Self-Portrait

See here youngsters
This tattered forehead with the last impertinent hairs:
I’m a grad student in a thankless university.
I gave what I had teaching classes
(not much, by most standards)
Telegraphing the dialectics of my mentors
Who are now being torn apart
By snitches who lack heart.
It isn’t easy to look at me!
Spitting and rubbing my hands together furiously
All for the sake of the few marbles that take to a polish.

The truth is I only took this job to rehabilitate an unspeakable reputation.
What happened to me? — Nothing.
I gave my heart to a particularly vicious individual.
We took to armed groups, pagan sacrifices, pauper theater.
In short, I devoted myself unrepentantly to the liberation struggle…
And ended up here,
Bowed before my once sworn enemies: the bureaucrats;
Day by day more numb to their email volleys.
You can indict yourself or someone else; that is the freedom of our age.
What odds do you honestly give me of graduating,
Before being thrust into the circular firing squad?
Sometimes I am unable to sleep,
Wracked by paranoia about losing even this miserable post.
A broken back and perennially ill, I slump home to be greeted by the blue light,
Which I stare into — God damn me! — even while writing these lines.

I used to be like you my young friends,
Singing on the gallows, ideas blistering in the night sky,
Splayed in ecstasy beneath the redwoods.
I was in jail, transient shelters, shoplifting a few treats, stalked by the feds,
And those were the good years!
Instincts assured me of an imminent demise,
Until plant deities suggested a desperate escape.
Then I was betrayed by my own party… and for my own good.
I blinked, and woke tongueless in the desert.
‘Cabrones— ‘ I squawked, ‘Do your worst!’
And began to crawl towards the illuminated tower,
Jubilant at last to bid my burdensome memory adieu.

 

 

strategy of repression

“And then, thirdly, they use WhatsApp and Facebook to generate harassment, the sort of harassment that can put any nongovernment organization, human rights organization, journalist, scholar or political party off its game, because you’re constantly being accused of pedophilia, you’re being accused of rape, or you’re being threatened with rape, threatened with kidnapping, threatened with murder, which makes it impossible to actually perform publicly in a democratic space. This is exactly what Modi mastered in his campaign in 2014, and, in fact, a bit before. And that same playbook was picked up by Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and it’s being used all over the world by authoritarian and nationalist leaders, to greater or lesser degrees.”

What this journalist describes is the twin-sided ‘outrage machine’ that is essential to counter-revolution and political manipulation by the elites who run these tools. It is twin-sided in the sense that the same mechanism which creates a constant specter of fear and assault, also mobilizes allegations against its opponents, generating a cycle of permanent suspicion, and paralyzed mobilization for all but the most seedy activity.
Anyone paying attention to radical politics in the US and the ‘hub’ of the Bay Area would admit these are the very symptoms of the political repression that we unwittingly perpetuate.

course syllabi on the abject

Three courses I taught in 2016-17. A Marxist perspective on literature and theory dealing with abject roles within capitalism.

Cabell, COM10N_ Liberatory Sexuality_
Cabell, COM10L_ Mental Health and the Emotions
Cabell, COM10M_ The Position of the Child in Society

Delivered from Capitalism

Delivered from capitalism, kiaer

Christina Kiaer, ‘Delivered from Capitalism: Nostalgia, Alienation, and the Future of Reproduction in Tretyakov’s I Want a Child!’ in Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, eds., Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2006)

Important article on socialist reproduction from my course on the position of the child in society.