Time and the spectral other: Demonstrating against ‘Unite the Right 2’ (original) (raw)
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TIME EMPTIED AND TIME RENEWED: THE DOMINION OF CAPITAL AND A THEO-POLITICS OF CONTRETEMPS
JCRT, 2018
In his long-awaited interjection into the debates on the future of Marxism after the collapse of Soviet state communism, Jacques Derrida introduces the notion of contretemps. 1 It is a concept that appears amid his call for a New International to bear the legacy of critique in a (final) epoch dominated by the new world order with its ten pervasive plagues. As is to be expected however, Derrida is no orthodox Marxist, and his intervention seeks, in part, to proffer a deconstructionist critique of the canonical concepts of class, history, party, etc. At the same time, he seeks to channel the critical spirit of Marx in order to re-politicize the current moment, introducing contretemps in order to highlight the persistent openness and counter-temporality intrinsic to the work of democracy. The details of Derrida's heterodoxy and his dispute with more mainstream Marxists, however, are not of primary interest for this essay. Still, I take his notion of contretemps to be an entry point for looking at how the church can draw upon Marxist insights for reimagining its own transformative political practice, particularly in an age of global capital. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, wherein the ghost of the murdered Danish king continues to disturb his perplexed son, Derrida's engagement suggests that the specter of Marx haunts the dominion of global capital, as a troubled spirit arising from the ache of a society whose relations have been pulled out of joint. At the heart of an unfettered and regnant capital, he suggests, is a distorted time. Derrida asserts, "The age is off its hinges. Everything, beginning with time, seems out of kilter, unjust, dis-adjusted," as the time of quantifiable instants and unlimited accumulation distorts the structure and rhythm of social and political relations. 2 Given the madness and the dislocation of time, a resistance that works toward democracy, justice, and solidarity must be something of an untimely, out-of-step practice.
TIME EMPTIED AND TIME RENEWED: THE DOMINION OF CAPITAL AND A THEO- POLITICS OF CONTRETEMPS1
Using a Marxish framework of contretemps, this article provides an analysis of the configuration of time under capital as the key ordering mechanism of its dominion. Any attempt to resist its hollowing out of life, therefore, must act to change time. While radical attempts to enact such a change remain forestalled, a theo-politics of contretemps constituted in the ecclesial practices of the Table and the Rule of Christ constitute a counter-force to capital's dominion through the renewing of time. I argue that as the reign of God infuses these practices, structuring the community's flows with an alternative tempo resonant with a peculiar mode of co-governance, they can resist the homogenizing circuits of capital time and embody a real political alternative. In his long-awaited interjection into the debates on the future of Marxism after the collapse of Soviet state communism, Jacques Derrida introduces the notion of contretemps.2 It is a concept that appears amid his call for a New International to bear the legacy of critique in a (final) epoch dominated by the new world order with its ten pervasive plagues. As is to be expected however, Derrida is no orthodox Marxist, and his intervention seeks, in part, to proffer a deconstructionist critique of the canonical concepts of class, history, party, etc. At the same time, he seeks to channel the critical spirit of Marx in order to re-politicize the current moment, introducing contretemps in order to highlight the persistent openness and counter-temporality intrinsic to the work of democracy. The details of Derrida's heterodoxy and his dispute with more mainstream Marxists, however, are not of primary interest for this essay. Still, I take his notion of contretemps to be an entry point for looking at how the church can draw upon Marxist insights for reimagining its own transformative political practice, particularly in an age of global capital. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, wherein the ghost of the murdered Danish king continues to disturb his perplexed son, Derrida's engagement suggests that the specter of Marx haunts the dominion of global capital, as a troubled spirit arising from the ache of a society whose relations have been pulled out of joint. At the heart of an unfettered and regnant capital, he suggests, is a distorted time. Derrida asserts, " The age is off its hinges. Everything, beginning with time, seems out of kilter, unjust, dis-adjusted, " as the time of quantifiable instants and unlimited accumulation distorts the structure and rhythm of 1 My thanks to [intentionally deleted for purposes of anonymity] for their insightful comments and suggestions on this essay.
