The Garbage Disposal Unit
6th October 2013, 21:56
Has anyone else ever thrown a "kidding-not kidding" type demo or rally? A few years ago, we through a "War Pig Chase" in which we gathered people at 6AM with the promise of free energy drinks to disrupt the Canadian Defense Minister's morning jog in the park (a stupid propaganda event to show how "down to earth" he was). Our silly posters / bad attitude / etc. were sufficient to get his event cancelled, and the local paper published our victory communique (a mix of anti-imperialist rhetoric and Twin Peaks references).
Last winter, me and my partner ruffled some student activist feathers by disseminating this call-out:
MANIFESTATION: Towards the destruction of the university and the subject-position of the student as such!
(Désolé, pour l'instant c'est en anglais seulement)
Against a tyrannical psuedo-academic discourse - so thoroughly enmeshed with capital that it's become indistinguishable from the crass ideological pronouncement of bourgeois functionaries, dripping with sterile privilege and bleeding money, it is necessary to posit not an alternative but, rather, to suggest the total destruction of a totalizing system that dominated and precludes the emancipation of autonomous subjectivities.
The university is not (and, let's face it, never was) a site of "free exchange of ideas", of "social progress". Rather, it is an economic machine geared towards the development of techniques aimed at perfecting the indefinite expansion of mechanisms to extract relative surplus value; looking to students not as subjects realizing a collective knowing but objects through which accumulated knowledges are realized and against whom their practical repressive functions are field tested. To clarify, these knowledges are not just those immediately present in curricula, research, and various archives, but they also encompass the whole of student life, insofar as it serves as a controlled environment in which the contractions and controls of a larger society can be boiled down and distilled.
Though by no means unique to the milieu of student politics, this necessarily presents itself as a limit to student politics as such, the terrain of student-being emerges not as a site of potential emancipation but rather as field that encloses - that subsumes - any action taken within; rather than prefiguring revolt, let alone forms of life, these limits ensure that student "movements" remain irrelevant. It is only in their collective overcoming that any emancipatory potentiality could be realized; that what was student may constitute itself as a body rendered unintelligible - outside of (and, therefore, in revolution against) the discourse that orders their being. The student - blinded by the realms of academia in which they sequester themself - cannot engage in a project of active world-making, in the necessary act of creating new discourse, new manners, new of ways of existing in and understanding the terrain on which we find ourselves.
It is on the basis that we manifest our opposition to the capitalist totality at the geographical and temporal site of the juridico-political apparatus that represents students, SSMU. This is not only because we oppose SSMU in particular, but because student politics - and the student as the locus of political activity - present themselves as the foremost barrier to a liberatory projectuality.
Thursday, March 28 6PM SHARP.
Shatner Building parking lot (http://ssmu.mcgill.ca/about-us/building/directions-parking/)
BYOB
So, what about y'all?
How have you found "funny" interventions have turned out for you?
Successes? Failures?
What do we stand to gain by "lightening up" and what do we stand to lose?
What's the role of humour in our organizing?
Last winter, me and my partner ruffled some student activist feathers by disseminating this call-out:
MANIFESTATION: Towards the destruction of the university and the subject-position of the student as such!
(Désolé, pour l'instant c'est en anglais seulement)
Against a tyrannical psuedo-academic discourse - so thoroughly enmeshed with capital that it's become indistinguishable from the crass ideological pronouncement of bourgeois functionaries, dripping with sterile privilege and bleeding money, it is necessary to posit not an alternative but, rather, to suggest the total destruction of a totalizing system that dominated and precludes the emancipation of autonomous subjectivities.
The university is not (and, let's face it, never was) a site of "free exchange of ideas", of "social progress". Rather, it is an economic machine geared towards the development of techniques aimed at perfecting the indefinite expansion of mechanisms to extract relative surplus value; looking to students not as subjects realizing a collective knowing but objects through which accumulated knowledges are realized and against whom their practical repressive functions are field tested. To clarify, these knowledges are not just those immediately present in curricula, research, and various archives, but they also encompass the whole of student life, insofar as it serves as a controlled environment in which the contractions and controls of a larger society can be boiled down and distilled.
Though by no means unique to the milieu of student politics, this necessarily presents itself as a limit to student politics as such, the terrain of student-being emerges not as a site of potential emancipation but rather as field that encloses - that subsumes - any action taken within; rather than prefiguring revolt, let alone forms of life, these limits ensure that student "movements" remain irrelevant. It is only in their collective overcoming that any emancipatory potentiality could be realized; that what was student may constitute itself as a body rendered unintelligible - outside of (and, therefore, in revolution against) the discourse that orders their being. The student - blinded by the realms of academia in which they sequester themself - cannot engage in a project of active world-making, in the necessary act of creating new discourse, new manners, new of ways of existing in and understanding the terrain on which we find ourselves.
It is on the basis that we manifest our opposition to the capitalist totality at the geographical and temporal site of the juridico-political apparatus that represents students, SSMU. This is not only because we oppose SSMU in particular, but because student politics - and the student as the locus of political activity - present themselves as the foremost barrier to a liberatory projectuality.
Thursday, March 28 6PM SHARP.
Shatner Building parking lot (http://ssmu.mcgill.ca/about-us/building/directions-parking/)
BYOB
So, what about y'all?
How have you found "funny" interventions have turned out for you?
Successes? Failures?
What do we stand to gain by "lightening up" and what do we stand to lose?
What's the role of humour in our organizing?