Territory or Fraternity?
Posted on | June 10, 2005 |
Update your RSS feeds everyone, Glen has just signalled war to the frat house project. He is the second person to do this in a week. I fear this could get very messy…
Category: Randoms
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2 Responses to “Territory or Fraternity?”
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June 10th, 2005 @ 3:44 pm
I have a feeling we are not at war per se or that I am necessarily at war with you. Rather, I am mobilising (quite literally!!) the resources I have available to me and my set of accessible resources are different to yours.
It is certainly not without some irony — considering the gendered nature of ‘home’ as traditionally belonging to a domestic space/private sphere — that we are developing and articulating different (indeed, in some sense, ‘polar’) responses to the radical insecurity of neo-liberal regimes of flexible labour. It is also doubly ironic you use the term ‘fraternity’ which is heavily gendered masculine… I guess my questions to you are: In what sense are you using the term ‘fraternity’? What is necessary for such a fraternity? You have been living with this concept for a long time, so I would be interested to read about it.
I think I need to do a follow up post on this, not only to forestall nasty emails from people who think I am going to ‘war’ with you in particular, which I certainly am not, but in light of the neo-conservative (cum neo-liberal) defence of the nuclear family. For me (in painful super-critical mode, because I love my family), this translates into being the most effective social machine for the affective reproduction of hegemonic power relations. This is not a fantastic point or insight I am making, in fact it is rather banal. I suggest that the affects (in the Deleuzian sense) that express territory are exactly the same affects that serve as the building blocks of populations of ‘dividuals’ and the singular identities that define (code) such populations, ie the ‘family’, the ‘nation’ and maybe even the ‘fraternity’…? So I am not sure if it (in your post title) is an ‘either/or’ question.
What am I doing? One of the great advances of 2nd wave feminism was to have the social (affective and material) labour of women within the home to be recognised. My attack on the ‘home’ is an effort to remove or depotentialise this matrix of affective reproduction, that is, remove it from the armoury of neo-cons in the reproduction of stratified social formations and the neo-liberals in ‘just-in-time’ flexible labour regimes. As Negri and Hardt suggest in Empire, the emergent politics will be over the passage from the virtual through the possible to the real. (Which we both know is a problematic reading of Deleuze’s Spinoza, but, anyway…)
Utopian, perhaps? Dunno.
Anti-feminist? Maybe, particularly in the context of the role of biology.
Hmm…
…but, on the other hand, you have to admit I could never be accused of not appreciating a sense of the dramatic.
To WAR!!!!
June 10th, 2005 @ 4:08 pm
Thank you for being the first person to actually ask this in an appropriately sensitive and demanding way:
-In what sense are you using the term ‘fraternity’?
An ironic sense, as you thankfully notice - unlike other people!!
-What is necessary for such a fraternity?
1. A sense of humour 2. An idea of home that is not tied to conventionally acceptable ends, whether heteronormative or reproductive or asset consolidation (tho my Dad will disagree with me on that one) 3. Simply: A belief that living together is better than living apart.
Glen, war with you is the bessst.