I was thinking of this because I’ve been reading various interpretations of Capital that seek to find where Marx is being “ironic,” and so where his true belief is the opposite of the position he puts forward.Wolff’s Moneybags Must be so Lucky: On the Literary Structure of Capital is a particularly good example because he spends some time explaining what he means by irony and why he thinks Marx employs it, which makes his position more defensible than some, although still, I think, wrong. What Wolff thinks is ironic is Marx’s development of the labor theory of value, in which commodities have value because they are the embodiment or crystalization of the non-material stuff of abstract labor time. Wolff writes:

What can Marx possibly have in mind by advancing so manifestly absurd an account of the commodity? That he does consider this theory of “crystals of abstract homogeneous socially necessary labor” to be absurd is demonstrated by the language in which he chooses to expound it. The chapter on commodities, in which this extraordinary doctrine is introduced, is strewn with religious metaphors. (48)

Part of the problem with Wolff’s position is that it is based on a misunderstanding of Marx’s position on religion, and so a misinterpretation of the point of this religious language. Wolff assumes that, because Marx is an atheist, a comparison between a theory of the commodity and religion must be intended to signal that Marx believes the theory to be as false as religion. But Marx doesn’t think religion is simply false; Capital takes seriously theological questions, such as the differences between catholicism and protestantism, and argues for the particular appropriateness, the social validity, of protestantism to capitalism. Further, the chapter on commodity fetishism explains precisely the analogies and disanalogies between commodity fetishism and religion:

In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. (my emph)

So Capital endorses a theory of religion and uses this theory, with modifications, in building a theory of commodities; that is, Marx’s frequent, and often sarcastic, references to religion are not a sign that he “doesn’t mean” what he is saying, but a kind of perverse mark of his sincerity.

What misleads Wolff, I think, is his understanding of irony, which cannot account for this employment of irony in the service of sincerity. The model of irony which Wolff uses in understanding Marx is Socratic irony, which he defines as a statement made with two intended audiences, a naive audience who assume that Marx intends the literal meaning of the statement, and a sophisticated audience who understand that Marx denies the literal meaning of the statement, and also understand why the naive audience would be fooled. But this underestimates the extent to which irony is a rhetorical effect, taking the two audiences simply as given; what reason do we have to believe that there is such a naive audience? The only reason we have to believe in the naive audience is in the ironic writing itself; indeed, the naive audience is purely imagined in order to produce the desired effect, in order to stage a confrontation between intention and literal meaning.

If there is no actual naive audience to be fooled, then, what is the purpose of Marx’s irony? The answer, I think, lies in distinguishing Socratic from romantic irony. Where Socratic irony is used to say something while meaning the opposite, romantic irony is used to say something ironically while actually meaning it seriously; that is, it a response to a crisis of sincerity, a situation in which it seems impossible to say what you mean. This is, indeed, the situation that Marx finds himself in. The transformation of abstract labor into exchange value is indeed absurd, but unfortunately it is not an absurd theory, but an absurd reality, and Marx’s irony is a response to this absurdity, a way of expressing the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of meaning just what he says. The irony in Capital, that is, isn’t a sign of Marx’s duplicity, but of his painful sincerity.

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W. is impressed by my stammer.—‘You stammer and stutter’, says W., ‘and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you?’ Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would account for it.—‘You had one just there, didn’t you?’

Perhaps, W. muses, my stammering and stuttering is a sign of shame. W. says he never really thought I was capable of it, shame, but perhaps it’s there nonetheless.—‘Something inside you knows you talk rubbish’, he says. ‘Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth’. (Lars Iyer, Spurious)

