Reader

Continuing down this trail we will convene on October 21st at 6pm PST to discuss chapters 1 and 2 of Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani. We are keeping it short so that we can do a close reading of the text, and the invite more people to join. If you're interested in participating you can reach out to bugs for a link.

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For some reason or another, the reading group has crawled out of the muck once more.

We will be reconvening on September the 23rd at 6pm Pacific, in an internet call, to discuss Friedrich Nietzsche's text Beyond Good and Evil. The format is unspecific, as are the reading criteria. Get your dice out and Nietzschemanteion your way through the text, or begin your rigorous studies at once!

Reach out to bugs for the meeting link.

The last of my notes from my review of chapter 2

the technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society's total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities at a time when increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.

the vast majority of people are still forced to take part as wage workers in the unending pursuit of the system's ends and each of them knows that they must submit or die. The reality of this blackmail—the fact that even in its most impoverished forms (food, shelter) use value now has no existence outside the illusory riches of augmented survival—accounts for the general acceptance of the illusions of modern commodity consumption. The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this materialized illusion and the spectacle is its general expression.

I finally looked at the end notes today and wondered why the text didn't reference any of them, but they read like it's ok to check in before/after I read the chapter. I welcome comments without spoilers, here if possible or at my Mastodon (Hometown) account, @mu@ni.hil.ist (https://ni.hil.ist/@mu).

The “commodity has ... [turned] the whole planet into a single world market.” (15)

Within natural economies, the emergence of a commodity sector represented a surplus survival. Commodity production ... implies the exchange of varied products between independent producers.... [W]herever it encountered the social conditions of large-scale commerce and capital accumulation, it took total control of the economy. [A] constant expansion of economic power in the form of commodities ... ultimately produced a level of abundance sufficient to solve the initial problem of survival—but only in such a way that the same problem is continually regenerated at a higher level. Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator.

I'm driving down the highway as some music blasts from the car stereo. It envelops the moment, suffusing each thought and gesture with self-evident meaning. The thought strikes me: do I rely on music to believe, fully, in a moment? to let it signify something real? Has the formative experience, perhaps, of the film score—accompanying some choreographed emotional arc—left me dependent on the swell of an orchestra or DJ to invest a feeling with wholeness? Certainly the spectacle has captured our recognition of the real in other ways. “It was like a movie,” people reflect about their most vivid impressions of the world. If a sunset manages to be “picturesque” and a humorous blunder “cartoonish”, do my felt intensities aspire to being “soundtrackish”?

After living with this thought for a while, another idea cuts through me. Maybe, instead, we retain in our bones a time when the leaves rustling against the soft trace of the sky, the throngs of swifts in their listing and swooping, the marsh frogs belching, the raven creaking riddles, the brook laughing across boulders, the choral whirr of myriad insects—when all these voices conspired to buoy our hearts along their course. Maybe we remember when the world itself sang to us, when no feeling passed through us unaccompanied by the beating heart of the land.

Eight species of forest bird finally vanished from Hawaii last year. They took their songs with them. Those creatures who move across the earth travel in fewer numbers, their havens dwindling. If the spring has fallen silent, if the stampede of civilization chases the gods from the land, what song is left to us?

The world we were born into still hums its tunes if we can listen; it sings with fewer notes. The brook still glistens downhill, the wind scrapes gusting across the snowbound hill, the coyote chatters and whoops melancholy thrill into my heart. My shoes crunch rhythms through the frozen meadow. Your sensuous body still stretches bowed across the thrumming string of the world. The rocks cry out. Go forth silent and sing you the world a song of creation.

The following text is my reportback from Bash Back! 2023, simultaneously published here and submitted to Bash Back News, where I hope it will be published soon. There are more than a few references that might be obscure to folks who weren't there, who don't know some of the pertinent lore. I hope that that does not diminish the value of the piece to the wider readership.

