#new inquiry

[filth-thezine]

https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/6unqqw/the_new_inquiry_on_top_shortage_memes_top_or/

So there's a terrible New Inquiry article that I've been mad about for years. I did some hate research on it and found this lovely example of academized theory in translation. More of this please!

[mybeingthere]

Persian talisman. According to The New Inquiry, “a brass amulet to render its bearer more attractive and help her capture and subdue a lover. The lover is symbolized here as a beast of burden.”

[endlessandrea]

What is crazy? The world is a bag and the water inside the bag is all the sense of power, joy, and possibility in the world, but there are holes in the bag: each wounding experience or painful loss is its own hole. Everyone carries their own world-bag and sometimes the bag gets so ragged with holes that all the water of possible joy runs out of you and you are left with a collapsed and empty bag that once held everything. That is crazy!

Hannah Black: Crazy in Love

[coverspy]

In a Dark Dark Wood, Ruth Ware (F, 20s, blond hair, yellow sweater, black shoes, New Inquiry tote bag, 1 train)

[floaterquoter]

Escapism is adult because it is childish. When we escape into booze or drugs or spending money, what we are actually trying to do is to get back to childhood, or more accurately the idea of a childhood most of us never had. Childhood, understood as a longing imaginary, is a time when there were no consequences to drinking, eating, or spending money. There were no consequences to decisions because someone made decisions for you. There was no regret because there had as yet been no past. Being a kid is being able to look out back window of a car without feeling sad.

Escapism and Art For Lonely People by Helena Fitzgerald

[carlsensei]

The New Inquiry - The Myth of Liberal Policing

Who are the police? Robert Peel (the "Bobby" behind British bobbies) said, "The police are the public and the public are the police."

Liberals think the police rightly have a monopoly on using force in the interests of the state, which they believe represents society’s general will. To retain this monopoly, the police must maintain their public legitimacy by acting in a way the public respects and within the rule of law, what is often referred to as procedural justice. For liberals, police reform is always a question of helping police sustain that legitimacy. The alternative would be to allow predators to run amok in society.

…

The reality is that the police have always been at the root of a system for managing and producing inequality. This is accomplished by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people in ways that benefit those already in positions of economic and political power. Police have always functioned as a force for controlling those on the losing end of these economic and political arrangements, quelling social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal, and informal processes.

I don't disagree that the police have been used to suppress lower class and enforce racial hierarchy, but I think the Peelean ideal is our only possible escape. A state just is the monopoly on legitimate violence. We can't imagine a state without some level of violence, and as long as inequality exists, those with the smallest voices will always be the biggest victims of violence.

If this is so, then the reform which police need is not greater professionalization but greater democraticization. Professionalization just means that a group has internal bureacratic procedures which they follow in exclusion to personal preferences. Making the police more professional just creates a greater gap between the people and the police. What our goal should be is the acheivement of the true purpose of the Second Amendment: the right of the people to participate in maintanence of social order as individuals.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“For all its fidelity to history, Summers’s work is a confrontation with the various elements of modern life he’d come to detest. He had, as one reviewer later noted, “a flatteringly poor opinion of anthropologists,” and he saw anarchists and Communists (groups he regularly conflated) as direct descendents from the witches of the Medieval world. Witches were “avowed enemies of law and order, red-hot anarchists who would stop at nothing to gain their ends.” When his patron, Lady Cunard, introduced him to her husband, Lord Balfour—who expressed disbelief in the existence of people who craved evil for evil’s sake—Summers produced a political analogy: “Well, Lord Balfour, you have only to think of the views of some of your opponents.” Liberals, socialists, and anarchists, he told Balfour, all bore “the witch philosophy.”

Scholars and critics immediately attacked him for this kind of hysteria. Theodore Hornberger disparaged Summers’s “alarmist themes”: “It is just about time, thinks Mr. Summers, for legislation, a bit more severe, if possible, than the famous statute of James I. The political implications of this logic are indeed alarming, but perhaps not always with the effect intended by the author.” In a similarly scathing review, H. G. Wells noted that Summers “hates witches as soundly and sincerely as the British county families hate the ‘Reds.’” Wells, anticipating Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” saw in Summers’s work a “standing need” of mankind “for somebody to tar, feather, and burn. Perhaps if there was no devil, men would have to invent one. In a more perfect world we may have to draw lots to find who shall be the witch or the ‘Red,’ or the heretic or the nigger, in order that one may suffer for the people.”

