Rogueish
12/21/12
For at least a season and a half Gossip Girl has been less a TV show than an experiment in FULL TROLLGAZE, which the internet response to the finale suggests has finally achieved its goal of trolling every single viewer (admittedly, that’s not very many people by this point). The series finale took a slightly surprising turn into self-referentiality: turns out it’s all been a story written by Dan! (which at least explains why it doesn’t make any sense). The ridiculous fight between Chuck and his dad reminded me of the bit in Adaptation when they decide to start writing an action film and immediately get into a car/horse chase. I was sort of hoping, though, that the show would end with Taylor Momsen coming back and murdering everyone. Well, really, I just want there to be a TV show where T-Moms kills people; it could be an ethical serial killer show like Dexter, except where Dexter only kills other serial killers, Taylor Momsen’s strict code would lead her to murder people who are irremediably #dads.
08/19/12
sext is actually short for semiotext(e) is case yall didnt know
thats why parents are so worried about teens doing it
they have a lot at stake in the current system of power relations, after all
So I found a copy of the Semiotext(e) Autonomia: Post-political Politics issue for $12 and I thought of this.
(Source: shousui)
06/28/12
The dogged, defensive narrative stiffness of a paranoid temporality, after all, in which yesterday can’t be allowed to have differed from today and tomorrow must be even more so, takes its shape from a generational narrative that’s characterized by a distinctly Oedipal regularity and repetitiveness: it happened to my father’s father, it happened to my father, it is happening to me, it will happen to my son, and it will happen to my son’s son. But isn’t it a feature of queer possibility—only a contingent feature, but a real one, and one that in turn strengthens the force of contingency itself—that our generational relations don’t always proceed in this lockstep?
― Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, ”Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”
04/23/12
Wow, Armageddon is a hella #dads movie. The fact that the dad dying at the end makes it more, not less, dads, might say something interesting about the relationship between dialectic and #nodads (tentatively: Bruce Willis fulfills his role as a dad, and so the negation that is his death maintains his place in the restricted dad economy; if there is a #nodads dialectic, it would have to be of the sort discussed by Derrida in “From a Restricted to a General Economy”). Also, what’s with the repeated trope in the film in which one character orders another to say certain words? Some kind of insistence on the nom du père over the non du père? Anyway, watching Armageddon yesterday reminded me of the episode of Wizards of Waverly Place based on the movie, in which Selena Gomez plays the role of Bruce Willis.
04/17/12
His relationship to his father and his guilt at not having fought in the Second World War have long been themes in Spielberg’s films, but they combine in a particularly creepy way in War of the Worlds. With the idea of a redemptive war for the natural/natal/familial community, Spielberg becomes something like a boomer Ernst Jünger.
k-punk: Marxist Supernanny→
03/20/12
The problem is that late capitalism insists and relies upon the very equation of desire with interests that parenting used to based on rejecting. In a culture in which the ‘paternal’ concept of duty has been subsumed into the ‘maternal’ imperative to enjoy, it can seem that the parent is failing in their duty if they in any way impede their children’s absolute right to enjoyment. Partly this is an effect of the increasing requirement that both parents work; in these conditions, when the parent sees the child very little, the tendency will often be to refuse to occupy the ‘oppressive’ function of telling the child what to do. The parental disavowal of this role of is doubled at the level of cultural production by the refusal of ‘gatekeepers’ to do anything but give audiences what they already (appear to) want. The concrete question is: if a return to the paternal superego - the stern father in the home, Reithian superciliousness in broadcasting - is neither possible nor desirable, then how are we to move beyond the culture of monotonous moribund conformity that results from a refusal to challenge or educate? A question as massive as this cannot of course be answered in one post, and what follows here will require a great deal of further elaboration. In brief, though, I believe that it is Spinoza who offers the best resources for thinking through what a ‘paternalism without the father’ might look like.
K-Punk on #nodads back in 2007.
The Great Dad's Misshapen Shadow: Men's Rights Fascists→
03/13/12
It was almost half a year, to the day, after Mohamed Bouazizi had set himself on fire that Tom Ball did the same. Just like the Great Dad who “is able to do her feminism for her,” the Men’s Rights activists appropriate real militancy and vacate it of its historical purchase in order to defend their privilege (that they are in no danger of losing) - the Dads Monopoly on Violence.
Fatherhood is these fascists term of solidarity for two central reasons. The first is that it allows them to adopt the veneer of a struggle. Dads are under attack, they say, just look at the court structure, we have an analysis, and a program. The second is who it excludes. This is much more important.
There is a sense in which these fathers’ rights activists are onto something. Their historical story - once there were dads, but now feminists have made being a dad impossible - is obviously nonsense, but they are right about their exclusion from dadhood. The thing is, this exclusion is inherent to the concept of being a dad. What would it mean, after all, to be fully a dad without remainder? It would mean to be autochthonous, to be a dad without being a son, or without having any kind of relationship with another parent; it would mean, in other words, being a psychopath (I think this is where Lacan’s utility as a no dads theorist might come in). Fathers’ rights activists want some kind of fantasy plenitude of dad-ness, and experience the impossibility of this as oppression.
What is it to Philosophise Fatherlessly? | That's Glory for You→
03/12/12
Philosophical fatherlessness begins with infertility. No dads is precisely the principle of this infertility.
This reminds me of Lee Edelman’s rejection of reproductive futurism, and also Halberstam’s criticism of Edelman, that Edelman “strives to exert a kind of obsessive control over the reception of his own discourse.” The constitutive absence of the dad that lies at the heart of #nodads is due to the tension inherent in the relation between dad and child; to use the abolition of that reproductive relation to abolish that tension, to stabilize the subject, as Edelman does, is not a #nodads move at all, but is in fact the ultimate pro-dads position because, paradoxically, the greatest dad is the dad with no child.
(Of course, there may be a distinction between reproduction and fertility.)
Thirty More Years of Hell→
02/06/12
While a liberal looks upon the New Deal and Great Society generation as a pantheon of benevolent patriarchs, I see a bunch of technocrats who slapped together a crude simulacrum of social democracy and called it “free-enterprise.” Just as in the submerged state of 2012, they did their best to make the government’s hand all but invisible, all the while using the machinery of the Cold War to purge labor radicals–McCarthyism’s real target–leaving us helpless after the onslaught began. They then told their children–the Boomers–to scorn these dirty reds, and to thank good ol’ American capitalism for the chicken in every pot.
