Kris Coffield, In Theory

Kris Coffield is Executive Director of IMUAlliance, a human rights activist, and a postmodern political nerd.

[kriscoffield]

WINNING! Conference committee members voted to PASS House Bill 1902, establishing a victim-centered sex trafficking ban for Hawai’i! Currently, Hawai'i is the only state in the nation that does not outlaw sex trafficking in its criminal code. As the last state to ban sex trafficking, we’ve completed the anti-slavery map. Soon, we can say that, in America, sexual slavery is banned from sea to shining sea. ‪

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Be It Resolved

Whereas a recent study by IMUAlliance showed that Hawai'i is home to 2,500 sex-trafficking survivors each year, over half of whom are underage, and whereas the same study concluded that $625,000,00...

My New Year's Resolutions, from teachers to trafficking to track and field.

[kriscoffield]

No Vote, Grumble?

It's a common Election Day refrain: No vote, no grumble. If you didn't cast a ballot, in other words, you have no right to complain about the decisions made by those who were elected. You had a cha...

At the very least, we must recognize the plutocracy of which modern elections are a symptom and work feverishly to free ourselves from its constraints.

[kriscoffield]

Is this why we're so addicted to them? 

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"That is what I insist upon in my theory of the mirror-stage – the sight alone of the whole form of the human body gives the subject an imaginary mastery over his body, one which is premature in relation to a real mastery."–Jacques Lacan, Seminar I (1953-54).

[kriscoffield]

Famoso Inn (with swimming pool) by Jeff Brouws

A fading swimming pool set amidst flourishing foliage. A fish-topped fountain, now inhaling musky air. A lone chair, overlooking a dried aquatic hotelscape. These are a few of the many objects contained in Jeff Brouws’ “Famoso Inn (with swimming pool),” in which the San Francisco photographer’s anthropological exploration of bleak aesthetics interrogates the origin, decay, and memorial space of industrial modernity. Yet, the static moment musters not just collapsing markets, but caressing entities, each translating its enmeshed ecology into its own unique terms. Decay, capital, and bleakness are, themselves, implicated as conceptual objects in the frame, recorded as finite beings in a contingent material array. Here, we see a set of objectal powers unfurled before the human gaze, such as earth toned saturation and blue-hued siding soiled by brusquely textured debris. At the same time, we are exposed to the inadequacy of our own perception in representing the hyperpluralized being of Others, both human and nonhuman, that are constantly animating their own relational architectonics and spatiotemporality, encountering the sublime horror of uncertainty with each burst and retreat.

[kriscoffield]

The other side of the infamous “Auschwitz selfie”

The funny thing about viral images is how endlessly easy it is to misunderstand them.

Selfies at memorial sites–the Vietnam Wall or Civil War battlefields–are a sociological phenomenon. What do they mean, to the taker and to us?

[kriscoffield]

We're yelling TINDER!

Does love conquer all? During a summer working in the West Bank a few 20-somethings decided to...

Obviously (or hopefully?), these folks are not representative of the greater Israeli dating scene.

[kriscoffield]

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.”

Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

[kriscoffield]

4CHAN PICS

4chan users don't post pics. They post myopics.

[critical-theory]

Slavoj Zizek Accused of Plagiarizing White Supremacist Magazine

[kriscoffield]

Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian critical theorists extraordinaire, has drawn the ire of academics after a blogger alleged that he had plagiarized from a white supremacist magazine. It all started when Steve Sailer was intrigued by a particularly lucid portion of a 2006 article entitled “A Plea for a Return Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua).” Soon after, this blog posted a side-by-side of the Slavoj Zizek excerpt in question next to a book review by Stanley Hornbeck. Screengrab from http://withendemanndom.blogspot.fr The text in question is a review of a Kevin Macdonald book entitled “The Culture of Critique.” That book, which analyzes Jewish culture, drew predictable attention from anti-Semitic and racist groups, including the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine.  Stanley Hornbeck wrote the article in question for American Renaissance in 1999. Of course, that raises the question: Why is Zizek reading the American Renaissance? One Redditor hilariously asked if Hornbeck and

Zizek later apologized, claiming that the incident arose from being given the source–and permission to quote from it–in an email. Most interesting, to me, is that Zizek, purveyor of dark philosophical humor, has inadvertently reified the ironic boundaries he so zealously works to transgress.

[kriscoffield]

CRASHING PAUL

Yet, the film’s gloss on “historically sedimented inequalities” (to borrow Hsuan Hsu’s critical phrase) privatizes the politics of race by subsuming identity formation within interpersonal ethics. Racism, the film tells us, is a personal choice. Eliminating racism is as simple as changing a few hearts and minds. While pervasive, this attitude fails to account for the material difference between different racial groups, as race is co-constitued with class, sex, gender, and other identity borders. For example, African-American youth are nearly 55 times as likely as white youth to be incarcerated for a first-time drug offense, a stark expression of white legal privilege. After labeling the Los Angeles Policei Department a “racist institution,” though, Crash portrays black criminality as a character defect, albeit one that whites too quickly presume. Structural and discursive racism are normalized. Minority impoverishment, maybe the leading cause of so-called “criminal” behavior, is dehistoricized, even mythologized.

Erasing racial coding lactifies prevailing power dynamics and race’s eventuality. Racism is instantiated as an immediate occurrence, with no unfolding past or future trajectory. More importantly, situating racism solely within social dyads obscures the possibilization of communal struggle against modern-day apartheid. Consider the following selection from the Apostle Paul:

But this I say, brethren, the time is short, so that from now on even those who have wives should be as though they had none, those who weep as though they did not weep, those who rejoice as though they did not rejoice, those who buy as though they did not possess, and those who use this world as not missing it. For the form of this world is passing away (1 Cor. 7:29-31).

As Katharine Sarah Moody argues, Paul highlights in these verses the antagonism between those who cleave to the pre-existing social order and those who actualize social obligation by suspending Christianity’s “Big Other,” namely the basis of identity and social obligation in legal regulation. In Christ, social obligation is no longer based on covenantal genealogy, but radicalized love for one’s brethren, no matter what socioeconomic, biological, or material differences may stand in the way–recall Paul’s letter to the Galatians, verse 3:28, which states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Paul introduces a new universalism indifferent to socio-symbolic difference (other than Christian/non-Christian). Moody refers to this as a “second birth” and “second death” mirroring that of Christ (whose birth and death parallel the creation and fall of Adam in Christian narrativity). We are born into subjectivity; we may renounce the ideological field within which subjectivity is politicized as identity struggle. What Paul leaves us with, then, is an avenue for articulating the particular within the universal. A narrow reading of Paul would contend that the apostle calls for the complete disintegration of identity, much more identity politics. I hold, in contrast, that Paul’s call is multiplanar. Rather than forsake identity formation entirely (a spatiotemporal impossibility), Paul asks us to abandon the naturalized succession of historical status and, instead, locate identity politics within an irreducible movement toward sociopolitical emancipation. Paul tasks us with de-crystallizing guilt toward the past–whether in the form of black missions or white burdens–and, in Fanonian terms, finding ourselves in a world where we have one right alone: demanding human behavior from the Other.