Rape likely occurs-based on Breitbart’s own statistics-at a far higher rate in the society as a whole than it ever did in occupy. Rape occurs on country roads and urban corridors. It happens in the suburbs and at schools. It occurs in our neighbors houses and even in the beds of married couples. Consent is coerced using drugs and alcohol, force and power, and this is the part of rape that is neglected in this discussion.

Do we need to explore the sexual politics and material reality of rape in occupy-yes! However, if Olbermann and Breitbart are suddenly so concerned about issues of rape I would invite them to take a shot the much larger issue of rape in our culture. That is a problem that can not be blamed on liberals as animals and demands more than a partisan ideology.

In what would seem like a superfluous contest of irrelevancy if it did not entail the serious issue of rape, Andrew Breitbart and Keith Olbermann got into a heated battle over the role of the Occupy movement in the rape of what Breitbart claims is at least a “dozen” people across the movement. In retweeting and replying to Olbermann (and being retweeted from there) I received a number of nasty replies from acolytes of Breitbart. Nonetheless, the issue of rape in occupy is important because it poses a number of issues of agency, response, and responsibility for a leaderless movement.

The incident that sparked the flareup was Breitbart confronting a group of Occupy protestors outside this year’s CPAC conference:

Breitbart can be heard clearly yelling

Stop raping people, stop raping the people…you freaks, you filthy freaks, you filthy filthy filthy raping murdering freaks.

His animus towards occupy makes it impossible to deal with him seriously as an advocate for those who were victims of assault in occupy encampments (especially those who were or are still members of the occupy movement). I wonder if he would blame them for being members of the movement.

Breitbart claims, “I said stop raping people, I am saying to the occupy movement, writ large…” He also claims that his bellicose yelling at Occupy protestors outside of CPAC was a stunt. The problem with his claim is that he makes Occupy into a a single unified agent that that is committing the rapes. Occupy is not an institution, as I have written on this blog before they are best understood using the Deleuzian concept of haecceity. They are a multiplicity and that lack of clear hierarchy likely is what drives Breitbart crazy and makes it impossible to substantiate the claim that occupy was raping people. Moreover, he has no evidence that the protestors he was yelling at in the video are rapists.

As for Olbermann, he often deflects attention away from the issue by hedging that members of occupy were victims and that it may have been outsiders that committed the assaults. This could be true, or not. However, occupy’s initial response to sexual assault undermines the sympathetic case Olbermann builds. As Jezebel (of all places) reports, the sexual politics of Occupy are incredibly complex. The initial response was to attempt to handle issues of crime and sexual assault internally, directing victims “to immediately report the incident to the Security Committee” as opposed to authorities. However, after widespread criticism many encampments became more open to letting authorities in and to providing areas with services specifically for sexual assault or rape. Showing their interest in stopping rape, as opposed to scoring ideological points, critics of occupy dubbed the areas providing these services rape free zones.

The core issue here is that rape is a serious crime and should be reported to authorities immediately. What is worse is that only about 25% of rapes are reported. Meaning that Occupy’s impulse to deter reporting says as much about the politics of occupy as it does about American society-we rather not talk about rape or deal with it. Breitbart’s core message “stop raping people” is a great message but is less efficacious and is wasted when his political motivations are revealed. The central message to every American, given that we live in a culture permissive of rape, ought to be stop raping people. Consider that The New York Time reported that government officials were shocked to find that 1 in five women in the U.S. had been raped. The occupy encampments are the perfect phantasmagoria of conservative fears of liberal occupation as rape scene-unwashed masses defying social order in a soup of social disobedience. This, like the mysterious dark alley, seems the proper place for rape. Of course there is never a proper place for rape. Moreover, rape likely occurs-based on Breitbart’s own statistics-at a far higher rate in the society as a whole than it ever did in occupy. Rape occurs on country roads and urban corridors. It happens in the suburbs and at schools. It occurs in our neighbors houses and even in the beds of married couples. Consent is coerced using drugs and alcohol, force and power, and this is the part of rape that is neglected in this discussion.