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On the sunny afternoon of Sunday, September 10, 2023—the third day of the Bash Back! network’s physical and psychospiritual reconstitution in Chicago, Illinois—it felt nearly all of us fags, dykes, freaks, and all combinations thereof, alongside however many theyfabs with cis boyfriends in tow, had assembled on the shore of Lake Michigan just west of Montrose Harbor on the breakwater.

How can I describe the scene? How much should I? Everything is already fading into memory, but a few images remain in sharp focus. Two smiling and naked women with dicks, big teeth and big laughs, standing and talking and drying in the Sun just to the side of where people are jumping into the rough water of the lake. Later, another trans woman, wearing nothing but a covid mask over her face, up close and personal with the fucker who had not only decided to film the scene with his smartphone, but who had insisted on keeping it up when he’d been told to stop.

Personally, I was nervous about getting naked, and I had my reasons. I pushed myself and did it anyway, jumping into the water—a little cold and a little rough for my liking—but when I got out, I was fairly quick to put my swim trunks back on, to conceal my dick and my butt. It had nothing to do with body shame; it had to do with society. The Montrose Harbor breakwater is not a sanctioned clothing-optional space. There is, in fact, no such public space anywhere in Chicago. (Mere days before the convergence, on September 4, the city government had affirmed as much, removing a sign at Loyola Beach to the north that had declared it a “nude beach”.)

Most other people didn’t get naked either, but there were a lot of naked titties, and those are legal in the state of Illinois, if various infographics on the internet are to be trusted. Exposed groins and butts, however, are definitely not legal. Where we were located is at a remove from the city as such, its police-patrolled streets and the great masses of its cop-calling good citizens—yet in broad daylight, with sight lines and cell phones and passers-by, it was not quite enough for me to feel safe. Or rather, comfortable, which is an overlapping emotional affect to be sure. This, despite the fact that I know that I could have been naked as hell in that crowd, out of the water as much as in. For all the inter-participant drama that the weekend generated, I don’t think it’s likely that my loose pecker was going to elicit much more than an eye roll from even the most prudish of attendees. And weather-wise, it was a perfect day for it.

Unfortunately, the police continue to exist.

What happened has already become legend. The blood dripping down the smartphone guy’s forehead. The mistake of clemency, when his phone was tossed inland (with a remark of “go fetch!”) instead of propelled lakeward with speed. When fuckface came back a bit later with some cops in tow, one person was put in handcuffs briefly, but eventually all members of the anti-fun brigade backed off without arresting anyone. It was a good time. Or, a victory? Or at least better than a lot of us would normally expect. People continued to chill, to drink, to laugh. But, there’s at least one sad aspect, which is that instead of a maximum six to seven people (out of nearly two hundred) being naked at a given time in the water or out of it, that number went all the way down to zero. This amounted to something of a buzzkill, given what was still only the mere inching towards free bodies in the air and sunlight that had been in evidence a few minutes before the ruckus started.

I don’t know how many people would have needed to get naked in order for me, the nudist blog guy, to feel a bit better doing so myself and staying that way, rather than spending my brief time naked in the relative obscurity of the lake water. But I think there is a number. The threshold to reach would have been a bit higher up still, for me to feel comfortable stepping away and walking my bare feet on the grassy embankment, navigating through the dense crowd of people, to where my friends were seated. Going to where the barbeque was—or hell, maybe approaching some new folks and trying to start a conversation, would have been still another step up. And how about ditching my clothes for the rest of the evening?

I have no pretense to being anything but a relative coward when it comes to potential friction with the state and/or just with other people who I expect are better at fighting than I am. I don’t especially like rowdy or hairy situations, e.g. Ryan Harvey’s concern trolling article from 2009 (title: “Are We Addicted to Rioting?”) was never written about me. Really, it’s for the same reason that I don’t like rough water. To put it succinctly, danger alarms me. A cool thing about a lot of anarchists, however, is that danger doesn’t seem to alarm a lot of them nearly half as much—and I’ve always thought that was pretty cool, personally!