Other reviewers castigated Summers for not “judging between different kinds of evidence,” and for his “odd mixture of learning and almost childish credulity.” But Summers maintained that a religion cannot on the one hand assert an unbroken line of pious infallibility, while, on the other, offer the kind of apologetic backtracking that characterized 20th century Church thought. The 1914 entry on witchcraft in the Catholic Encyclopedia (written by Herbert Thurston), attempting to thread the needle between the church’s past and its future, is reduced to equivocations: “In the face of Holy Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers and theologians the abstract possibility of a pact with the Devil and of a diabolical interference in human affairs can hardly be denied, but no one can read the literature of the subject without realizing the awful cruelties to which this belief and without being convinced that in 99 cases out of 100 the allegations rest upon nothing better than pure delusion.”

Summers’s attitude was vile, perhaps indefensible, but at least it was consistent. As the Church lumbered towards Vatican II, it found itself caught between the demands of a tradition and a need for modernization. Despite what apologists like Thurston might have you believe, exorcism was then (and is still today) a sacrament; Summers’s work brought this history out of the Latin and into the light.” - Colin Dickey, “The Last Witch,” The New Inquiry. October 26, 2013.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“It is always illegal to kill a police officer, but then again, murder is not the focus of recent calls to expand hate crime legislation to include actual or perceived law enforcement officers as a targeted group. Last year, “Blue Lives Matter” morphed from reactionary rejoinder to legislative plan when politicians began proposing bills to rewrite hate crime laws across the nation to include law enforcement personnel. Inasmuch as murder was the galvanizing force behind the appearance of “Blue Lives Matter,” the enforcement of this newborn legislation has required much less bloodshed. In New Orleans, where a “Blues Lives Matter” provision was first applied in a criminal proceeding—and subsequently rejected by the Orleans Parish District Attorney—injurious words were the designated crime. Racist and sexist slurs, not murder, necessitated the expansion of hate crime laws in the effort of protecting the police.

Where proponents of “Blue Lives Matter” bills see the proposals as added protection of the police, critics—chief among them the ACLU, The Anti-Defamation League, as well as legal and liberal reformists—recognize them as symbolic and reactionary posturing that appropriate the language of civil rights, undermine racial justice activism, and trivialize calls for police reform. The Anti-Defamation League, for instance, argues that the proposed legislations threaten to contaminate the legal designation of hate crimes and “deter efforts from protecting against identity-based crimes.”

But the trap of these critiques of “Blue Lives Matter” which advocate for the sanctity of hate crime laws is that they are grounded in a basic assumption that the law can provide justice. The result is precisely the aim of “Blue Lives Matter” itself: to strengthen the fiction that the law is just.

“Blue Lives Matter” is, fundamentally, a moral claim that conjures an ever-present threat “out there.” It fabricates a hatred of the police that somehow supersedes the violence and terror that the police state injects into everyday life. This moralization is enacted through a performance of vulnerability in which “Blue Lives Matter” translates a disparate array of actions, feelings, utterances, mindsets, opinions, and fantasies into a homogenous field of negative sentiments towards the police: Protest is transformed into a sign of aggression, congregating on the street into a riotous threat, self-preservation into resisting arrest. As a result, a wide range of emotive forces and entire social worlds are perceived as forms of terror directed towards the police.

This construction of terror sets the stage for the law to step in. Louisiana State Rep. Lance Harris speaks on its behalf: “In the news, you see a lot of people terrorizing and threatening police officers on social media just due to the fact that they are policemen. Now, this (new law) protects police and first-responders under the hate-crime law.” Speaking after the passage of a “Blue Lives Matter” bill in both chambers of the Louisiana legislature, Rep. Harris, the bill’s author, explains how he sought a legal response to what he describes as “a concerted effort in some areas to terrorize and attack police.” In Harris’s mind, there is a conspiracy brewing in the unmarked location of “some areas.” Whether or not such a conspiracy exists, the idea of individuals working in concert to terrorize and attack the police would be unimaginable without the performative labor that “Blue Lives Matter” enables. Under the brush of “Blue Lives Matter,” grievances before (and beyond) the law lose all distinction. We know that Christopher Dorner’s machismo is not the same as Korryn Gaines’s armed self-defense, nor is that the same as Valerie Castile’s prophetic rage. But the law must mistranslate everything into hate.

