Also, if you haven’t already, you might also like to have a read of Althusser’s Machiavelli and Us, in which there is lots of talk (some of it quoting Machiavelli) of grabbing fortuna by the hair.

The original comment from me, that sparked Az’s ire, was intended by me in an quasi-ironic fashion to try to depotentialise the event. The affects I could see circulating, in the media and in your immediate blog post after the riots, were problematic for me. I could see that such circulation was not going to be good for any sort of progressive political movement whatsoever. I am glad we are in agreement with the becoming-minor thing because the response from those involved has been a becoming-major, including my comment above and including your blog post after the riots (and Az’s post for the matter). This does not correlate to a question of “personal responsibility”, it is a collective response from the dominant, but not only the ‘dominant’. To depotentialise the event is to reduce and slow down the circulation of affects that pertain to a prepersonal and collective reactionary desire (that is subjectively experienced). Your blog post, with the burning Australian flag etc was about as reactionary as you can get! So my response was to use examples from my own life to try to introduce some ironic humour into the situation. Obviously this manoeuvre spectacularly failed, in part because humour and so on only travels as far as good will on the internet. From my perspective Az spectacularly failed to understand what I was trying to do, or maybe others want to see their friends full of reactionary desire. I don’t.

From my perspective it is not a question of specificity of difference or of generality. I can see no sense in perpetuating the circulation of reactionary desire and any move to perpetuate such reactionary desire appears to me to be the living out the micro-fascisms (in the D&G sense) of a slave mentality (in the nietszchean sense).

Instead of depotentialising the event by slowing down such a circulation, all I have done, apparently, is add another circuit (or two) for reactionary desire to circulate, including my own. For that I apologise.

Anyway, I’m not particularly angry or interested in “attacking”– the references to our little collective shit-fight were taken from a draft post from around 13 December 2005, and yesterday’s post in particular stayed in draft form for several months, so I apologise if I seem to be bearing a grudge. If you take a step back and get over the idea that an insistence on highlighting the specificities of racism might somehow displace your own “masculine whitey” experiences of violence at a work-site, you might realise that my engagement with your comments is possibly the most dispassionate part of my commentary, and are there as a springboard for things that have nothing to do with Glen Fuller. Given that you no longer have access to your own original comment (which has since disappeared, so I’ve contextualised it by lengthening it from an earlier draft), I think you’re also misreading my intent. Obviously you’re interested in affect; but as far as I could tell, you ascribed Az’s interest in the revelatory aspects of incidents such as Cronulla to a mistakenly “Lacanian” model of the masses “only need[ing] to be informed about what is hidden”, i.e. in the sense of imparting facts about “reality”. Not only does the position you describe seem rather non-Lacanian, but I think it’s a significant misreading of Az’s original post. You suggested that everybody “involved” in Cronulla already “knows” all they need to know, and that it’s the personal responsibility of people in a racist mob not to be “fuckwits”. My entire post takes issue with this idea — not as an attack on you personally or your capacity for suffering at a union work-site, but as something in which I have a general investment.

And yes, I completely agree with you about “becoming minor”.

Mel, I have to go write me some abstracts right now, but I’ll be back later.

I think your aim of a deterritorialised subjectivity is clear (which is what makes people’s fixation on being quoted right funny to me as an observer), and I really agree with what I understand your critique of leftist strategy to be: it is the larger conceptualisation of history implicit in available left positions that is ultimately ineffectual for (what I usually call) a politics based on moments of mass empathy or trauma. That does seem to me exactly what Benjamin was on about in that essay, and why it has such an attractiveness to it.

One thing I guess I also find, when reading such a masculinst (to me misogynist) passage as the one you first cited, is the affective response I feel as a woman reading it. It is a different experience of embodiment which may or may not share the same anticipation of violence that attends racial difference, which is the issue you seem to most want to address with a reworked understanding of Benjamin. The writing cannot but make me aware of the linearity of history – that in a present day text it would not be appropriate to write in this way (which does not make me feel any less suspicious that misogyny continues today in less eloquent forms).

So I’d like you to write even more about this, because it seems to me you need to be more explicit about the layers of distanciation or alienation that need to be acknowledged in engaging with a mode of thinking that has such divisive capacities from a present perspective. If the objective is to avoid seeing history as linear, the question is how to read Benjamin without the presumption of contemporary feminism or anti-racism, or… whatever recent critical and political tools we take to be irreversible. Foucault would appear to me more useful for this task.

Anyway, sorry if this is going too far elsewhere, but this problem you’re working on is probably the biggest intellectual problem I struggle with too, and it is the basis for my ongoing inability to engage with the history of philosophy. If we can both work it out, ripper.

I have a feeling Az was pissed off because I allegedly didn’t recognise ‘difference’ to an acceptable level. That is, I apparently didn’t recognise the “fucking HUGE difference between feeling the constant threat of racialising violence on a beach because of the politics of skin colour, and feeling vulnerable about your body because you don’t like it.” Whatever! If people want to run around being the FUCKING fascist alterity/identity police, then good on them. If people also want to refuse a gesture of empathetic linkage, then fucking good on them. But what’s at stake? being ‘fat’ is not good enough because, of course, this isn’t about ‘belonging’ it is about ‘violence’. Sure, forget belonging, not important. Of course, there is no ‘violence’ to ‘belonging’. Never. But is the beach the only fucking space of potential violence based around identity? No? Ok, good.