A side effect of this relative ambivalence towards danger, however, is that we sometimes do stuff that pisses each other off. That is why a white-passing, girl-passing (something something) got jumped and at least two of her locs cut off earlier on Sunday. She probably knew, in 2023, that some people would have strong opinions about her hair. The two that jumped her definitely knew that a lot of people involved in the convergence wouldn’t think their action was very cool. Anarchists, typically, don’t call the cops—not on other anarchists, and not anyone else. But that means we have to resolve our conflicts with one another in other ways. Is it surprising that when most of us don’t know each other and a lot of us have pretty strong expectations of what other anarchists should be doing and how they should behave, things sometimes get a little fighty?

The reason that, even as the nudist blog guy, my nudity was brief and confined to the waterfront, is that I was at least a little concerned about my dick being in proximity to, and at eye level with, strangers. Anarchist faggot strangers they may have been, and as I said earlier, I deem it unlikely anyone would even say anything, let alone get physical. But apart from my fear of what might happen if the police came, there was still an inkling that, as with masks and veganism and which people are too shitty to be allowed to come to the warehouse rave—and of course the most urgent issue of our generation, white dreads—anarchists are not on the same page about nudity, e.g. when and where it is appropriate, when and where it is not.

Can I share with you, though, that I regret it? That I didn’t live out that other timeline, where events played out exactly the same way, but I was more fully the anti-civ give-no-fucks and (provided the correct ambient conditions) fully naked queerdo I am at heart.

In this alternate history, the mêlée still breaks out a little bit later, but this time, my scandalous exposed penis, and any other nudity that my own had inspired up to then, is part of the reason why. I would probably still hang back from the action, maybe even a bit further back—but well-impressed by the aforementioned naked go-getter with the covid mask, and knowing that the cops wouldn’t be around for a while at least, I might have been able to talk myself down from putting on clothes too quickly. Things necessarily get more speculative when we think about buddy returning with the cops, but never mind that. Even thirty more minutes of not wearing clothes, which would have weighed me down and made me sweat, would have made a sweet afternoon even sweeter. To be as naked as I (often) want to be—not while I was writing a reportback in the safe space of my nudity-optional anarchist household, but while adjacent to anarchist history’s unfolding in dangerous outdoor space, in a moment that would matter to me later and to other people later—would have been a special treat indeed.

I had, by Sunday, heard about trans girls’ place in the holy war—one between insurgent but frightened right-wing Christianity and its allies, on the one hand, and between, well, us, which is to say queers and anarchists and perhaps adherents of an altogether different, necessarily antagonistic “religion”. The spiritual stuff was heady and I’m not sure I buy it. But I saw that big smile on the one whose face was turned to me, like Baphomet with breasts and transfemme cock, glowing in the Sun and looking happy and in danger and being normal. It was beautiful, but something that our enemies would wish to snuff out, to make ontologically impossible and physically unrealizable; and something that trans-inclusive blue America still treats as terribly excessive, a violation of a norm that needs regulating. The logic in the dominant culture is that exposed penises are antennae radiating psychic violence, that women must be at all times presentable, and that transness is pitiable when it isn’t pathological. Simply by existing, the nude comrade Baphomète-in-Chicago, radiant by the water, nullified that culture in that moment, at that location. (Sorry for turning you into a metaphor, sister! Usually I’d ask for your consent for that kind of thing, but I don’t know who you are.)

Now, of course, I’ve turned it up a notch or two from how I really feel. One of the takeaways from the convergence is that fags are dramatic, so I’m playing my part. Like the Suck Cock Not Covid cohort, the ungrateful hyenas, Flower Bomb, and the crypto-Maoists, I have an agenda.