White Supremacist Terrorism in Charlottesville: Reconstructing 'Unite the Right'
STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM, 2021
The “Unite the Right” rally that subsumed Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 will be remembered for its haunting torch-lit rally, massive display of neo-Nazi and white nationalist paraphernalia, bloody riots, and murderous car attack. Despite extensive media coverage, a comprehensive, scholarly, synthetic study of the planning and execution of the Unite the Right (UtR) has yet to emerge. Drawing from a repository of 5,000 primary texts and digital artifacts and using the lens of symbolic interactionism and levels of analysis theory, this study details the event as manifested in three theatres: symbolically mediated, systems-technical, and physical. Three findings are discussed: first, the “event” was centrally organized as a simulacrum of a military campaign; second, the agitational propaganda and information warfare was extensive and designed to publicize, recruit, and terrorize; and third, the city of Charlottesville suffered two cyberattacks timed for meaningful symbolic interaction with movement actors and public officials. Based on these three findings, the authors offer the term “immersive terrorism” to describe the extended, transmediated, multi-theatre nature of the UtR terror campaign.
Rhetoric and the Temporal Turn: Race, Gender, Temporalities
Women's Studies in Communication
Palestinian liberation, just as now is the time for our own in the United States. (quoted in Palumbo-Liu, np) This sense of now seems particularly common as a means of motivating action, as the current moment is depicted as being the moment of action. A common corollary to this sense that now is the time for action is the suggestion that the normal course of prior life is no longer tolerable. Sylvia Rivera's defiant declaration to the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally that "I will no longer put up with this shit" epitomizes such exasperation. A similar sentiment served as the basis of the response by many women in Hollywood who, in coalition with other organizations like the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, declared "Time's Up" on the culture of sexual and racial bias and harassment in the U.S. entertainment industry. Likewise, Wilhelm Van Spronsen, who was shot and killed by Seattle police in 2018 for trying to burn an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center to the ground, reflected on his youth growing up in post-WWII Germany in his manifesto, stating: We are living in visible fascism ascendant …. I promised myself that I would not be one of those who stands by as neighbors are torn from their homes and imprisoned for somehow being perceived as lesser …. Detention centers are an abomination. I'm not standing by …. You don't have to burn the motherfucker down, but are you going to just stand by? (quoted in Jaywork, np)
ARTICLES: CONCEPTUAL Reckoning with Hate: Faithful Routes Away from the Charlottesville Rally
Social Work & Christianity, 2020
Ripples of both alarm and hope regarding United States race relations have circled out from Charlottesville, Virginia subsequent to violent demonstrations held on August 11 and 12, 2017. This article tells less well-known stories out of Charlottesville, recounting faith groups’ prayers and vigils through the summer of 2017, and one Christian social work educator’s experience of witness with her faith community during the August 12th rally. The article also highlights several loving and creative responses that individuals, groups, and organizations made on August 12th and in the subsequent year after the rally to assist the injured, address the trauma, and begin to rebuild a sense of safety and normalcy in the community. The unfolding Charlottesville story offers an anti-racist case study of one community’s efforts under extreme conditions to reconcile and heal racist wounds.
The Ordinariness of January 6: Rhetorics of Participation in Antidemocratic Culture 2024
Journal of Right-Wing Studies, 2024
The January 6, 2021, Capitol riot appeared as an extraordinary and shocking event to many American citizens. In fact, the various framings of the riot such as “insurrection,” “sedition,” or “domestic terrorism” seem to confirm the unprecedented nature of the day. By contrast, in this article we argue that January 6 can be understood in terms of its ordinariness, that is, as “the most ordinary thing that could happen” when viewed in the context of right-wing politics. We first argue that the reliance on a universalized dichotomy between authoritarianism and democracy in current research on right-wing politics in the United States tends to reify those terms, and thus miss the ordinary and routine dimension of antidemocratic practices. We subsequently propose the concept antidemocratic cultures to understand how right-wing political dispositions are fabricated through and mediated by rhetorical acts including speech, written texts, and embodied everyday practice. We analyze the rhetoric of participation of riot participants by reading their text messages, social media posts, and interviews with law enforcement and news media, as detailed in their arrest sheets. The rhetoric of participation of riot participants reveals how political dispositions are fabricated through ordinary language use and how these identities congeal in antidemocratic cultures. In the last section, we further discuss how a theory of antidemocratic cultures provides a novel framework to understand contemporary right-wing politics.
