I'm going to be starting Black Bloc, White Riot on #hoopla now! If anyone wants to read along, they are very welcome

The introduction is great! Conversational but also really beautiful towards the end.

"The anti-globalization movement is at its best when approached as an open question"

I don't like DOING etymology and research and that kind of analysis but I do like READING it

So this bit about "dissent" and "dissidents" is great

I am already enjoying this book so much but also, reading it on #hoopla means I can’t highlight or annotate, which sucks! I will have to find a way to draw hearts all over the part where AK Thompson talks about Sorel

"Psychoactive drugs... are more than means in the war against newer and more unbearable forms of alienation... they are part of an optimizing strategy aimed at bringing the body/mind into productive conformity with the logic of late capitalism"

This is a really really reallly good book

"Deprived of genuine access to the political and supplicated by social proxies and mediations, white middle class dissidents have often been taken in by 'political' gestures that are principally representational in character. Action at the level of the signified becomes impossible for those who inhabit a world in which the signifier appears to have become all."

this book is almost EIGHT years old and perfectly describes The ResistanceTM that wants Oprah to be president

"Today's dissidents exist in an indeterminate space between signified and signifier between politics and its representational proxies. It's an untenable position marked by psychic instability. It is therefore not surprising to find that white middle class activists tend over time to be reabsorbed into the representational sphere..."

This is a really really fascinating book and is actually successfully using critical race theory and treating whiteness as a condition and experience

Highly recommend

“For [Richard] Dyer, the counterpoint to white people’s self-aggrandizing spiritual transcendence is the fear that they are not here at all. Is it any wonder, then, that Paxil has found such a devoted following by promising to deal with the feelings that things aren’t real?”

“It was the excessive character of the movement - its riotous exuberance - that enabled activists to reach beyond the ontological constraints of the white middle class. As practical experiments with violence, these moments of excess provided functional (if incomplete) conduits into the realm of political being.”

“In the representational field, ‘identity’ is the name given to the absolute correspondence between an object and the concept by which it is denoted. In contrast, violence is the name of the process by which objects are transformed so that they no longer correspond to the concepts to which they had previously been tied (as when ‘architecture’ is magically rematerialized as ‘property’ the minute you set it on fire).”

The section on bourgeois constructions of "activist" as an identity are super fascinating

"Activists have accepted much of the discursive logic and inherent constraints of media and state accounts. Instead of questioning the legitimacy of a gaze that casts us as violently exterior and binds us to a world of objects, many dissidents have sought to establish their status as 'reasonable' beings within the representational sphere."

"Restless, the white subject's productivity arises from the fact it's not ontologically impossible for him to sit still. And is this not the case for activists as well? Anxious productivity, activism's nervous conditions."

I really love and am fascinated by the analysis of the objects/symbols associated with the media image of "activist" but I'm also

not

really

into Andrea Dworkin

sorrry (this isnt a critique, i'm just an ass)

"By speaking about what the mask enables and not what it means; by not seeking to refute possible negative readings... the Black Bloc statement effectively reformulates the relationship between activists and objects... the Black Bloc orientation to masks suggests the concrete means by which representation is supplanted by production."

"From the managerial realm of surveillance and the bio-political possession of the body comes the mask. By wearing it, the activist enabled her passage through violence from ontology to politics."

This part about gender and prison visits and the clothing you have to wear (more often CAN'T wear) is really great

and very familiar

"Confrontation helped to reveal a small but significant piece of the social regulation puzzle by uncovering a connection between gender and the carceral project."

"Through the concrete experience of arrest, many activists came to a better understanding of how the system actually works and managed, in a manner of speaking, to inoculate themselves against its mystifications."

So. This is probably very true and good but also.... what of the fact that a lot of people see arrest as a legitimization of their activism and then also... pay off extraordinarily high bails when they might be ORed in a day or two? idk

It says a lot that this particular instance that Thompson is talking about has not surfaced in other discussions of resisting or confronting the state. Almost as if organizing spaces don’t want to learn from past experiences (i.e. experiences more than ten years old)

The chapter “Direct Action, Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is REALLY GOOD and very good for me, someone who just applied to PhD programs

After discussing A Communique on Tactics and Organization and GMAC, the following struck me:

Insights on movement building must “take into account both the not-yet-active and those who are active but have not yet acknowledged that they are, in fact, at war. In order for direct action to become a research practice and pedagogy, it must aim in two directions at once... our enemies: the state, the police, the capitalist class. In the other, we find our friends, the people.”

In case the overlap between To Our Friends and Black Bloc, White Riot weren’t clear

This bit on the European Social Forum is fascinating especially on the “summit hopping to local resistance” thing

And I think movements are largely stuck in the latter (not a bad thing but an interesting thing)

"Conceptual distinctions like that beween the global and the local bring us no closer to understanding how globalization is put together through coordinated efforts in actual settings. The epistemic habits of whiteness confirm that rendering 'the local' as an abstract antithesis to a universalized 'global' makes it very difficult to acknowledge the materiality of local situations themselves."

This bit about white disembodiment, the white bourgeoisie, and everything else that it entails is super fascinating to me and also

a deepening of Richard Dyer's scholarship on whiteness, which I always felt was a little 101

"Omniscient invisibility has been both a source of power and a source of anxiety for white people. On the one hand, occupying a position untouched by gross particularity has allowed white people to act on the basis of a transcendental conceit. For the white knower, the Other is thus cast as an object whose very existence is summed up by gross particularity..."

Coming back to this specific part a lot:

“Bannerji argues that making ‘community’ the center of anti-racist struggles has been a dangerously ambivalent endeavor. In her estimation, uncritical support for communities of color has made it more difficult to highlight the forms of oppression that take place within them. For, while communities have a tendency to present themselves... as homogenous bodies, they are in fact an amalgam of different and competing interests.”

Because, yeah. Duh.

This is a great argument for, like, intersectionality but not in the “checklist of identities” way, the actual way that shows how misogyny and racism intersect

“By paying attention to the gender of rioters throughout the history of capitalism in the West, it becomes possible to dispel the myth that rioting has been a purely masculine pursuit... women have been rioters in the past. They have recognized the importance of rioting in pursuit of political objectives and even if political being.”

Nice

HWOEVER I’m not super down with this:

“While contemporary detractors of the Black Bloc have done their best to discredit the Bloc’s actions as macho rabble rousing, the historic gender of the Riot has been both masculine and feminine.”

My beef with this is that the anonymity of the Bloc SHOULD create a space both without and overflowing with gender - but, not presenting an identifiable gender in the space of the Bloc as a tactic means the whole thing gets masculinized

Like, I agree that the Bloc is too often called a “macho” thing, bc that def happens on both the left and especially from the center->right

HOWEVER, I don’t agree that the Bloc is “both masculine and feminine”

The Bloc is queer af and also without gender and not caught between a binary, duh, especially Blocs I’ve rolled in. Which should also be historicised but I feel like Thompson is oversimplifying to make a point 🙄

“Because the social organization of gender relied (and relies) extensively on the register of signification, the turn toward committed action (where recognition is demoted to secondary importance) can be seen as an opening move in the war on gender itself.”

- AK Thompson, Black Bloc, White Riot

“But if the Riot is the ‘great equalizer’ because of the exigencies of commitment, it’s worth considering how it might also stand as the inaugural moment of post-representational politics. If the contemporary Riot brings with it a moment of gender abolition, where one becomes nothing more than ‘one entity moving as a whole,’ how might we extend its effects into regions of life where the logic of representation is dominant?”

- AK Thompson, Black Bloc, White Riot

This is what I was talking about earlier. Shouts out to Thompson.