In the little attention economy of the geographically dispersed Bash Back! network and its supporters—now overlapping with many North American anarchist scenes, from at least Montréal in the northeast to the Bay Area in the southwest, from Pacific Northwest towns and cities to denizens of the Weelaunee Forest—it seems like the best move is ALWAYS to turn up the emotional pitch. Use the word “eugenics” in your graff. Lift the cut locs above your head and shout “And I’d fucking do it again, bitch!” Ask a presenter if they are “even an anarchist” for not wearing a mask. I don’t know what the anarcho-nudist equivalent is, but I guess I could argue that jumping into the lake with clothes on is cowardice; that there should have been ostentatious public nudity from day one (what if even three or four people were naked during Flower Bomb’s workshop in the cemetery across the street from the venue when that guy came over and asked about shutting it down?); that privacy is basically a fake idea and really only the concern of liberals with generally vermin-free fixed addresses; that radlibs are at least twice as tolerable when they are nudists; that a lot less energy should be spent worrying about saying the right thing and more priority given to making sure that everyone’s junk is getting enough fresh air; and that this is, bar none, THE THING that everyone needs to talk about. (Civil war in ‘24? Never heard of her!)

There is no time like the present, with that weekend in September still fresh in our minds and rumours of regional convergences in circulation, to get nudism on the priority list and nudity on the dance floor.

I want to think of Bash Back! as harbingers of something better than this world. Additionally, I get the impression that, in theory if not in practice, a lot of us are ready (if not eager) to see more of our friends get as naked as they want to be, when they want to be, where they want to be. By no means do I think this is actually more important than, like, anything else. If anything, compared to a Serious Issue (let us gravely bow our heads and Think on Them), I would acknowledge nudism as, like, maybe not quite as important. But we had orgies, we had games, we had squats, we had expropriated cans of caffeinated fizzy beverage. In other words, we had good shit, and I think it’s fair for us to want even more.

It’s apparent enough that most of what happened in Chicago in September was at the behest of a core group of only seven organizers who taxed themselves to the very limits—and despite the fuck-ups (do you know that 17 trainhopping teenagers starved to death because there was no food on the Monday?), I think things were pretty good, overall. But, improving the conditions of our lives (which includes relieving as many people as we can in the overlapping scenes of our subculture of their wretched anxieties, their most Victorian of sensibilities, and their dead weight of cotton-polyester blend) not only makes us less alienated, and more dangerous as a result, it’s also more or less what all of this is supposed to be about. You don’t have to be an egoist or whatever to include yourself in the category of what you are fighting for. Thinking through how to expand the option of nudity for participants at our events, and navigate competing interests and preoccupations in our messy dramatic camp with (and hey, this is just me) as little violence and suffering as possible, is of a piece with other problems like how to make our parties cooler, how to make our drugs safer, how to distribute hormones for as cheap as free, how to turn down the notch a bit on shrill and outraged while turning it up on self-confident and slutty.

Anyway, personally speaking, I’m ready for some new kinds of drama: whether white nudity is allowed on Stolen Native Land; just what level of FUCKED UP it is when someone unconsensually inhales unfiltered pit stink from the biggest naked oogle in the room; bitching out the organizers because they didn’t prioritize shower facilities in their event planning. I think—to use the watchword coming out of Chicago—it would be generative.

Down with civ. Shed the armour. For anarchy, experimentation, and freedom in all domains.

Chapter 2: Active and Reactive

Getting, finally, into Chapter 2 of the text we can begin to see Deleuze discuss some of the more controversial language in Nietzschian texts, specifically language around concepts like superiority and inferiority, and how the implications of that language are very much opposed to those often derived by fascist readers of Nietzsche. Within this discussion we can start to see how, rather than marking some sort of inherent concept of dominance or some inherent hierarchy, as people like Richard Spencer would have it, the concepts of inferiority is mapped onto the concept of reaction, which is then mapped onto a broader concept of power to act.

• Consciousness is presented unpretentiously. By that, I mean that consciousness for Nietzsche is partial, limited, unable to grasp what is outside of consciousness. The Aristotelian paradigm is grounded in counsciousness that is separate from the world yet, from a position of non-knowledge, can somehow come to understand Truth of all things through conceptual thought alone. In rejecting this absurdity, Nietzsche enshrines this separation between consciousness and the world as central to the limits of consciousness. As such, consciousness can then re-enter the world as something formed by and impacted by the world.