Equality is a central term for Rancière, but it is quite a circumscribed equality, the equality specifically and only of speaking beings. Which immediately raises the question, what about non-speaking beings? Animals would be the most obvious example, but there are also human beings prevented from speaking by age and infirmity, disability, oppression. Rancière might object that these examples of non-speaking don’t exclude people from the class of equals, which isn’t strictly speaking beings, but rather beings that have the logos, that have access to language; and, furthermore, it is the structure of the logos, of language, which ensures this equality. However, in the way Rancière makes his argument, speech is indeed theoretically central, and problematic. The argument for axiomatic equality occurs in what is, as it were, the primal scene of politics for Rancière, the moment at which a master gives an order to a slave. This contains the central contradiction of politics: the master presents themselves as of a different order from the slave and so as entitled to give the slave orders; but in the process of giving the order, the master assumes that the slave is capable of understanding the order, that is, that master and slave are equal in their possession of language. This argument doesn’t depend on speech literally understood – it would work if the order was handed over in written form or using sign language – but it does depend on features of speech broadly construed: the two participants must be in the same place at the same time for their equality, the possibility of the slave speaking back to the master, to manifest itself.

That is, Rancière’s argument for the equality of speaking beings is phonocentric in Derrida’s sense. Phonocentrism is the belief that spoken language is more authentic or primary than written language. The two features that are supposed to give spoken language this primacy are the presence and synchronicity it is supposed to require; through this presence, the speaker retains the ability to directly authenticate the meaning of their words. Writing, on this theory, is a poor copy of speech, where, in the absence of the author, the written text is parasitic on the authority which the primary speech situation provides. Derrida points out, however, that the asynchrony and absence which characterize writing are features that are inherent to all language, and are present as possibilities in spoken language as well. The absence of language is the condition of possibility of its presence.

This isn’t just a philosophical position for Derrida; rather, the prioritization of spoken language in philosophy supports the prioritization of those authorized to speak, particularly white men. Irigaray makes a somewhat similar argument, that philosophical accounts of meaning in language depend on excluding the non-meaningful in a gendered way, constructing the category of femaleness through this exclusion from language. What differentiates Derrida’s and Irigraray’s positions from Rancière’s is that, for Rancière, exclusion from language is a ruse of the powerful (slaves are persuaded of their inability to speak, and thus their inequality, but this is a false belief, the falsehood of which they can realize), whereas for Derrida and Irigaray exclusion from language is a result of the operation of language itself.

This suggests an alternative to Rancière’s idea of the equality of all speaking beings: where we are equal, rather, is in our status as non-speaking beings, in that moment of faltering hesitation that may (or may not) precede speech. This idea of a community of non-speaking beings is part of Adam’s idea of “radical awkwardness,” although this awkwardness may be a more general sociality than just the linguistic; nevertheless, I think a specifically linguistic inarticulacy is an important part of the phenomenology of awkwardness. Thinking about awkwardness primarily in terms of language also allows us to use a whole history of thinking about the relationship between women and language to think about the relationship between awkwardness and gender.

A number of  reviews of Awkwardness pointed out that all the awkward characters discussed in the book are male, and this somewhat blunts the potentially radical force of awkwardness. Judith Halberstam has a useful analysis of a related phenomenon, the difference between male and female stupidity (using as examples Dude, Where’s My Car? and 50 First Dates, respectively). Although stupidity is the opposite of the intellectual competence traditionally assigned to men, male stupidity isn’t opposed to this stereotype; “though we punish and naturalize female stupidity,” a man’s stupidity “is quickly folded back into his general appeal as a winning form of vulnerability…. Male stupidity masks the will to power that lies just behind the goofy grin, and it masquerades as some kind of internalization of feminist critiques” (The Queer Art of Failure, 55-7). So too with male awkwardness, which, as in the Apatow comedies Adam discusses (and as Adam points out) raises the possibility of a critique of articulacy only in order to resolve the problem in a new and non-awkward male homosociality. Embracing female awkwardness would be more radical, because it would involve an upending of the standards which exclude women by privileging the possession of language.

This is particularly relevant in the post-Fordist context that Adam discusses, because of the increasing economic importance of articulacy, an articulacy which is increasingly feminized. Just as Apatovian male awkwardness is ironic, a mask for continued male power, so too is post-Fordist female articulacy; this image of the sorted, omnicompetent woman is produced at the same time that possession of language is increasingly tightly integrated with the forms of control involved in wage labor, which means that language is increasingly experienced not as a capability but as a demand. In One Dimensional Woman, Nina discusses the way in which post-Fordism feminizes labor, and connects this in particular to “the demand to be an ‘adaptable’ worker, to be constantly ‘networking,’ ‘selling yourself,’ in effect to become a kind of walking CV” (21). Linguistic labor requires a compulsory sociality, which repurposes earlier ideas about women’s work and women’s greater social skills as a paradigm of labor.