Do we need to explore the sexual politics and material reality of rape in occupy-yes! However, if Olbermann and Breitbart are suddenly so concerned about issues of rape I would invite them to take a shot the much larger issue of rape in our culture that persists long after the violent and peaceful evictions of a number of the occupy encampments. It is at a cultural permissibility of rape that sees 1 in 5 women experience rape and only 1 in 4 report it that Breitbart’s ire should be directed. That is a problem that can not be blamed on liberals as animals and demands more than a partisan ideology.

This week Rick Perry pulled up his boots and stepped in it once again delivering a divisive new ad that among other things appears at its face to be homophobic and launches a direct attack agains Barack Obama for operating a “war on religion.” The ad reads:

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.

Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.
I’m Rick Perry and I approve this message.
(Transcription Here)

Several issues persist with the internal logic of the video itself. First, the overturning of a discriminatory practice in the military is not a defacto attack on any religious set of practices. Moreover, no direct link has been made that argues Obama has, himself, forced any school anywhere to stop openly celebrating Christmas. The ridiculousness of such a claim was laid bare when Perry tries to defend it. When asked by Wolf Blitzer about Obama’s War on Christmas Perry responds with “I’m just giving you some examples of what we’re seeing from the left, of which, I would suggest to you, President Obama is a member of the left and, uh, substantial left of center beliefs.” In essence, he has no substance and is only able to launch a vague attack on the left. See a portion of the interview and Think Progress’ take on the interview here.

Perry’s ad and message smacks of desperation, playing on the social issues of God and Gays to rally support as his presidential campaign fizzles. Yet, it is these very issues that Timothy Egan argues are losing traction among the right. Regarding, Perry’s ad Egan writes, “This is Perry’s last gasp; in desperation, he shows how this particular balloon has run out of hot air. Poll after poll has found that Americans now overwhelmingly favor letting gays serve openly in the military — a sentiment backed even by a sizable majority of Republicans.” As Perry’s presidential ambitions dwindle his campaign and his ads enter a kind of farcical phase. Even his choice in wardrobe becomes subject to satire. To wit: This image, being shared on Facebook and other popular social networking sites point out the similarities in Perry’s wardrobe and the critically acclaimed cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain. The irony derived from both the film’s and Perry’s use of a rugged cowboy ethos for radically different ends suggests the fractures in the culture wars are beyond repair. Moreover, parodies of the advertisement are appearing all over the internet. Some even take on Perry’s logic directly and reverse his claims blaming people of faith for every problem this country faces. Take this parody from The Partisans for example:

All of this suggests to me that we may have seen the moment where Rick Perry’s campaign has jumped the shark. In its desperation to get back into the GOP primary race Perry went all in on social issues (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the War on Christmas/Obama’s War on Religion) that lack the permanence and vivacity to revive his ailing campaign. In a sentence, the ad is ridiculous. That does not, however, let Perry off the hook and we should remember that given the materiality of discourse we should consider how to respond to a rhetoric that attempts wedge a policy of hate and division for the purpose of political advantage.

It is here that I noticed, and was disappointed by, some of my friends and colleagues who desired to censor the ad instead of responding to it. Another image that I saw circulating with great popularity on Facebook asked users to go to youtube.com and (1) flag the ad as inappropriate, (2) for reasoning indicate that it contains hateful or abusive content, (3) indicate the ad promotes hatred or violence, (4) indicate the ad contains hate speech about “sexual orientation,” (5) then share these steps with others.

While I find Perry’s advertisement intellectually dishonest, desperate, disgusting, and one of the lowest forms of politics following the impetus to censor the ad is dangerous response to hate speech. First, we know that censorship stifles discussion, dialogue, and intervention in the dissemination of hateful ideologies. Stoping homophobic discourse from being expressed by political leaders will not make homophobia disappear because no act of censorship is a total act of discursive invisibility. As Butler argues in Excitable Speech

This view maintains that a text always escapes the acts by which it is censored, and that censorship is always and only an attempted or partial action. here, it seems, something about the text under censorship exceeds the reach of the censor, suggesting that some account is required of this “excessive” dimension of speech.(129)

Removing the ad from youtube will likely to shift the conversation away from the homophobic nature of the advertisement and poor quality of argumentation and instead agitate sympathetic media to report on the censorship of the ad and not the content of the ad itself. Not to mention that youtube is one of many places the ad has been released make the act, though symbolic, materially ineffective at removing the speech from the discursive field of contemporary American politics. It is of course ironic that the case Butler made in her analysis of censorship was the original institution of DADT and yet her I mobilize it to oppose those who wish to shout down a politician who wants to reinstate such a perilous social experiment. For Butler, however statements are performantive in that they have force in the material world. Given that framework, we ought not censor Perry and not allow his performative homophobia rest under the surface but instead be laid bare. The more we welcome his subjectivity into the realm of speakability the more transparent his politics become and the more efficacious our rhetorical responses can be.