• As such, consciousness becomes inherently related to the body. Bodies in Nietzsche are not physical mediums. Rather, the body is typified by its insertion into the world, and, as a result, is directly a product of relations of forces, framed through the language of superior (more forceful) and inferior (less forceful) forces. In other words, consciousness is simultaneously limited to itself (it cannot think anything outside of itself, can't think the actual world), as well as formed through that which occurs outside of itself (in and of the world).

“What defines a body is this relation between dominant and dominmated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body- whether it is chemical, biological, social, or political. Any two forces being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into relationship” (40).

This constitutes the body, not as a solid singularity that persists across time, but as an arbitrary outcome of the shifting dynamics of plural forces coming into relation. The body here names this relation, that which is formed by the collision of the exteriorization of power or activity, its propelling into the world. Body here does not just name something like the human body, though the term does apply here. Rather, body is a term that marks a relation between multiple forces, with the body itself being the point of convergence, the relation. These relations of force with force are discussed as active (doiminant) and reactive (dominated) forces, with the difference in qualities (quantity here is a quality, an element of a thing) being referred to as hierarchy.

• These “inferior” forces are not subsumed into “superior” forces; namely a dynamic of activity does not get eliminated simply due to a differential of force, but remains within the moment, as an element. The quality of “inferiority” or “superiority” is not some sort of declaration of inherent domaination (as really bad readers of Nietzsche like Richard Spencer would have one think), but is, rather, a descriptive property relating to a relationship of force. The concept of some sort of inherent nature, as bad readers of Nietzsche claim he is asserting, are, sort of like the individual in Stirner, static categories which may name some sort of dynamic, but which can never define, subsume, or limit that dynamic in itself. Force is always a conflictual relationship, and as such, it is a dynamic that constructs contingency and the particilarity of force in a moment, and not something that exists independent of force due to its independence from time (all universal categories are “timeless, namely outside of the world, metaphysical).

“Inferior” forces are defined not by some inherent deficiency, but purely in relation to a more acute force or a force of greater magnitude, and does nothing but name that imbalance without any sort of pejorative or qualitative assertion about the categories themselves. “Inferior” forces are reactive forces and function based on operating within the bounds of regulation, or externally imposed limits that they cannot overcome. The constellation of regulation defines the “inferior” force as part of a body (defined as a collection defined by an organizing logic). The body, as an organizational logic and force, is both a product of collection and a force that shapes the relation of “inferior” forces within the body without defining what those forces are. It is this organization of a unified singular body that precedes all concepts of the “self” for example.

• Forces are traditionally discussed through a discourse on quantity, which is a quality of force (an element of the force but not the defining element). The framing of force through the concept of quality allows us to address a core conceptual issue, how we think relationality. For a relation to exist a commonality must be present to provide terms for that relation. In qualitative analysis comparison becomes impossible and commonality absent due to both the arbitrariness of qualitative analysis, as well as the positionality of qualitative analysis in the constantly shifting moment. This leads to two implications. Firstly, quantity becomes a point of convergence, but only to the degree that quantity becomes inseparable from the difference in quantity in relation; it is inconceivable without comparison. Even in simple quantities, like 2, we are positing an organizing logic that allows us to group things together through asserted commonality.

Secondly, if forces are within qualities and quantities are an element of quality, then quantity is taken into account as a property of quality and not independent from quality. This prevents the isolation of quantity from all other elements, and inserts it as an element of force among other elements. Quantities, as a result, never become simplified into some sort of equality of quantity; these quantities themselves are qualities of something else, and have their own qualities, rendering them particular and not common. As such, quantity and quality enter into a relation where neither is simply reducible to one another, but necessarily exist coimmanently.

