Call me a sissy, but I've never particularly cared for being referred to as cisgender. Still, the work of transgendered activists within Occupy Wall Street has been one of things that keep me optimistic. At a November 13th teach-in at Zuccotti Park, just days before the brutal eviction, trans activists took over the people's mic for an hour-long lesson in occupying gender, educating their non-trans listeners on the unearned privileges we enjoy whenever we conform to ascribed gender; outlining the work that groups like the Sylvia Rivera Law Project have long been engaged in, against police violence and medical pathologization; and outlining pragmatic and principled tactics for an occupation open to trans and cis-gendered people alike.>>
Blog
Sometime in early October I showed up to an OWS organizer's meeting at 16 Beaver Street. 16 Beaver, like 56 Walker or Charlotte's Place, is one of these magically anachronistic spaces in lower Manhattan that feel like something out of Patti Smith's Just Kids -- free space for art, activism, and organizing, embedded in some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Of course, to label these spaces "anachronistic" is to cede to capital its totalizing power.>>
I didn't realize how claustrophobic Wall Street's Liberty Park was until I arrived at my home Occupy in Oakland. Rather than the jumble of tarp-covered shelters that grew and morphed rhizome-like through Liberty Park, Occupy Oakland's colorful tents felt positively...>>
The Skim
Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal invests $300 million in Twitter, though at the time of this announcement "it wasn't clear how much of Twitter the prince will control."
"There is no reason to believe that these abrogations of popular
sovereignty cannot be sustained for a very long time with the tactical
application of force." Africa? Latin America? No, Western Europe and the U.S..
There is nothing wrong with higher education in Greece that a little less democracy couldn't solve, according to an international committee that included the chancellors of University of California-Davis and New York University.
When did "health and safety" become a euphemism for "shock and awe"?
Great aerial footage of #OWS action in solidarity with #OccupyOakland
What Days of Rage looked like around the world.
What do you do when your job makes your poorer?
"Mic check? MIC CHECK!"
The UnAutobiography of Julian Assange
"With laptops open like shields against the encroaching cameramen..."
Wikiversity's Supplement to the Texas US History Textbook responds to the perversion of the high school history curriculum.
Sept 17, 2011: What is your one demand?
Paul Gilroy on UK riots
Events
The Collective is proud to announce the following recent publications by Social Text authors:
Sujatha Fernandes. Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation. New York: Verso, 2011.
Nicholas Mirzoeff. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Alondra Nelson. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Click here for more.
Reviews
David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is an outsize exposition of social, historical, and institutional constructions of value and the high political stakes they have for human societies. It spans an impressive gamut of practices ranging from religious beliefs about primordial obligation, 19th-century Positivist notions of "social debt," and the bond between states and the markets that parasitically rely on each other to survive.
In his Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel wrote, "just as a poem is not simply a fact of literary history, but also an aesthetic, a philological and a biographical fact - so the fact that two people exchange their products is by no means simply an economic fact" (52-53). People invest economic objects with a calculable value as if it were an inherent quality, though Simmel left the question of what value is or means as ultimately "unanswerable." Marx took a similar approach, notwithstanding his remarks on the element of unaccountability in money as an expression of frayed social relations.
Graeber's Debt offers a synthesis of transnational social practices concerned with value, exchange, and money but moves in an exciting novel and opposite direction. He situates debt as the quantification of promise and obligation and the threat of violence behind that calculation (in contrast to the complexities of obligation in self-cooperating civilizations, in what is usually referred to as mutual aid). Read more >>
Periscope
critical intelligence on current events
Speculative Life
In our dystopian present, the term speculation is associated with an epistemology of greed, a sanctioned terrorism, and new dimensions of imperialism based in the domination of abstract futures. But speculation means something else for those who refuse to give its logic over to power and profit. With contributions from Jayna Brown, Alexis Lothian, Moya Bailey, Tamara Ho, Alex Weheliye, Tavia Nyong'o, Elizabeth Turgeon, Andrea Hairston, and an interview with China Miéville. >>