In essence our impulse in the face of excitable speech must never be censorship, especially when words wound. Instead, it must be engagement with the material reality of living in a world where the flows of power operate to subject and oppress the majority of Americans to serve the interests of those who exercise the flows of power to their advantage.

I want to deal directly here with the tension between sedentary ways of living and the figure of thought of nomadic resistance. Deleuze and Guattari argue that nomadic resistance exists outside, beyond, and in excess of the State and as a result poses a threat to the stability of the State and has the ability to make social relations otherwise. In this post, I argue that there is a dangerous tension at work between the desire in the occupy movement for sedentary territories (encampments across the country) and their mobilized potential as a nomadic war machine that can escape the reach of the state by avoiding remaining sedentary.

Let’s begin by addressing the central problematic of all of culture summed up in one remarkable word: difference. Despite our claims to the contrary, culture is not homogenous and we cannot get over or ignore difference, there is no post-race, post-class, post-sexist (this list could be so much longer) society to get to. Culture is a
heterogenous play of forces that struggles to negotiate flows of power
through and over difference. The occupy movement is one of many social movements to struggle over the way power has been distributed across
nodes of difference.

The force of their visibility comes from the State’s inability to process or create strategies to deal with the #Occupy movement in any successful way. It is a movement that emerges and reproduces like a rhizome and seems to make about as many demands as a rhizome. From the perspective of the State the movement must appear altogether perplexing. Take for example Deleuze and Guattari’s stringing of
Nietzsche and Kafka together to describe the sudden appearance of
nomads in the city:

“‘They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext…’ ‘In some way that is incomprehensible they have pushed right into the capital. At any rate, here they are; it seems that every morning there are more of them.’” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 390

We can see that the bewilderment Deleuze and Guattari pick up from
Nietzsche and Kafka is likely remarkably similar to that found in the
stammering rush to justify State aggression and evictions of
protestors from their camps. The encampments in Zuccotti Park and in
Oakland, and so on, were simply not going away. At the start of the occupy movement folks smugly gave it a few days, then a week or two, then the eviction of Zuccotti would put a stop to this mess, and yet here we are and “every morning there are more of them.” However, the movement’s identity in its twitter hash tag #ows and its sense of belonging to community formed in places like Zuccotti represents its greatest liability. #OWS cannot risk becoming a sedentary movement and let the State dictate the boundaries of its cultural expression. it
cannot afford to have its identity dictated for it by geographic boundaries, instead it must reticulate the mate retrial force of those
boundaries.

Let’s parse out two terms. States are striated sedentary ways of living that plant roots and hierarchies, chains of command deliver official pronouncements that use centrifugal force to compel bodies to the center of structures of power. The nomad is cast out from the State, wandering beyond recognized culture, beyond recognition at times. Yet, they can traverse vast amounts of space and arrive in the
city “like fate, [seemingly] without reason.” The nomad is at war with
the State because they refuse to have their bodies subjected to inherently unequal systems of human relations.

Now to be clear, the majority of the folks who enter the #OWS movement
are not nomads, either in the traditional or in the Deleuzian sense. However, they are experiencing what Deleuze might call a becoming-nomad. That is to say that these geographically dispersed movements are sharing an intellectual, affective, and aesthetic
experience that need not be tied to any one place to make war with economic inequality and injustice despite geographic distances and to, at times, gain power and force because of those distances. The danger is that the movement cannot become a sedentary one. The last week has revealed some troubling questions about the exercise of free speech and protest in the United States. The clashes between police and protestors are doubly heartbreaking because they are avoidable and they have the potential to shift the conversation from income
inequality to protest rights. To be clear, we need both conversations, there is no doubt about that. However, if this movement, that is a kind of becoming-nomad, gets consumed with its right to this territory or that territory it ceases to make war with the economic injustice it
seeks to battle in the first place.

