I want to read Incognegro though, because I suspect I don't have a grasp of the total argument; I'm only responding to the summaries and quotes being posted.

vic (and maybe treesh) it's not a critique of rationality or logical thinking as a whole, rather the kind of rational subjectivity that can give make notions like 'human rights' tenable in the first place. so roughly speaking post-locke (who incidentally made a tonne of money in the slave trade).

treesh for most of your stuff i still dunno but i think maybe afro-pessimism's political logic is essentially revolutionary (cf fanon), reformism just doesn't cut it when the system is oppressive all the way down

mb http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf will be of interest

A notion like human rights is an attempt at defeating the simple dictates of might-makes-right with an idea that people ought to be better to each other. Better ideas pursuing the same goal are welcome; potshots against the fallible character of John Locke are not.

Hey, we could endorse some kind of tear-down-the-system-violently thing - a total crapshoot by the way, with no guarantees of a good outcome but plenty of blood and chances for deep misery and even worse oppression - but if it "succeeds," then when it's over, and a bunch of people are dead...... well, what happens then? Why do they then have some kind of society free from oppression? What would be different? How does it stay non-oppressive?

I get that Merdeyeux but why is blackness destined to *always remain* the other of rationality?

Occam's razor?

my potshot at locke was cheap but one can quite well map a racial logic intrinsic to his thought which carries through. i have no firm position on what that means re current issues of subjectivity and race besides 'it's messy and difficult'.

Why has it lasted hundreds of years already?

Nb western civilization's origins and dependence on a slave class go back much further than the 18th cen

(This I think is implied in the afro-pessimist account, which seems to deny the substantive content of the recent movement against police brutality.)

Wait, did the brutality stop? Did I miss something ?

he means, what it meant, what it was about