• Chance names the relation of all forces to one another. When forces come into collision the result is not confined to a calculus limited to the immediate forces in conflict. Rather, forces enter into conflict within a medium of action (the moment) that, in itself, is constructed of various forces in conflict, and both shape and are shaped by that medium. As such, some sort of definitive narrative on causation, some sort of understanding of “strategy” in the abstract, some discourse on political determinism (historical materialism), are impossible and rely on the reduction of conflict to such a degree as to cease speaking of dynamics in conflict, and retreat into speaking of abstract static objects. This dynamic foundation to force and conflict not only prevents any sort of singular definitive political narrative from emerging (especially in relation to some future utopian fiction) but it also grounds the world, occurrences, time itself, in chance and contingency reaulting from a collision of forces and bodies.

• Force only exists in relation to other forces, and not independent of that conflict, and only to the degree that there is a differential of force, with the different quantities of force being qualitative differences; if force exists in relation to conflict, and force is equivalent between entities, then there is no conflict and thus no force. “This is what the will to power is; the genealogical element of force, both differential and genetic. The will to power is the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation. The will to power here reveals its nature as the principle of the synthesis of forces” (50)“.

So, far from the way that this concept is read when appropriated by authoritarians, the will to power names the differential quantity of force in relation to other forces; it is the basis of dynamic relationality. It does not exist separate from forces, and is bound up in the dynamics of conflict and flux that necessarily result from force, activity, life itself. If we allow for the will to power to be separated from the materiality of force (and thus the impossibility of unity, let alone something like a nation) then it is reduced to a metaphysical and moral object, which is what occurs in many forms of vitalism for example. In this reading force is always bound up with conflict, which is always something that occurs in moments that are, in themselves, defined by that dynamic of conflict. This return of the dynamics of conflict from past moments, which constructs the present, is what is referred to as the eternal return, a concept that Deleuze returns to at length later, and I would argue the most critical concept in the text.

• To then argue for a systematization of forces is to posit a unity across both time and space, eliminating force itself, and positing a static immobile world of peace (the absence of conflict). Within Nietzschian language the concept of active force corresponds to the concept of “superior” forces, but these are not qualities that can be posited in some general, universal sense, but are always within and in relation to force, and thus the moment. As such, the question of whether a force is active or reactive is not reducible to a comparison of forces within some sort of static system, which posits the temporal singularity of both force and “systems”. Rather, the determination of whether forces are active or reactive is fundamentally grounded in the moment of conflict itself.

It is even possible for reactive forces to triumph over active forces, and in fact this is what often occurs. Any time activity is mobilized to preserve some sort of systemic limitation, inherent prohibition, some sort of limitation not grounded in the moment, this force is operating reactively. What is law or policing except this? We can see this in Hobbes, where the state is not posited as an object in itself, with an independent existence, but is only framed as a reactionary response to the anarchic, which is what Hobbes refers to as the “state of nature”. “Indeed, everything which separates a force is reactive as is the state of a force separated from what it can do. Every force which goes to the limit of its power is, on the contrary, active” (58-59).

This reactionary triumph constructs the core of modern positivism (we can also refer to this as prefiguration or utopianism). Within this framework conceptual understandings are elevated to the position of existential conditions of possibility for existence. For example, in Aristotle the existence of universal truth is asserted, which then means that all thought exists only in relation to this universal truth which is, paradoxically, not known (how we go from not knowing to knowing is an irresolvable issue at the core of all truth narratives). The framework is removed from materiality, and exists independent form the world and in a completely static form across time, elevating it to a metaphysical position that is capable of being above action and judging action. All morality is structured this way.