None of this is to say give up on Zuccotti or any of the other encampments, Deleuze reminds us to always have a small plot of land,
for without it we may lose our sanity. However, the occupation of these places is a tactic of confrontation that enables a making of war against economic injustice and cannot exhaust the creativity, energy, resources, and bodies of the movement. That is the strategy of the State and is the status quo. “Invest in defending your space. Pay your legal fees, pay for goods to protect you from our riot gear. Pay your taxes to buy our riot gear.” When these movements march in the lines the State provides it has become a sedentary movements and it’s creativity has been folded back into the desires of the State. At
that point little large scale social action seems plausible. All of this assumes, of course, that the becoming-nomad of #OWS can achieve some plausible social change if it presses on through the cold winter months.

Yet, this morning the occupy movement in New York began marching on Wall Street and attempting to reassertion dominance over Zuccotti Park. Some were even arrested while dismantling police barricades. Despite the systematic crack down against the protesters and the widespread coordinated exclusion of the press from covering police mobilization against the protests, how does the occupy movement continue to sustain itself?

First, I am really excited to present my paper “The Possibility of Politics: Aesthetics, Airports, and the Production of Docile Bodies” on the panel Securing the State, Securing the Self: Voice and Vision in (Domestic) Foreign Policy. The panel is in NCA’s Critical and Cultural Studies Division and the other papers look outstanding. I am really looking forward to this conversation. Check us out from 8:00 AM to 9:15 AM at the Sheraton New Orleans Napoleon A3 – Third Floor. The other papers include:
“Tasers, Torture and the Politics of Visibility” Andy Opel, Florida State University; Greg Elmer, Ryerson University
“The Two Shootings of Oscar Grant: Cellular Panopticon as a Diagonal Process” Chema Salinas, Arizona State Univ

Second, I am chairing the Top Student Papers in Critical and Cultural Studies and the essays are outstanding. You should make plans to stop by to see these papers from 2:00 PM to 3:15 PM at the Sheraton New Orleans Napoleon A1 – Third Floor. The essays being presented are:
“On Being-Confined: Destructive Time and the Supermax Prison Cell as a Weapon of War” Michael Vicaro, University of Pittsburgh
“Two Sides of the Same Coin: Economic Bail Out Discourse as Liberating and Oppressive” Christy-Dale L. Sims, University of Colorado
“What an Idea Sirji! Deconstructing the Language of Citizenship in Idea Cellular’s ‘Inclusive India’ Ads” Rahul Mukherjee, University of California, Santa Barbara

Third, I will be joining Utah faculty at the Graduate Student Fair to talk about the Utah experience with prospective graduate students Thursday November 17, from 1:00-2:30 at the Marriott Grand Ball Room in booth #416. If you want to hear more about our grad program please stop on by.

Last, Utah will be hosting our annual NCA reception Friday November 18 from 6:30-8:30 in the St. Charles Room at the Marriott Hotel (41st Floor). Please join us.

I hope to see lots of folks at NCA!

Over the past few days I have been catching bits and pieces of news that a U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had issued an injunction against the FDA’s new rules requiring graphic visual labels on cigarette packs until the case can work its way through the legal system. After reading more on the case and Justice Leon’s ruling I find myself not necessarily opposed to the ruling but disturbed to some of the logics and assumptions about the nature of rhetoric, language, and discourse in the ruling itself. Armed with my outrage, I took to twitter to air my disagreement:

The ruling takes issue with the FDA’s use of persuasive rhetoric instead of informative rhetoric. Judge Leon is partially walled in because precedent in the law distinguishes between informational and persuasive language and this differentiation has been written in to the law. That said, it is worth making the point that such distinctions are problematic within contemporary theories of rhetoric.

Justice Leon argues

“This fundamental failure, coupled with the Government’s emphasis on the images’ ability to provoke emotion, strongly suggests that the Government’s actual purpose is not to inform, but rather to advocate a change in consumer behavior.”

As my tweets foreshadow there are two issues in the line of reasoning present in the law and in the decision. First, informative and persuasive speech are problematically divided. Second, rationality and emotionality are implicitly held as separate modes of reasoning that carry legally distinct weight.

