Recorded on December 18th 2015
This is one of the first episodes where B & A! seriously disagree. Probably there is just some sort of misunderstanding or perhaps race is something we are not capable of seeing eye to eye on. Entertaining listen though. Totally separately than this is a discussion about an article from the newest Black Seed by Gerald Vizenor.
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Ticktock
Introduction @ 2:00
Topic of the week – Identity @ 4:00
Bellamy was taught politics in college… saw some grandstanding
He moved to the Bay and saw worse
A! attempts to thread a needle
A critique of Post-left Anarchy as tone deaf
Pickup lines on Facebook
Not stories, battle plans about winning
Veganism
Individuation and social relations
Race is a geist @ 24:30
Revisiting reflections on and with the Unterrified podcast (episode 11)
Can an analysis (about geist) be intrinsically European or only contingently associated
Context matters! (in this case I don’t know more than I know)
White mans burden (colonization and evaluating other cultures)
Disagreement ensues
Imagination redux @ 41:20
Gerald Vizenor!!!
Spoiler Alert!!!
We talk about specifics of the Vizenor piece from Black Seed
European authors are mentioned (Derrida, Barthes, etc)
The story is about storytelling, indigeneity, sex, social pressure, racism, etc.
“When you tell a story you lead with the sex and then tell about the back seat”
Trickster destroys and creates the world
Genocide vs the Trickster
Catholicism
URLs
Anews Identity
Locating an Indigenous Anarchism
Black Seed #4
(1140)
6 Comments
One of the last things Bellamy said was about other stories that have inspired his ideas, and that leads me into a vague request: I personally would enjoy and appreciate more talk of writing or other material that either of you have really come to view as foundational to your worldview, or even just stuff that really resonates with you right now. I’m not sure if there’s a better way to do it than in a pseudo-list format, maybe it can just be an ongoing segment or something, maybe something short and sweet. Just a thought, it doesn’t exactly seem like the type of thing you would do on this show so I won’t be expecting it to stick.
Aragorn> How can you possibly think that an ‘extreme nominalist’ rejection of the spooks of ‘race’, ‘gender’, etc. includes a rejection of ANY of the validity of that person’s story? You and Bellamy were talking about the consequences of the ‘identity’, but you don’t seem to acknowledge that the people treating a given person in a given way are completely COMPLICIT in reifying that spook.
In other words, neither you ‘identifying as’ X, nor the ‘Others’ who ‘treat you as X’ can validate the concept. You are just both sharing the same delusion, albeit from different sides of the table.
You repeatedly reference the locale of the Bay Area where apparently you and/or others would physically attack me for voicing my rejection of your geists, but you don’t seem to see the irony of dismissing a rejection of essence as ‘European colonialism’ or even ‘genocide’, while constantly referencing a local perspective that lashes out in respond to WORDS.
As for your sanctioning the pandering towards your hosts by humouring them (you mentioned some black nationalists as your example) and their spooks, I guess I can understand that in a practical sense if one feared violent reprisal and wanted to get out of the room unharmed, but it raises the question of why one would want to communicate with people that are violent in the first place, no?
I don’t know if I’m wrong to take your statements in this episode, and your continued warping of my arguments to suit your narrative, as open hostility, but when you won’t communicate directly with me at all, these are the kinds of confusions that might arise.
bennett, it’s me again (btw, totally appropriate response to me in the other thread — although perhaps what you could take away is that not everyone is following what you’re doing elsewhere, merely what you’re saying here… an issue with our oh-so-attenuated social/written space).
i haven’t listened to the pcast yet, but i will say that there are many times when i don’t respond to someone who really wants to talk to me, usually because the premises they present to me as the basis for conversation are so out of synch with what i want to say that meeting them is more difficult than it seems worth. interestingly, from what you write about a!’s point here, that seems connected to what your issue is also–ie, the idea of meeting people where they’re at. the two things that i seem to get from your post above are that a) you know things about people that they don’t know about themselves (ie how wrapped up in spooks they are) and b) you know how they should be living.
however common that perspective is, it’s understandably seen as deeply disrespectful, no?
as for people beating each other up over words, words are how we communicate to other people–they are frequently these days the only indicator we have of someone’s intention, since we don’t know what people’s actions are (or only know through their words, at best).
i’m not supporting people who claim identity as the end-all, be-all, i’m just saying that people who reject it entirely and out of hand seem just as simplistic.
but i’m not a! and also, i’m spotty at online conversations, so it might not be worth answering me. 🙂
I’m not rejecting it “out of hand”. There is an entire conceptual framework behind both positions and I feel mine is more robust. Writing reams in this thin comment column hardly seems like the best place to go over this, or the best way (I’d prefer direct verbal discussion any day of the week and twice on Sunday).
But Aragorn advocates ending the discourse by branding me as rude, and/or suggesting I would deserve to be attacked, and/or trying to tar me with a genocide brush.
I could write a lot just about the mini-saga of this exchange, but I think I’m done with it, in all honesty. I have lots of other things to put my energy towards.
Sorry to hear that you’re spotty at conversations. If you want to have this one properly, you know where I am, since whoever uploaded the last episode was kind enough to link to The Unterrified.
Have y’all checked out Benett and Entito’s critiques of gender?
I think that A! is more on the mark when it comes to what those folks think.
They reject the position that trans women and genderqueer take, but seemingly don’t attack gender in its entirety and continue to gender people.
I do think gender is a construct, but it’s just as much a construct as any other categorical label or declaration of affinity.
“but seemingly don’t attack gender in its entirety and continue to gender people”
Actually, you are mistaken. Our position is that gender is a spook, and we do not ‘gender’ people. I don’t know what you exactly mean by that verb, but I do not make statements about gender other than to argue why it doesn’t exist.
Perhaps you are confusing sex with gender?
May I ask why you are posting this here and not communicating with us directly?