destituencies: issue zero

destituencies: issue zero

From destituencies

destituencies: issue zero

In destituencies’ zeroeth issue, we’ve brought together a compact ensemble of four works that we’d like to offer as an excuse to pause and as an opportunity to break away from the alerts and alarms that accumulate in and increasingly structure our lives, whether expressed as cascades of anxious screen notifications or as chameleonic emergency measures. And of course, as the world collectively holds its breath, we send this out also as an invitation to think beyond the hollow yet exhausting dramas of the election. In place of “What is going to happen?,” a repressive apprehension of what may happen to us, we choose to ask instead “What might otherwise happen?” in hopes of pursuing what can possibly be done and, perhaps more urgently, undone.

The first work we’re featuring in issue zero is Wendy Trevino’s incendiary poem When You Hear People Say “Burn Down The American Plantation.” Written in the midst of the contagious and unruly upheavals of the George Floyd revolts, the work gestures again and again towards that which used to be here, a still-present past that is both a violent inheritance and a living memory of insurrection. In a world built upon anti-Blackness, capitalist dispossession, and state violence, Trevino’s poem ultimately imagines what else might soon be set aflame here, and here, and here, and here, and…

In the piece that follows, contributors from the Hostis journal have outlined the contours of the destitution thesis, drawing a nonlinear thread through 2001-1921-2014 in order to stitch together a concept that has been “forged in the fires of struggle.” Their text, Destituent Power: An Incomplete Timeline, asks in an appropriately (un)timely manner whether our present requires not another balanced calculation of the lesser of whatever number of predictable evils, but a return to the unapologetic clarity of an ultimatum: ¡Que se vayan todos! (All of them must go!)

The third work for issue zero comes to us from Nil Mata Reyes in the form of a flyer posted throughout the neighborhoods of Barcelona, warning of Esperanza’s Escape. The search for missing animals is of course an activity that the inhabitants of most cities are regularly called upon to partake in, but the difference between lost property and lines of escape is often only a question of position.

The fourth and final piece is a series of Notes on Ungovernable Life written by Ian Alan Paul, who also worked as the editor of this issue of destituencies. Over a series of brief passages that attempt to think through the consequences of life’s addressability and multiplicity, life is theorized as being at once the object of, and fundamentally incommensurable with, the capture of governance.

It feels less than empty to wish all who read this well, given the tense precarities and acute uncertainties that more and more people so intimately live. We’ll end instead by reminding ourselves of the necessity of solidarity, and of the profound reckonings with the world that even the most modest gestures of solidarity now require of us.

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File under "F" for false critics

If incivility dot org and autonomies dot org was too close to anarchism for comfort, yet you cum when you read "agambian" and "benjaminian" in the same sentence, this publication is for you.

From their about page: "destituencies is an online journal that diagrams and aims to depose the forms of power that exist at the intersections of global politics, culture, and art." Emphasis added.

These updated democrats (not the party, but the inheritors of the republican movement, again not the party, the historical movement to found democracies, the doublespeak for founding being destitute, the ante-chamber of re-constitutional assemblies) fetishize legalistic language; sovereignty, constietuency, de-institute, destituencies, etc. Soon we'll see more offshoot projects, maybe one titled ~constabularies. They also think footnotes, endnotes and references to texts assigned in political science bachelor courses are the spice of life. But they're young and hip, nose-deep in the artsy-farts, so expect aesthetic flourishes that will make your reading list feel ~gentrified~.

Nothing new here, just further cycling through buzzwords after they're spent, publish or perish populists need constant stream of buzz words for the novelty factor to get published and remain relevant, get contracts as visiting professors (they're hardly giving tenure these days aren't they?). Nothing new to see here, more along the lines of communization (communizing is basically same concept as destituting power), horizontalism, direct democracy, radical democracy, new populism. People that found Gilet Jaunes and Paris Debut more exciting (due to its populism, and its frenchy-ness, though they wont admit that part) than precincts getting burnt or cops getting shot, but the academic topics cycle moves on, they must keep up to date. "How to talk about the same things we talk about, and try to relate it to current events, so it's topical?" It's what everybody's doing, choose your scare. They will have to have opinions on everything, on the internet, like everyone else does. Someone somewhere will read it and find a way to make their thesis ~destitutent~.

Agamben's biopolitics ontology has limitations. By blaming everything on sovereignty, state of emergency, and the threat to life posed by law, the way in which governance technology works is ignored. So a common mistake is to treat fascism as some kind of exception, rather than the general normal of post World War II contemporary society, and lack of concept of mass moral psychology and trial. For example, some anarchists (such as Italy) face a strange state, which is not an emergency, but a postponement of fate. This is actually a form of social control implied by Foucault. Because the trial of Christianity is above the law, it is no longer the law that drives the authority, but the sword of Damocles above the law. In other words, the technology and morality of controlling society have reached a consensus. Technology and law need mass movement to establish power, while the masses are subject to the politics of morality and security. By letting the masses desire their own repression, a suspended trial is formed. The masses yearn for the revolutionary Messiah, and the social movement is also ongoing, but the fate is constantly delayed and suspended - the revolution will not come. So the limitations of Agamben become more obvious. It has become a vulgar liberal politics, blaming everything on the state of emergency, without asking about the disease of technology advancement, strategy and revolution! The social movement is exhausted in such incompetence!

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