Black Social Movement

https://vimeo.com/116111740 (please note the blog theme subtracts embedded videos from the front page preview) --- click read more to see full post.



There are many many brilliant talks with Moten, but i woke up this morning remembering that hearing this one was probably the first huge huge re-orientation in my understanding of Blackness and Black Life (as opposed to only addressing Black 'lives' (the subject)) ---  i woke up this morning with his voice in my head and its resonance with the arguments and dreamings at the end of the da Silva text. The Undercommons and In the Break go into things much more precisely. But in this talk  , from 2015, he's foregrounding that 'the police officer' wasn't just shooting 'a' person, a black body (subject) he was shooting at mobile black social LIFE

He is not denying the body, and says the police shootings are an extension of Lynch Law. But

" what it is that the State is defending itself from, and I think in this respect in the particular instance of Brown and Gardner's murder, the details are worth paying attention to, because what the drone Derek Wilson shot into that day was insurgent Black Life walking down the street'. I don't he meant to invade the individual personhood, of Michale Brown, he was shooting at mobile black sociality in the street, in a way that he understood implicitly constituted a threat to the order he represents and is sworn to protect'.  Erik Garner on an everyday basis, initiated a new mode of marketplace, another mode of social life, that's what they killed. So when we say that Black Lives Matter, we sometimes obscure the fact that it is indeed Black LIFE that matters. That insurgent Black Social Life still constitutes a profound threat to a the already existing [State] order. And part of the reason it constitutes a threat is its openness, its lack of fixedy, the fact that anybody can claim it and it can claim anybody. it seems to me..... Clearly both in the instance of Brown and Garner, these are manifestations of broken windows, policing, and what they made clear is that we are broken windows. We constitute this threat to already existing normative order, and i think the police have this regulatory function to destroy broken windows. even in a weird way to fix them, by destroying them. I study literature and philosophy and about 10-12 years ago i became obsessed with a passage, which ...'Critique of Judgment' Kant writes "the imagination in its lawless freedom produces nothing but nonsense, it must have its wings severely clipped, in order to understand it'. He opposes the lawlessness of the imagination with the regulatory policing function of the understanding - and there's a whole complicate way in which he says imagination is both ratialized and gendered, and sexualised in all these profound ways in the Western cultural tradition. Kant's interested bc he understands we can't do without imagination, but he definitely wants its wings clipped. He demands that it be regulated. In the history of english poetry, the window is often a figure of imagination, as a kind of lens through which we see, thorugh which we envision. and part of what's at stake - to fix a broken window is to fix another way of imagining the world. to fix it is to destory it (with fix-edy) to regulate it to exclude it to incorporate it, to capitalize it, to exploit it to accumulate it. this state can't live with us or without us. It's not so much , it's important to recognize that the broken window, the alternative window through which we see the world, its not just the way in which we something that doesn't exist, but its also the way we see and imagine that which does exist. it's important to imagine what might be otherwise, but it's also important to see who and what we are right now. But i think they see who and what we are, through the sights of their guards, through their surveillance mechanisms."

{and this is where i'd happily write everything else he says but it's also too much and better to just listen to him speak in the video above).

He also foreground how it is activism, not activists, that made the social justice movement in its early days, possible. it was the PRACTICE of  local collective movements, that made that possible, rather then any single charasmatic leader. Again, he's working this idea that the resistence is in the movement, the lack of a subject around with the State can capture.

Also of note is his mention of a book co-written with Eyal Weisman, who's giving a talk today at McGill, on Architecture after the revolution. When mentioning this book he again discusses how by practicing a form of communal land ownership, Palestinians continually are able to resist the capture and invasion techniques of the Israelis -- because that collective practice does not yield a 'subject' around which to they can subtract, invade or mobilize around.