This shows how post-operaismo discussions of linguistic labor as the basis for the construction of the multitude may be overly optimistic. Virno does recognize that the rise of linguistic labor in post-Fordism  is “ambivalent,” in that it can give rise to forms of domination as well as forms of liberation. However, there is still an underlying optimism in the idea that post-Fordist linguistic labor involves a “fundamental mode of being,” as Virno says (A Grammer of the Multitude, 84), because the suggestion is that the communication involved in post-Fordist labor involves a kind of fundamental human universality, which is liberated, or produced in a more direct form (and so in principle at least available for re-appropriation) in these new forms of capitalism.

But what if it is not speech, but non-speaking, which is the fundamental human universality? Then awkwardness would not only be, as Adam argues, the potential grounds for a radical politics, it could also be a mode of resistance. Discussing an earlier form of compulsory sociality, Shulamith Firestone describes a kind of weaponized awkwardness:

My ‘dream’ action for the women’s liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them (The Dialectic of Sex).

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In a radical privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users across all services—email, Search, YouTube and more—sharing information with no option to opt out. The change was announced in a blog post today, and will go into effect March 1.

Now, as Forbes points out, this is bollocks. This is not a policy shift at all, still less a radical one – tracking users across services has been in Google’s privacy policy since 2005. What I’m trying to figure out, though, is why people are freaking out over this. A couple of possibilities occur to me:

1. People misunderstood the description of the change, and took “sharing information” to mean that Google would be, IDK, going through your email to find your mum’s address so that they could email her links to all the videos you watched on YouTube, or something.
2. People didn’t know that Google was already combining information across products. This is plausible, but why would people care? If you’re worried about Google having your information, why does it matter if they have it in two separate databases or in one?
3. People didn’t know that Google stores information about how you use its services.

Looking at the responses of people on Tumblr, the third seems like it might be the case, but this is very odd. Young Tumblr users are the sort of people who tend to get called “digital natives,” but they seem to lack a basic understanding of how the internet works: Google runs the computers that store your email, so of course they have access to your email; when you search for something you send the search terms to Google’s computers, so again, of course they have access to what you search for . The basic thing which people should understand is that unless you take specific steps to make it otherwise everything you do on the internet is public. It’s public in much the same way as walking down a busy street in a foreign city is public: no-one who has access to the information is likely to care about you, and no-one you care about is likely to have access to the information; but there will always be other people who do have access to this information.

But it’s hard to be sure what’s going on here, because, although I’ve trawled through many of the Tumblr posts on this issue, no-one seems to be explaining exactly what it is that they’re worried about. What, in other words, is the “privacy” that people are worried about here? There are real concerns about privacy, of course, and two of Google’s recent policies – Buzz making people’s email contacts public, and Google+ requiring people use their legal names – potentially expose people to real danger. But this is a concern with services releasing data in ways which are problematic. A lot of concerns about “privacy” seem to be objections simply to the fact of Google tracking data, to the idea that our behavior can be quantified and mathematized. The concern, that is to say, is about privacy in the sense of our true, innermost, self, our bourgeois subjectivity. Or, to put it another way, people are worried about technology stealing their souls.

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“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”
That was almost your
Catchphrase

We might call the ideology of tween media an ideology of perkiness, in which energetic, smart kids learn useful lessons and become better people; so it’s a little marvelous that the longest-running show on the Disney Channel has a main character who is what Sara Ahmed calls an affect alien, someone who refuses perky sociality in favor of laziness, selfishness, and low expectations. It’s particularly welcome that this comes in the form of a female character, Alex, because the demand to be enthusiastic and omnicompetent is directed especially to women in post-Fordist economies.