Rolling Stone called the Zuccotti Park encampment “semi-religious,” and Adbusters Magazine’s former editor, Micah White, referred to the collective action as “a spiritual insurrection.” One of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, Willie, used metaphorical language to describe both the experience and the larger campaign: “the camp feels magical but it’s also totally jerry-rigged, improvisation built on improvisation…A truly massive storm could take the whole thing down—but can’t the same be said of the status quo? The camp, if joined by enough like it around the world, could be that storm.” Journalist and participant Nathan Schneider called the year he spent encamped with Occupy “the apocalypse.” He linked the term etymologically to the idea of lifting a veil, saying that that the movement brought revelation to participants, who after the awakening could not go back to life the same. Participants, though differing in their ideas of what collective action could best affect change, almost uniformly confessed that Occupy changed them, transformed them, “messed with them” by creating a new sense of “we” that did not exist before, “an entity with agency and identity and potency… [within which] new things seem possible… a sense of connection that is as emotional as it is political.” This exam begins by describing the operative spirituality of the movement through an in-depth treatment of four categories found in primary texts from 2011-13 which articulated a structuring transcendent experiences of Occupy actors toward deep solidarity against the Empire: symbols, values, practices, and rituals. The essay then argues that the religious imagination of the movement and its political performance that aimed to redefine power through symbolic protest and participatory democracy exemplifies prefigurative politic with an evident eschatology and ontology.
“Apocalyptic Politics: On the Permanence and Transformations of a Symbolic Complex” -- Duke 2014
DUKE University -- The Franklin Humanities Institute Politics and Religion: a Humanities Futures Cross-Departmental Seminar December 3, 2014 - 1:00pm - 5:00pm See more at: http://www.fhi.duke.edu/events/fhi-mellon-seminar-political-theory-religious-studies#sthash.L7JH1kdc.dpuf A number of eminent philosophers, historians, and political theorists have described modern conceptions of history as secularized apocalypses. They argued that the progressivist ideologies of Enlightenment, positivism and communism had adopted from the apocalypses the linear and future-oriented conception of history and had replaced the expectation of a beyond with the promise of innerwordly fulfillment. Recently, a number of comparative studies on terrorism and sectarian violence have concluded that the one unifying element in such diverse groups as American far-right activists, the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo sect and radical Islamists, is their apocalyptic conception of violence: Religious terrorists see their own activity integrated in the scenario of a global war of good against evil. Employing a similar argument, other researchers have stated that the rhetoric of the Cold War and the “War on Terror” is clearly apocalyptic. Thus the question arises: Is then everything apocalyptic? The apocalypse is certainly in fashion in modern social science. However, some basic paradoxes of the above claims have been almost completely overlooked: How can modern narratives of progress draw on the apocalypses, if apocalypses traditionally offer a narrative of decline? How can activist and revolutionary movements be called apocalyptic, if apocalypses traditionally dissuade their readers from any engagement in politics? If the ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries result from a secularization of the apocalypse, why are the apocalyptic activists of the early 21st century suddenly religious again? How can it happen that a decidedly Jewish and Christian symbolic tradition becomes integrated into Islamic and even Buddhist narratives? How is it possible that, after two millennia and despite multiple religious, political, social, and cultural transformations, the symbolic lore of the apocalypses is still with us today? My paper will show that there are answers to these questions and that they are highly relevant for modern political science. However, they require two preconditions which are often missing from the way in which political science is practiced and taught at universities today: 1) a long-term historical perspective, which reaches back to the formative periods of symbolic complexes; 2) methodological flexibility, which overcomes the fragmentation of modern academic disciplines.