In an effort to overflow a news media already saturated with stories, images, and videos depicting monstrous murders by cops, police departments, their allies, and supporters have attempted to spread a soft image of the force on social media in recent years. The failed #myNYPD campaign is just one of the many calculated “community policing” endeavors that attempted to change the image of police in the public sphere. Soon thereafter, the evolution of “Blue Lives Matter” from social media campaign into legal statute was underway: in May 2016, Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate of any U.S. state and any country in the world, added police to the state’s pre-existing hate crime laws. Amending the law regulating hate crimes to include victims targeted for their “status as a law enforcement officer or firefighter,” Louisiana paved the way for Kentucky and Mississippi to sign similar “Blue Lives Matter” bills into law, effectively handing hate crime protections over to police. Not to be outdone, Arizona then passed Senate Bill 1366 that not only amends the state’s existing hate crime legislation to include “peace officers” but also extends those protections to off-duty officers.

Many critiques of “Blue Lives Matter” assert a distinction between an “immutable identity” and a chosen occupation. This effort—though seemingly effective in disqualifying police officers from protection under hate crime laws—does little to challenge the liberal discourse of hate crime itself. In 2009, activist organizations such as Black and Pink and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project spoke out about the limits of hate crime legislation. Speaking in response to President Barack Obama’s expansion of hate crime law to include sexual orientation and gender identity, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project argued that hate crime laws are part of an expansive logic of subjection; they maintain that “hate crimes legislation is a counterproductive response to the violence faced by LGBT people” due to the fact that it increases marginalized people’s interaction with the criminal justice system, legitimates imperial warfare, and displaces the need for racial, social, and economic justice.

Hate crime is a legal construction whose goal is to make criminals. It has little to do with redressing violence, and at the most basic level upholds the power of the state as the sovereign arbiter of not only the way violence is enacted, but also how it is defined. When viewed within the purview of the prison industrial complex, hate crime legislation is one node in an entangled web that constitutes pretext for punishment.

Some of us already know that the law is not justice.

We also know that the police do not simply enforce the law. The police protect the state’s monopoly on violence and establish the parameters of legitimate uses of force. This double operation is the paradox of police violence: it simultaneously affirms the rule of law and exercises the authority to act outside of the legal framework. The peculiar institution of policing is endowed with a “formless” power that conceals the state’s impotence. Like a ghost that seeks out the unruly, the police are an extralegal force.

“Blue Lives Matter” wants to give flesh to the ghostly presence of police power. It conjures the specter of an enemy that conspires to terrorize the police and threaten its existence, only to turn around and fabricate a homogenous field of animus as evidence of this ever-present threat. By producing and then gesturing towards an amorphous hatred, “Blue Lives Matter” constitutes an uninhabitable legal identity out of a repertoire of fear, dread, and trepidation. We can call this new thing blue life.

As a moral claim, “Blue Lives Matter” is predicated on the existence of blue life. And yet blue life does not exist prior to the articulation of that moral claim. Blue life is merely constituted through the anticipation of violence and the projection of criminality. Blue life is not a personhood but rather a spectral legal identity that mimics vulnerability. Blue life is no more than a figuration. Blue life effectively obscures the violent operations of police power by attempting to give it flesh. Blue life is the byproduct of a spirit possession ritual in which the formless authority of police power momentarily inhabits the body and poses as a form of life. Blue life is always under threat but can never perish. Blue life is what you get when you confuse a job for a social existence, an occupational hazard for an ontological crisis. Even more, it creates an equivalence between two disparate “sides” that are in fact not sides at all. It is impossible to inhabit the “I” of blue life. No one can be on the side of blue life. It is merely a conceit that simulates a threat in order to justify the expansion of state power.

There are infinite ways of hating the police, just as there are infinite reasons to hate individual police officers, the political authority they represent, the legal system that protects them, and the social order they preserve. Hating the police takes on a variety of forms and, like any feeling, it intensifies, dissipates, transforms, fades, and returns. It would be impossible to speak of a singular hatred of police. However, it is the belief in such a fictive thing that motivates “Blue Lives Matter.” This singular “hate” consolidates a multiplicity of experiences, affects, relations, and modes of living and dying into a fundamental enmity towards blue life.” - Nijah Cunningham and Tiana Reid, “Blue Life,” The New Inquiry. August 10, 2017.