The connection between the show and the egoist anarchism of Max Stirner first occurred to me when I saw the episode in which Alex paints a large circle-A anarchist symbol but refuses to identify it as the symbol of any ideology (or “spook,” as Stirner would no doubt have it), insisting it is merely a symbol of her own sovereign ego.

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In another episode, it turns out that this surly indolence is an ethical commitment:

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I am, appropriately, too lazy to go and download all the episodes and make a compendium of clips demonstrating this at length. Luckily, the producers of the show condensed this into one episode, so all I need to do is summarize and then let you watch. In “Positive Alex,” Alex is forced to take part in the heteronormative ritual of the school dance. However, because she won’t adopt the normative feminine performance of pleasing smiles, the boys at school consider her too surly, and won’t be her date to the dance. So, she uses a magic spell to make herself more complaisant, an effect which is visually represented by rainbows leaving her body. The pressure, however, of being in this emotional closet makes her crazy, with disastrous consequences.

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Lady Gaga – The Edge of Glory (video)

When “The Edge of Glory” came out, I described it as like Jason Nevins remixing Kelly Clarkson; should probably have clarified that this was intended as praise, an attempt to convey the splendid excessiveness of the song. Indeed, the song has become my favorite track of the year, and the more I listen to it the more it seems to be even more overstuffed than a Jason Nevins remix. Much the same could be said of Born This Way, and while the continuing parade of terrible lyrics, ridiculous outfits, and 13-minute videos got a bit wearing, I think it’s important to maintain fidelity to the Gaga event. The ambition (and Gaga’s obsession with making sure we know about the ambition) and the failure is kind of the point; Katherine St Asaph’s description of the album as “like the patterns you can use to cast invulnerable 73-foot-tall shadows on the wall behind you with your scrawny Wizard of Oz hands” remains the best explanation of what it’s doing, at least when it works.

The Saturday's – All Fired Up (video)

Another of my favorite tracks was similarly preposterous in its size. The Saturdays’ On Your Radar is the logical endpoint of the increasing indistinction between dance and pop which has coincided with the Saturdays’ time in the charts, largely abandoning conventional pop song structures in favor of dance builds and breaks, taken to an absurd (and, when it works, as in the case of the Xenomania produced “All Fired Up,” brilliant) lengths. Two widely cited bits of musical journalism discussed something related: Daniel Barrow on songs constructed around a textural and emotional intensification, or “soar,” and Simon Reynolds on “digital maximalism.” Both articles are kind of weak, and would have benefited from more historicization of their objects; I mean, Reynolds writes about music which “is up!, preposterously euphoric but genuinely awesome” without mentioning gabba? And confining his discussion to dance music misses how widespread this kind of maximalism is, or what wider cultural trends it might be tapping in to.

Britney Spears – Till the World Ends (video)

The distinctive thing about the maximalism in the charts this year is the apocalyptic tone. You can see this to some extent in the Gaga and Saturdays videos, but the central exponent here was Britney. Appropriately, because she was already developing this trend back in 2007 with the release of Blackout. At the time, I rather underrated the album, seeing it as part of the narcotic rave&B trend that developed from FutureSex/LoveSounds, but it’s actually doing something else, not withdrawing from the world but attempting to obliterate it. The political significance of this apocalyptic maximalism is something I didn’t really focus on in my own review of Britney’s album (although it’s not incompatible – the proletariat, after all, is the class whose destiny it is to abolish its own conditions of reproduction), but The New Inquiry joined the dots between the barely-suppressed insurrectionary fervor of apocalyptic maximalism and the forms of struggle that have been emerging recently.

2NE1 – Can't Nobody (video)

This year I started paying attention to K-Pop, which seems to be an entire genre devoted to maximalism. Last.fm has been periodically playing me K-Pop tracks for a while, although the only one I can remember is Girls’ Generation’s “Gee” from 2009, which is amazing. Anyway, Girls’ Generation are great and all, but their recent tracks are a bit restrained compared to their stuff from 2009, and the last thing I want from K-Pop is restraint. But through YouTube’s knowledge of related videos, Girls’ Generation led me to 2NE1, who are if anything even better. This year they released a mini album featuring a great synth-poppy track, “Hate You,” and a slightly confusing entry in the self-esteem pop genre, “Ugly,” but their best song remains last year’s “Can’t Nobody,” which is just fantastic: the amazingly swagged out rap at the beginning, the diva-ey chorus, the screeching tire sounds,the bit in the video with Minzy wearing a suit….