First, the ruling assumes that the government has a proper role in informing consumers about the statistical dangers posed to consumers by tobacco but that the government cannot compel cigarette producers to place speech on their packages that would persuade consumers not to buy the product. Here the logic sounds simple, but is not. The government can delineate risks, but cannot argue outright that a consumer should not use a product. The problem with this line of reasoning is that it reifies the notion that statistical information (like that currently contained on cigarette warning labels) is objective and value-free as opposed to recognizing that even the delineation of risks is persuasive subjective speech. As such the question is not where is the line between informative and persuasive speech, but what types of persuasive speech will be allowed and what types of persuasive speech cannot be compelled by the government. It is ridiculous to assume that the current labels avoid any advocacy of “change in consumer behavior.”

Second, Justice Leon seems particularly concerned of the image’s ability to “provoke emotion” instead of rationally informing the consumer about the dangers of tobacco. The fallacy here is the assumption that appeals to emotion or reasoning based in emotion is less valuable or reasonable compared to appeals to logic. The long held assumption that logic is reasonable while emotionality is unreasonable negates some of the primary modes by which humans make decisions in our everyday life. Many of our everyday decisions are based not on some artificial standard of rationality and objectivity but on the subjectivity of human experience. As Edwin Black argues, “there is no outrage to reason we can imagine that has not ample historical precedent.” My colleague Nicholas Russell and I recently argued at the 2011 Alta Conference on Argumentation that, “Reason is summoned to serve the interests of State politics, which in turn erase subjectivities (and desires) that are at odds with the state” (Publication forthcoming in the conference proceedings). This is to say, that what is reasonable, as opposed to irrational, is an artificial difference and usually is divided between the so-called logical and emotional. We must recognize the fallacious nature of this distinction both in the ruling and the law that suggests that the use of pictures are too provocative and thus overwhelm the capacity to just inform and take on the work of persuasion. After all, as I stated in my first objection it all does the work of persuasion.

All of this being said, Justice Leon does get one issue correct-images are qualitatively different than words and in our logocentric world we too often textualize images instead of developing ways of dealing with images as non-textuals forms of persuasion. Much of this problem in the discipline of communication has been at the heart of Kevin Michael DeLuca’s current work on visual rhetoric. The use of image-based warnings are qualitatively different than the current textual warnings that the government is allowed to compel and images warrant more in-depth examinations.

In sum, it is a mistake to reify the simplistic reasoning that assumes we can draw a line between persuading and informing. No such line exists because language is always already saturated with persuasion. There is no way for rhetoric to function absent a field of persuasion. All of this being said, this is not to say that some distinctions cannot be made among types of discourse. My friend and mentor Professor Sean Lawson aptly reminded me on twitter that distinctions need to be made and lines need to be drawn. My argument is just that those lines are not between persuasive and informative discourse.

As long as the court and the law rests on this distinction it fails to grasp the nature and power of rhetoric, especially given the ideological nature of rhetoric-in its entirety.

A few months ago I found my efforts to write my dissertation prospectus grounded by a frustrating set of attempts to gain site access for my dissertation research and a kind of lingering insecurity over what this document was supposed to be about anyways. While coping with site access ultimately shifted my dissertation content, my anxiety over the actual document was something I had to get over and do so quickly. Thankfully, my committee is incredibly attentive and one of my committee members happened to drop The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Demystifying the Dissertation Proposal,” in my mailbox. Leonard Cassuto’s advice is succinct and was helpful. Cassuto lays out a series of descriptive points that establish what a proposal is not:

• A dissertation proposal is not an essay.
  
• A dissertation proposal is not a mini-dissertation.
  

He also offers suggestions on what a dissertation proposal is:

• A proposal puts forth your argument.
• A proposal describes how your argument will fit together.
  
• A proposal outlines methodology.
  
• You need to show the place of your dissertation in the critical field.
  

I found his advice to be enormously helpful, but there is a glaring caveat that Cassuto recognizes in the form of a commandment, “Consult your adviser as you develop your proposal. The myth of the writer as solitary genius striving away in the garret has surprising persistence.” The fact is that a dissertation prospectus can be many things, including the mini-dissertation or essay Cassuto urges you not to write.

