This piece situates the project of critique in relation to the idea of library instruction as lab... more This piece situates the project of critique in relation to the idea of library instruction as labor and the library as an organization. If the laborer can come to reflect on the conditions of their labor, thereby achieving a measure of autonomy even at the grindstone, it's also possible that the critical subject can be induced or coerced to labor on behalf of the organization. In the attenuation of organized forms of solidarity at the workplace, the organizations that employ us demand more and more of their workers' time, energy, and commitment. In this piece, I surface these tensions in the interest of a different kind of instruction: studying to learn from fugitive forms of solidarity that, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney suggest, endure because of their refusal to be organized, keeping the commons alive around and beyond the frame in which the subject studies their own reflection.
A pop-up library of leaked and declassified government documents, shedding light on the history o... more A pop-up library of leaked and declassified government documents, shedding light on the history of state secrecy and surveillance.
We are living through the wrack of the White Male. As the compact between social hierarchy, inher... more We are living through the wrack of the White Male. As the compact between social hierarchy, inherited privilege, and race (reinforced by gender and other normative categories) shows signs of buckling, his rage and resentment threaten us all. For he is a thing possessed: possessed by his own love of possession, and born to a sense that the world belongs to him and him alone. The spoils of oppression lie coiled inside him, a glut he can’t digest, and murder beckons behind the respect that he conceives of as his due.
As W.E.B. Du Bois observed, to inquire of white men what makes them so special calls forth a fanatical defense, an empty enthusiasm. And this holds true even when we white men pose the question to ourselves. The voice that answers is not one I want to avow, but I am answerable for it. How to write against the grain of this self-possessed voice, whose authority lies at the surface, where the flesh becomes abstract (in the gender I perform and in the color of my skin)? My privilege underwrites any explication I might offer, however critically reflective. For I am permitted to believe that what I write exists apart from the flesh from which these words issue and from the history that it entails. And in this belief, my words glide over the violence, past and present, whose wake I am (however woke I try to become).
A hybrid of critical essay and memoir, and Rough Notes to Erasure contributes to a growing body of work that wrestles with the tacit and embodied nature of privilege and prejudice, and it contributes not only via argument but also through style. Taking inspiration from feminist/queer poetics and what Fred Moten calls “the black avant-garde,” these rough notes address the remainder that gets lost in explicit argument, which is the flesh. Where privilege roils through history, and empire whets the appetites. But also where the world catches on its own fractalization by thought, feeling, and desire; and language recovers, for a moment or two, the power to entangle us with our mother tongue.
This piece situates the project of critique in relation to the idea of library instruction as lab... more This piece situates the project of critique in relation to the idea of library instruction as labor and the library as an organization. If the laborer can come to reflect on the conditions of their labor, thereby achieving a measure of autonomy even at the grindstone, it's also possible that the critical subject can be induced or coerced to labor on behalf of the organization. In the attenuation of organized forms of solidarity at the workplace, the organizations that employ us demand more and more of their workers' time, energy, and commitment. In this piece, I surface these tensions in the interest of a different kind of instruction: studying to learn from fugitive forms of solidarity that, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney suggest, endure because of their refusal to be organized, keeping the commons alive around and beyond the frame in which the subject studies their own reflection.
A pop-up library of leaked and declassified government documents, shedding light on the history o... more A pop-up library of leaked and declassified government documents, shedding light on the history of state secrecy and surveillance.
We are living through the wrack of the White Male. As the compact between social hierarchy, inher... more We are living through the wrack of the White Male. As the compact between social hierarchy, inherited privilege, and race (reinforced by gender and other normative categories) shows signs of buckling, his rage and resentment threaten us all. For he is a thing possessed: possessed by his own love of possession, and born to a sense that the world belongs to him and him alone. The spoils of oppression lie coiled inside him, a glut he can’t digest, and murder beckons behind the respect that he conceives of as his due.
As W.E.B. Du Bois observed, to inquire of white men what makes them so special calls forth a fanatical defense, an empty enthusiasm. And this holds true even when we white men pose the question to ourselves. The voice that answers is not one I want to avow, but I am answerable for it. How to write against the grain of this self-possessed voice, whose authority lies at the surface, where the flesh becomes abstract (in the gender I perform and in the color of my skin)? My privilege underwrites any explication I might offer, however critically reflective. For I am permitted to believe that what I write exists apart from the flesh from which these words issue and from the history that it entails. And in this belief, my words glide over the violence, past and present, whose wake I am (however woke I try to become).
A hybrid of critical essay and memoir, and Rough Notes to Erasure contributes to a growing body of work that wrestles with the tacit and embodied nature of privilege and prejudice, and it contributes not only via argument but also through style. Taking inspiration from feminist/queer poetics and what Fred Moten calls “the black avant-garde,” these rough notes address the remainder that gets lost in explicit argument, which is the flesh. Where privilege roils through history, and empire whets the appetites. But also where the world catches on its own fractalization by thought, feeling, and desire; and language recovers, for a moment or two, the power to entangle us with our mother tongue.
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As W.E.B. Du Bois observed, to inquire of white men what makes them so special calls forth a fanatical defense, an empty enthusiasm. And this holds true even when we white men pose the question to ourselves. The voice that answers is not one I want to avow, but I am answerable for it. How to write against the grain of this self-possessed voice, whose authority lies at the surface, where the flesh becomes abstract (in the gender I perform and in the color of my skin)? My privilege underwrites any explication I might offer, however critically reflective. For I am permitted to believe that what I write exists apart from the flesh from which these words issue and from the history that it entails. And in this belief, my words glide over the violence, past and present, whose wake I am (however woke I try to become).
A hybrid of critical essay and memoir, and Rough Notes to Erasure contributes to a growing body of work that wrestles with the tacit and embodied nature of privilege and prejudice, and it contributes not only via argument but also through style. Taking inspiration from feminist/queer poetics and what Fred Moten calls “the black avant-garde,” these rough notes address the remainder that gets lost in explicit argument, which is the flesh. Where privilege roils through history, and empire whets the appetites. But also where the world catches on its own fractalization by thought, feeling, and desire; and language recovers, for a moment or two, the power to entangle us with our mother tongue.
As W.E.B. Du Bois observed, to inquire of white men what makes them so special calls forth a fanatical defense, an empty enthusiasm. And this holds true even when we white men pose the question to ourselves. The voice that answers is not one I want to avow, but I am answerable for it. How to write against the grain of this self-possessed voice, whose authority lies at the surface, where the flesh becomes abstract (in the gender I perform and in the color of my skin)? My privilege underwrites any explication I might offer, however critically reflective. For I am permitted to believe that what I write exists apart from the flesh from which these words issue and from the history that it entails. And in this belief, my words glide over the violence, past and present, whose wake I am (however woke I try to become).
A hybrid of critical essay and memoir, and Rough Notes to Erasure contributes to a growing body of work that wrestles with the tacit and embodied nature of privilege and prejudice, and it contributes not only via argument but also through style. Taking inspiration from feminist/queer poetics and what Fred Moten calls “the black avant-garde,” these rough notes address the remainder that gets lost in explicit argument, which is the flesh. Where privilege roils through history, and empire whets the appetites. But also where the world catches on its own fractalization by thought, feeling, and desire; and language recovers, for a moment or two, the power to entangle us with our mother tongue.