On the topic of maximalism and swagger, Jay-Z and Kanye’s Watch the Throne was released to howls of frankly bizarre protest about its supposed excess. The worst of these was probably Ryan Briles’s at The Activist, which calls the album “upper class propaganda.” This is so fucking stupid, and is an interpretation which could only be sustained by failing to pay attention to the album itself and the last, IDK, 20 years of hip hop. Yes, Jay-Z is a petit-bourgeois black nationalist rather than a revolutionary socialist, but it’s not like he doesn’t have a worked-out theory of the relationship between material success and the liberation of poor black people, and the album continually thematizes this complicated relationship (perhaps most straightforwardly on “Murder to Excellence”). I don’t know that Watch the Throne is a great album, but it’s better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, because MBDTF was about Kanye’s individual and internalized pathologies and self-loathing, which aren’t really all that interesting subjects, while Watch the Throne expands the frame to consider the social context which produces these pathologies. I’m also still mad that that Ryan Briles post completely fails to get Kanye’s very funny joke about forcing his son to be a Republican “so everyone knows he loves white people,” from the album’s best track, “New Day.”

Lil B – Unchain Me (video)

I don’t know if rap hasn’t been very good this year, or if I’ve just lost interest, or what, but the only really good hip-hop album I can think of from this year is Lil B’s I’m Gay. It’s not entirely clear what makes this an album, as opposed to the over 9,000 mixtapes Lil B also released this year, particularly a he put the album up for free download almost as soon as it had been released, but it is both better and more coherent than the mixtapes. Lil B obviously has the most innovative flow in rap since forever, and aside from the entertainment value of his meme-generating lolcat rap, he’s working through a bunch of issues in an honest and interesting, if not always right, way.

Katy B – Broken Record (video)

Also, I guess, falling in the category of maximalism would be brostep. I’m a bit confused by the attempt to delineate brostep, perhaps because “bro” is a bit of an alien category (we don’t, quite, have bros in England). A lot of the dubstep purists’ criticism of brostep reminded me of dismissals of donk a few years back; the difference is the way the process of Bourdieuvian distinction works rather differently in the US than in the UK. In the UK, the crassness of donk was signified primarily in class terms, with donk unsophisticated because northern and working class. In the US, the racialization of class means that the distinction works differently: the crassness of brostep is signified as white and (thus also) middle class; hence the relatively priveleged fratboy brostep listener is contrasted with the faux-bohemian hipster. Which is to say, I’m not at all convinced that the category of brostep has any real coherence, beyond a general name for big, hooky, populist rave tunes. And if that’s what brostep means, the biggest brostep record of the year would be Katy B’s On a Mission, although Katy is no bro.

Last few things about which I don’t have much to say about. Cher Lloyd’s is really good (even “Swagger Jagger” is good if you can persuade yourself to not hear the “O My Darling Clementine” bits, but “Playa Boi” and “Dub on the Track” are better). Selena Gomez released a fairly consistently good album, Demi Lovato released a less consistent album which did have some pretty good tracks. Beyoncé released the best album of her career. Nicola Roberts released a very good album, Florrie and Sky Ferreira released good EPs, Menya and tAtu split up.

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Terminator: Salvation, on the other hand, takes place firmly after the apocalypse, and was released in 2009, when, indeed, the neoliberal apocalypse had already happened. It isn’t exactly a perfect film, with its focus on explosions taking up time that could have been put to better use telling us, really, anything about the main characters, but it’s a lot better than Terminator 3. It’s temporal location may explain why, except for the last 20 minutes or so, Terminator 3 doesn’t have any of the resonance of the other films: it’s set before the apocalypse, but released in 2003, at which point I don’t think anyone thought apocalypse was avoidable; the film is, really, just marking time.