For example, as I wrote my prospectus I consulted with a number of my colleagues who had recently written or were writing a prospectus. I discovered that their chairs had advised them to write everything from a fifteen page overview to a two-hundred page proposal with one or two sample chapters. Even more harrowing was that in many cases the chairs demanding these documents happened to be on my committee. Meaning, that even writing my prospectus under careful guidance from my chair, I knew walking into my defense that at least two-fifths of my committee advise their doctoral students to write their documents in radically different ways from what I had written (A 34 page overview of my research orientations, justification for the study, theoretical insights, and chapter overviews).

In the end my document served me well because it accomplished what Cassuto describes as the main purpose of the dissertation prospectus:

The purpose of the dissertation is for it to be approved. Only then can you start writing. A lot of misunderstanding swirls around dissertation proposals. One foundational fact cuts through it: A dissertation proposal has no independent existence. It’s a provisional document, a way station to an eventual goal.

My document accomplished just that. From here, my dissertation is able to get moving. However, it is worth noting that in the actual defense meeting many of the questions that were asked of me called me to answer for what some committee members would have asked their advisees to write in the first place. For example, my theoretical insights, though provisional, were heavily featured in the document. Two committee members needled me with questions about how those insights specifically connect with the actual analytical work with texts I would be doing. These questions could have been nullified had I written a mini-dissertation or provided a sample chapter of some kind. I do not regret writing the proposal I wrote, however, I do find that the document I wrote did as much to determine the tone, pace, and content of the defense meeting as the documents I chose not to write.

Here, as my last point, I want to emphasize that the prospectus document is meant to get you to the meeting so you can talk about your project in front of a panel of experts. The meeting is meant to help clarify issues that may have occluded your view and to engage in a conversation with your committee about the work you plan on doing. Defense, may in fact be the wrong posture for these meetings. I found that my committee members asked tough and important questions, listened carefully to my responses, and pushed me–all of this was not to make me defensive about my project but to aid in widening my field of vision so that I could see important issues I was missing. What emerged is a set of lingering questions that I must attend to in my dissertation, but the tone of the meeting was never defensive. Instead, I found my meeting to be a rigorous and challenging conversation with experts in the field. This conversation model is important because as we progress beyond comps and through the dissertation process we emerge as colleagues instead of students. These meetings, as conversations, help facilitate that movement.

In the end, learn to trust your chair’s intuition about the process but remember that they cannot anticipate everything that can happen in the meeting. As such, prepare by talking with your colleagues and gauging their perceptions of the styles and postures faculty have taken in their meetings. This can provide enormous insight that helps you get past the last hurdle before you write your dissertation (Which is, of course, an entirely different set of anxieties).

For another look at defense meetings see Daren Brabham’s recent post on these meetings.

UPDATE According to the Dallas Voice three suspects in this case have been charged with hate crimes for their role in this brutal assault. Speaking to the Dallas Voice:

Chuck Smith, deputy director of Equality Texas, said he was pleased to learn of the indictments.

“I certainly think this was a bias-motivated crime,” Smith said. “This is what our hate crimes act is for. It’s good from the standpoint that it could result in enhanced penalties. It’s equally if not more important that it sends a message that Lamar County is not going to tolerate bias crimes.”

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on hate speech and made the argument that we cannot treat such incidents as isolated events. Instead, we need to recognize that violent homophobic rhetoric has material consequences. The consequences of hate mixed with the desire to do violence exists just below the surface of the fabric of culture. With each incident we see an antagonism that complicates our desire to see violent outbursts as aberrant and to read alternative sexualities as exceptions on the margins of society. When those two antagonisms meet and violence is done, we are left with the brutality of hate and a desire to remind ourselves that we are not part of the discursive chains that caused the violence. Such a reading of these events is a mistake because it silences critical discourse about why we hate, how we hate, how we learn to hate, and the ways we teach others to hate.

Another such antagonism can be found here

Burke Burnett said he was at a private party at about 1 a.m. when four men suddenly attacked him, stabbing him at least twice with a broken beer bottle before throwing him onto a fire. His attackers yelled things like “pussy-ass faggot,” “gay bitch” and “cock-sucking punk,” Burnett said.

Burnett said it took 30 stitches to close stab wounds to his back and forearm, as well as a cut above his left eye. He also sustained second-degree burns and severe bruises.

These events are connected in that they make clear the brutal material force of discourse, especially when violent heteronormativity remains invisible to the bodies that perpetuate it.

