Some recent readings:
Zhang Sheng, 'In Search of the Process of Anti-Colonial Solidarity-Building: How I Used Archives to Explore the History of China-Palestine Solidarity Networks', Archive Stories
This succinct and straightforward discussion of the methodological challenges of archival research is a really interesting read. I'm so intrigued by the highlighted book on Palestinian history co-authored by Wuhan factory workers, as well as the illustrated children's books about Palestinian resistance.
I am excited to read all the articles on Archive Stories. I've also been thinking a bit about what we (I) are fantasising about when we (I) devote ourselves (myself) to the notion of the archive as a site of repair, recuperation, resistance, and resonance. When is it that easy? When is it not?
Avgi Saketopoulou, 'Exigent Sadism: Austerity Logics and the Antireparative Turn', Social Text (open access)
I was very struck by this piece, which resonates with things I've been thinking and talking about with my friends lately, like: ideas and assessment of risk, scarcity mindsets, 'crisis', willfulness and the Sara Ahmed of it all, the pleasures of refusing repair, and what must be done because to not do it is unfathomable. Some extracts:
Exigent sadism draws inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s belief that “to improve our position in the struggle against Fascism,” our task “is to bring about a real state of emergency,” a form of emergency that he contrasts with the normalized emergencies pleated through fascism. […] To effectuate this crisis, exigent sadism demands that we relinquish repair. […] Exigent sadism, that is, works to keep the wound open and to liberate harmed persons from the routine expectation placed on them that they owe those who harmed them a successful chance to repair, no matter how infirm the reparative gesture. (26-7)
and:
Sade’s political treatises gave us the insight that the state legitimizes its violence by telling the story that its own violence is based solely on reason and calculation that there is nothing enigmatic or pleasurable about it. That, of course, is not true: state power is, in fact, rife with sexuality’s sublimated version, what Wendy Brown calls “the sexual ethos of predator and conqueror.” […] [L]iberals—and even those in the secular Left—think and act as if fact-checking, education, and critical thinking could defuse the power of fascist erotics. (35)
Despite the sometimes academic and opaque language, the topics discussed here are actually really instinctive for those who are racialised (Saketopoulou points out Kleinian repair as specifically structured by whiteness) and those who are already working within 'activist' landscapes. I particularly enjoyed, and felt seen, by the second half of the article which speaks to how exigent sadism/refusing repair involves walking away from relationships/institutions/connections out of principle; but that this walking away isn't a unilateral abandonment, it first stages a moment of refusal in which the refuser is vulnerably asking the other, the interlocutor, to respond and engage, to understand that refusal and be in solidarity with it. Too often, the other fails to understand, responding instead with fragility, hostility, silence, or fear. We see that:
Nowhere is the violence of the reparative made more obvious than when the object of aggression refuses the labor of docility demanded by the person (or institution) who harmed them. (38)
But:
Unquestionably, exigent sadism has a measure of cruelty in it, because the refusal to repair the other requires that a certain kind of ruthlessness be brought to the situation. And if we are honest with ourselves, that may be accompanied by a feeling of pleasure—and that can make us feel guilty, as if the refusal to repair the other should be solemn and serious, when a measure of joy always accompanies refusal. […] There is a comfort in knowing that you resisted, insists James Joy, and that is itself a form of pleasure.What makes exigent sadism’s pleasure ethical, however, as opposed to self-indulgent is that it is not done self-righteously to aggrandize the ego, nor is exigent sadism about punishing those who harmed us—it is precisely not about revenge, retaliating, or “keeping score.” Exigent sadism, we begin to see, is a path to an erotics of resistance. (38-9)
And:
In refusing repair, exigent sadism is not indifferent to the other’s gesture. To the contrary, the exigent sadist seeks to stage an encounter that stands to rearrange the terms by which the relationship proceeds. […] A lot comes down to how passible the other will be to us, how susceptible to the ask. Ethical sadism, in other words, does not build a system, nor does it work by mastery or by trying to control the other, which would undermine the other’s sovereignty, but is a live process that proceeds through and in interaction with its environment. […] Herein resides also the sadist’s exquisite vulnerability, because the task exposes the rawness of the sadist’s need, in that it issues an invitation that the other may or may not accept. The other can refuse the engagement, recoiling into moralizing accusations about the sadist’s oversimplification, irrationality, rigidity, or demandingness. The exigent sadist keeps negation on the table; she takes the risk of discovering that she was, after all, not that special to the other—that she is fungible, easily exchangeable for another, more docile subject. For the sadist to have no attachment to how the other person responds is impossible; the sadist thus approaches the encounter with a sharpened sense of hope, a hope that she knows may be dashed, accepting the fact that hope always involves heartbreak. (41)
Ultimately, I remain intrigued by Saketoupoulou's statement that exigent sadism should be thought of as apart from things that shore up or fuel ego, or are about revenge, or self-righteousness. I think that although I'm proud of myself for constantly being the annoying one, the one who refuses repair, the one who refuses diminishment, and although I'm "appreciat[ive of my] own strength" in this regard, I should admit that the pleasures of refusal can't necessarily be completely divorced from the pleasures of ego and a perception of power reversal. Maybe I just don't know anything about psychoanalysis, but I wonder if it's too tidy to think up a form of resistance mindset that has nothing to do with feeling good, feeling powerful, feeling like I've made a white person feel bad for once, feeling like I'm better. (Does the terror that sits alongside that pleasure—'Oh this time I've really done it....'—complicate this?) Where do we locate the uglinesses of acts of refusal? The lashing out adolescent, the willful child, the little kid who does understand why she is different?
Also.... When is one having one's cake and eating it? Can 'exigent sadism' take place within the academy at all? But perhaps, as a dropout, I'm being on my high horse about it?
Yet getting stuck in academic genealogies, debates, and deeply burrowed investigations really does still bring pleasure. I recently found out that Benjamin Kindler, whose work on Maoist art theory was hugely important, enriching, and illuminating to me when I was working on my PhD, published his book, Writing to the Rhythm of Labor: Cultural Politics of the Chinese Revolution, 1942–1976, which I'd love to properly read eventually, once I get access to it. In the meantime, always thinking about the material conditions that can make radical artmaking possible, the politics and contradictions of community and infrastructure, and how to keep learning and sharing and making and making to smash and break the imprisonment of the imagination that comes with elitism.
Adam Hanieh, Crude Capitalism: Oil, corporate power, and the making of the world market
This book completely blew me away. I've been trying to type up a proper study guide or study notes from it (especially as I have to return it to the library at some point) but it's so dense and informative that it feels like I would just end up needing to type the whole thing up. I hope to upload some notes about it soon, especially in the context of Amu's friends loosely studying about materials extraction together, but for now I will list it here and just say that I genuinely think everyone in the world should read this book.
Finally, some updates:
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Sine Theta will be at Outland Publishing Fair, London on Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 April.
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I had a lovely time reading at the HAJAR BOOK OF RAGE launch at The People's Letters! My £100 speaker fee has been redistributed to Hossam and Mahmoud's campaigns.
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Support the Save Ridley Road campaign and occupation!
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I was very pleasantly surprised to hear from my housemate that my face was on her Xiaohongshu front page because 'The Overpass' was being recommended. Very cool! I'd like to note that I am non-binary (as I imagined would be fairly obvious via my bio): I use they/them pronouns in English, ta in Chinese, and, reluctantly, iel in French. Please do not refer to me as she, elle, or 她. To anyone who has ever read my work, thank you!
xx J