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(A digression inspired by watching Zombieland the other day. What I like about the film is its presentation of the post-apocalypse as amusement arcade; apparently, you only need to walk a hundred yards to find a Hummer full of weapons, or Bill Murray’s house full of food and fine wine. Obviously in one sense this is ridiculous; if there’s no-one working at the power plant, it will take more than flipping a couple of switches to get the theme park rides back up and running. But there’s also something right about this; our apocalypse isn’t an apocalypse of scarcity, but one that leaves us scavenging in the wreckage of superabundance. I also like the way no-one in the film uses their real names, as if the apocalypse has wiped away bourgeois subjectivity.)

The post-apocalypse of Terminator: Salvation is a more conventional in its portrayal of economic and environmental ruin, but what strikes me as interesting is the role that industry still plays in it. You might expect the world produced by a murderous artificial intelligence to be more immaterial but, in a partial reversal of the first film, in Terminator: Salvation, industry is now firmly on the side of the machines. The choice to locate Skynet central in the Bay Area is clever; what is, in our world, the home of post-industrial Web 2.0, becomes, in the film, the real of post-Fordist capitalism, the nightmare factories of China and other free trade zones. And we see that, like neoliberalism, Skynet still has a use for human beings, even if only as bare life to be fed into its machinic labs. But Skynet is presented as so material in the film that it seems to have neglected its immaterial dimension; surely an omnipotent AI would not have a security system that is as easy to hack as John Connor finds Skynet’s to be? The film is perhaps still caught up in the liberatory fantasies of the late neoliberal period, in which the internet was imagined as uncomplicatedly a site of freedom.

The end of the film perhaps complicates this, as John Connor is saved by the robot that does not know it is a robot. I had thought, and hoped, at one point that they were going to go further with this blurring of the human-machine boundary: would it not have been a better ending if the actual John Connor had died in the attempt to free the prisoners from Skynet, but the humanoid robot had decided to continue Connor’s work by taking on his name, with the result that the “John Connor” who started the whole series by sending Kyle Rees back in time to save Sarah Connor, would have been himself a Terminator?

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White audience members’ consequent “panic,” she notes, is simultaneously posited as an intended effect, a positing that locates and circumscribes [artist Adrian] Piper as a strategizing subject. Rather than remaining cognizant of how their panic is produced in the moment of their own receptive uptake, white interlocutors instead construe Piper as the sovereign and willful originator of their discomfort, disorientation, and shock. (Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance, 186)

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(Note that this video contains repeated uses of the n-word.)

One of the best things about Curb Your Enthusiasm is its recognition of race as a site of particular awkwardness in the US. In the episode from which these clips are taken, Larry experiences the world as it appears to the paranoid opponent of political correctness; people of color, in this mindset, only exist in order to arrive just at the moment the (white) person is telling the “truth” about race, to entrap the white person into political incorrectness. By playing this worldview straight, Curb Your Enthusiasm shows how ridiculous it is, and so, I think, comments rather well on the sense, which pervades discussions of race in America, that the awkwardness that surrounds the topic is somehow the fault, or even the willed action of, people of color.

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2. In Memo­riam  So. Farewell then Wizards of Waverly Place You were the best Disney Channel Show About egoist anarchism And queer anti-sociality. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” That was almost your Catchphrase We might call the ideology of tween media an ideology of perkiness, in which...
3. “Thinking guides and sus­tains every gesture of the hand” ...

The supposed strategic advice is based on the idea that, if we act in certain ways, the media and police will react in particular ways. But the media has a bunch of structures around which they build stories, and they will slot the actual events into these structures as they see fit; so, whatever the the most militant or photogenic action of the day happens to be gets wedged into the “outrage” slot, if the script calls for an outrage, and whether that particular outrage is property damage or something else is basically irrelevant. As reclaimuc put it on Twitter, “the media will always be terrible, no matter what we do.” This is even more true of the idea that property damage “provokes” the police, which really badly misunderstands the way in which public order policing works. Police responses are not, in general, decided by individual police witnessing specific events, but by senior police and political leaders deciding how to deal with the protest as a whole. If the police attack protestors, it’s because they’ve decided to attack protestors, not because of anything the protestors did (this is also why worrying about police infiltrators is usually pointless; police may use provocateurs to stage-manage their intervention, but the form of their intervention is decided in advance and is independent of what either protestors or provocateurs do).