WARNING GRAPHIC PHOTOS BELOW

Busy week in TSA land as the TSA blog takes on Internet rumors and an inappropriate note left in a passenger’s bag makes a buzz online.

First, a TSA exercise got a few folks thinking the TSA was setting up roadside check points in Tennessee. The TSA says that was not the case.

Second, a loaded gun fell from a piece of checked luggage prompting rapid criticism of the agency. The TSA responded saying that they do not look for weapons in checked luggage they only screen for explosives. The LA Times has the story.

Last, when an agent found a sex toy in a checked bag they wrote “Get your freak on girl” on the “Notice of Inspection.” The agency has since found the offending agent, saying “The handwritten note was highly inappropriate and unprofessional, and TSA has zero tolerance for this type of behavior.” The agency says disciplinary action has been taken.

• Democracy and capitalism are not the same thing, in fact, left to its own devices they can be mutually exclusive means of governance (Yes, I consider capitalism a form of governance).
• Neither Republican or Democratic policies actually seek to implement the invisible hand, both parties seek to use government (albeit differently-barely) to creatively manage the economy.
• Capitalism’s drive to concentrate wealth may be a death drive–a desire to realize its own destruction in the satisfaction of its ultimate desire–complete control over all capital:

“Death then is a part of the desiring-machine,a part that must itself be judged, evaluated in the functioning of the machine and the system of its energetic conversions, and not as an abstract principle.” (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipis, p. 332).

• Given the increasing gap between the 1% and the 99% it seems impossible that there can be enough consumers left to consume the good the economy relies own. We are distributing wealth in a way that is, day by day, shutting consumers out of even basic necessities. Certainly, the standard of living has increased to a degree that many people confuse needs and wants. However,  the long term unemployed, uninsured, under-fed, and under-education in this nation is increasing and the stability of the economy is at stake.

Each of these points are meant to be contested, I see them as grim economic realities that require some very difficult policy adjustments because the market will not resolve these issues as long as our economic-political policies provide incentives that speed on this death drive. If we weigh our needs and our desires, our work is to take this death drive and hold it up to be “judged, evaluated in the functioning of the machine and the system of its energetic conversions.” The sole unifying goal of #OWS should be to help hold this instinct to light, other political effects are icing on the cake.

A great many of the swing-and-miss takes on the #OWS have levied complaints that the movement engages in class warfare and is made up of anti-capitalists malcontents. The charge of class may actually be a fair point and one that demands emphasis:

There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

If this movement accomplishes nothing other then forcing America to focus on income inequality, class mobility, and the growth of financial services beyond the scope of common sense controls then the movement will have done a service to this nation.

To the charge that the protestors are anti-capitalist; again sure there are probably a number of people drawn to the movement in part out of a politics of anti-capitialism. It is a mistake to either discount them or the movement because of their presence. What should frighten the 1% is that the 99% inevitably represents a heterogenous movement that lacks the kind of charismatic leadership that can make it so easy to discredit a movement. Thus, the movement has anti-capitalists, socialists, democrats (no these terms do not all mean the same thing), some republicans, and a great many other parts of the American political spectrum. Moreover, even calling someone anti-capitalist does not really tell us all that much about their politics (See Jeremy Gilbert’s critique of Naomi Klein’s No Logo in his book AntiCapitalism).

Social movements in the digital age are more heterogeneous that we could ever imagine, or it may be fair to say the heterogeneity that was always already present may be more visible today. When we read the group as a homogenous group of angry dissidents who defecate on symbols of authority (see, given the content of this post, the ironically named The Blaze‘s post on #OWS), we allow our selves to ignore the serious and pressing political problems that #OWS is trying to bring to light. #OWS is not a homogenous movement and it is  political miscalculation to read it as such–this is true of both is critics and supporters.

As the movement marks its one month anniversary, many have called for them to outline more concrete political goals. Yet, the nature of #OWS defies such demands. If #OWS is to remain a creative force that opens space for new creativity and movement in striated spaces of America’s unequal income distribution. Our best hopes for this movement is that it does not simply become another set of party slogans, instead it becomes a source for creatively undermining the systems that it opposes, not at a molar level to undo all of capitalism but at the micro level where shifts in flows of capital can be politically efficacious.