For example, has anyone else ever worked and lived for on a union construction site without being a union member? And then joined the union because it is easier. And then have all this other shit happens (like winning a harley davidson!) so it is just better to leave the site because there is so much resentiment because you are a ‘university type’ even though you grew up in the same fucking suburb as some of the other dumb fucks on the job. of course, living and working with these assholes 24 hours a day doesn’t compare to a day at the beach. whatever. no, no one else, especially a fucking MASCULINE WHITEY, could ever possibly know what the threat of violence is because of something about one’s self that is permanent.

Anyway, the comment link you reference to on my haloscan account doesn’t work. i think you want to link to the post for which that haloscan link (which is actually a trackback link) correlates:

http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/2005/12/az-and-beach-bodies.html

however, that post doesn’t contain those comments that are being attributed to me!?!? I’ll assume i said that comment (???), because it does read like something I would write and I vaguely remember it. So, first thing: You are actually agreeing with my comment with the jist of your post here:

“The ‘in/visible’ distinction you make is very useful for those who think people… only need to be informed about what is hidden, etc. that is, what is really going on.”

“very useful for those who think”

ie those who think.

ie not glen who thinks this, but useful as a fulcrum/weapon for those who mistakingly think it is merely a case of informing the uninformed on what has been ‘invisible’ to them all this time.

ie IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF IDEOLOGY OR A MYSTIFIED BELIEF, LIKE AS IF WE ARE ALL PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS WHO KNOW BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE

that is what i meant in the comment.

Second thing: So WHY IS IT NOT A CASE of an invisible state of affairs being made visible? because “everyone involved” in racist violence “knows what they are doing”: not ideology, but affect. Am I not agreeing with you 100% here? NO! ‘They’ don’t need to ‘know’ it on a conscious thought level to “know it”, but ‘know’ it on an experiential felt level. I am assuming they can feel the stupidity and ethical badness of what they are doing in their body, in the situation. Maybe they don’t, I don’t know. Maybe the obviousness of one’s own affective disposition isn’t obvious to racist fucks. But I think it is obvious, and they revel in the righteousness of their own hatred and the associated affectivities.

The comment by Az presupposes a world ‘out there’ to which ‘we’ don’t belong. The hidden wires made visible when the ‘world’ cracks open. Well that very well may be for people who don’t know discrimination exists in the world, or who have never encountered such violence on a personal level, or whatever. something COULD be hidden from people who are either retarded or willfully ignorant. sure, why not. However, for the people who actually are racist and who actually have experienced racist violence, or even those people aware enough to pay attention to what is going on in the world in recent history, then IT IS NOT HIDDEN. NONE OF THIS IS INVISIBLE. You say you don’t want to “regain some footing in the public”, then fine, who the hell has the ‘hidden wires’ made visible to them if it is not the apatheic mass who couldn’t give a shit about you or anyone else who feels like they don’t belong because of racism or any other form of discrimination? It is not the apathetic mass that needs any sort of convincing, etc. by ‘public intellectuals’, they don’t care, they don’t need something rendered ‘visible’ for them. However, all this racist discriminatory bullshit is WILLED by those who weild it because it gives them MORE POWER. THEY WANT IT. IT IS NOT INVISIBLE TO THEM. THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT IS GOING ON.

third thing: I am not sure if you were there for question time at the Toby Miller thing, because you left early but I can’t remeber when. I actually asked him (after much stuttering and stammering as is my way) why he relegated what he called the ‘passional’ to a single, passing comment (in opposition to ‘rationality’, if you remember, in his talk) and why there was an absence of any sense of an affective dimension to ‘cultural citizenship’. I invoked the example of sport, ie brian massumi’s thing on the political economy of belonging, which I have written about many times on my blog, and meaghan morris’ comment about how sport is the only domain of community left anymore. He misunderstood my comment/question to be about sport, rather than the affective dimension of any conception of citizenship or what I was trying to get at, belonging.

fourth: I have no idea what the lacanian comment is about. I am not sure lacan described or worked in fallacies. However, the ‘cracking open’ business is precisely an ‘event’ in the disjunctive lacanian sense. I would prefer to look at things on a much more delicate scale, but whatever.

Lastly, I am tired (5am, I have a tooth ache, drugs have started working), but this post reads, ie all the anti-masculinist-history-as-progress stuff and escaping subjecthood, etc, like a question/case of ‘becoming-minor’, but that is putting words in your mouth.

i watched Derek Jarman’s St Sebastine a little b4 reading this post. So when i did catch your wourds it unintentionally sent my mind adrift into the world of homosexual inverts, trauma & ‘subjective destitution’ as you would say

anyways… a picture of st S appears in V’s home – interesting huh?

cheers & beers babe :)