In both cases, the liberal position is based around a belief that we can control how we are perceived, and how the state (and its ideological apparatuses like the media) will respond to us. Or actually this could be put more strongly: the criticism reveals the liberal’s desperate need to be in control. The fact that protestors have very limited ability to prevent state crackdowns, and certainly individual protestors can do almost nothing, is scary, and it conflicts with deeply held liberal beliefs about how the state works, and how protesting can change it.

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1. Acts and images of protest The coverage was almost entirely predictable. It was predictable because it was in important respects stage managed by the police…. The state seeks to manipulate the media in order to protect the status quo from serious challenge. (Dan Hind, VersoBooks.com) I do think this focus on police infiltrators risks overemphasizing...
2. No on 90 California is, politically, an odd place. It has a reputation as one of the “bluest” states (which, in America’s curious chromo-semantics means “left wing”); but it’s also a home of libertarianism, which coexists with the left in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. This combination makes California an interesting testing-ground for...
3. Britain’s stu­pidest public in­tel­lec­tual (with bonus St Au­gus­tine content) The Guardian last week saw some particularly high-quality entries in the competition to write the stupidest thing possible about religion. Tobias Jones is terrified of “totalitarian” Richard Dawkins, who is apparently poised to carry out a genocide of religious believers. A. C. Grayling fights back, accusing homophobic protestors of “an...

I was happy to see this successful response, because the response from the University administration had been (predictably) useless, and the response from Student Government (perhaps not quite as predictably), also awful.

The ASUC passed a deeply stupid bill that, didn’t condemn, or even mention, the actual racist bake sale, but:

would provide guidelines for respectful conduct by campus organizations. Among other provisions, the bill “condemns the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or in seriousness by any student group.”

This is so wrongheaded I’m not sure where to start. To say that their bake sale is “discriminatory” is not a criticism, on the contrary, it accepts the premise of their faux-naïf argument. Racist former UC Regent Ward Connerly, who showed up to support the bake sale, made this clear:

“This bake sale is racist,” he said. “It’s only the way to call attention to the problem [of affirmative action].”

By complaining about the formal discrimination at the bake sale, the ASUC gives the College Republicans the opportunity to nod solemnly and say, “but don’t you see, isn’t affirmative action even more discriminatory?” Worse, the ASUC ‘s bill commits them to agreeing with this, and condemns the ASUC’s own event in support of affirmative action because, of course, affirmative action is formally discriminatory; what justifies this formal discrimination is the context it takes place in. The problem with the bake sale isn’t that it discriminates on the basis of race (who really cares about 50 cents difference in the price of a cupcake?). The problem is that the attempt to present this trivial discrimination as in any way relevant to affirmative action, which attempts to redress a long history of the most appalling discrimination. To think the two are in any way comparable is incredibly stupid; to pretend to be that stupid for publicity is racist.

In other news, Wendy Brown decided to adopt a lulz-based anti-racist strategy, of which I also approve:

The College Republicans started selling baked goods at 10am PT this morning. Their first customer was UC Berkeley Professor of Political Science Wendy Brown, who tried to buy all the baked goods but wasn’t allowed. “I thought the Republicans were free enterprise, but they won’t let me buy all the cupcakes.”

(Picture from thenoobyorker)

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One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

It’s no accident that the description of contemporary racism in terms of past racism appeals to progressives, because the structure of the argument is itself progressive; that is, it suggests that there is a natural tendency for things to get better, and things which are bad are bad because they are outdated. This view presents racism as an atavism, and, in doing so, actually downplays the importance and persistence of racialized inequality; racism, it suggests, should have ceased to exist some time back in the 50s, but mysteriously has failed to do so.

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