• The will to power functions as the differential element of the relation of force, and must manifest only within that relation. “The relationship between forces in each case is determined to the extent that each force is affected by the other, inferior or superior, forces. It follows that will to power is manifested as a capacity to be affected” (62). This affection, the change in an entity as a result of something outside, occurs in all relations of force, for all forces involved, which makes all forces fundamentally dynamic and all relations of force momentary. The will to power, therefore, is not about some ability to maintain some rigid form and use that to inscribe the totality of life to justify some relation of domination, as fascist “readers” of Nietzsche would baselessly assert. Rather, the will to power is the ability to operate within possibility, as a formlessness, and to resist efforts to concretize that possibility, limit it, or define it. It is this capacity to be affected, to be changed and modified dynamically, that typifies a type of power that is active, that destroys governmentality, that renders things ungovernable as a power to become or of a possibility unbounded.

• The actualization of becoming, as opposed to the possibility of becoming, functions as a reactive power, as a concretization of boundless possibility in a specific form, as opposed to any other possible form. For example, in any moment one has an infinite ability to act, on a formal level, as long as the universe is not deterministic. Yet, when we act we choose one possibility in lieu of others, eliminating those possibilities, and binding activity to the act of becoming. This interplay between the imposition of concretization and the destruction of limits in the possibility of force in action, functions as the core of the dynamic of force. This reactiveness of becoming is a result of the ways that becoming has been tied to some concept of being; that becoming itself, at any given moment, is what defines an existence in its totality. At the same time, the becoming-reactive of forces, in itself, generates new possibilities, new active forces, simply by the ability of force to effect and affect.

In the structuring of active force the destruction of the limitations imposed on possibility is viewed as an affirming force, and all affirming forces are active. It affirms by asserting a space in which an entity exists in a particular way, with all of the possibilities in the moment, but only to the degree that necessary limits are destroyed to allow for that possibility to emerge. This is not an either/or calculation, either concretization or possibility, but is a necessary interplay at the core of the very construction of any act (we choose one of an infinite number of possibilities, while at the same time creating possibility through the contingent impacts of the act). The task is not to eliminate concretization, which would result in some sort of formless existence; Stirner points this out in his argument against using absolute freedom as a sort of conceptual ideal. Rather, the task becomes the prevention of the emergence of policing, or the attempt to inherently limit all acts based on conceptual definitions of life and a logistics of force; forces that would prevent possibilities from emerging.

• The point in which the reactive becomes the active is termed active nihilism, or the point where the will to nothingness (reactive force) becomes related to the eternal return. “Only the eternal return can complete nihilism because it makes a negation a negation of reactive forces themselves. By and in the eternal return nihilism no longer expresses itself as the conservation and victory of the weak but as their destruction; their self-destruction” (70)(weakness here is a term to identify the inability to overcome external limitation). This is an active destruction of the reactive, without then positing a new framework of limitation, as would occur in political modernism and all forms of positivism.

We will come back to the concept of the eternal return later, in future notes, but for now, it marks the return of the dynamics of the past in the construction of the present. For now, it is merely important as a source of tension. On one hand there is this return of the past, of the effects of the dynamics of the past, and the present exists as a highly particularized expression of the effects of everything that has ever happened ever. At the same time the moment of action is a moment of possibilities, where the past terminates in the present, and the present has its own effects which then contribute to the construction of other moments. There are a lot of implications to this, but the most relevant for this discussion is the discourse on the moment of imposition of limitation.

If limitations are only imposed in the moment in which the eternal return constructs the moment, then all limitations are in themselves that which operate within that moment as well. This means that any conceptual limitations are, in themselves, not able to function without the materiality of policing within the moment itself. As such, conflict is not able to be a theory of conflict in general, or, at its most absurd, some sort of theory of “revolution” or “history”; it is only relevant in its operationality in the present, making this act of destruction material in itself.

Drop-in, check-in, say hello. How's summer been for you? Does anyone need a particular reason to have a conversation with a friend at this point?

That's 7pm EST 4pm pacific

the usual

Neurodivergence, Queerness, Anarchy!

“In the clear, critical light of day, illusory administrators whisper of our need for institutions, and all institutions are political, and all politics is correctional, so it seems we need correctional institutions in the common, settling it, correcting us. But we won’t stand corrected. Moreover, incorrect as we are there’s nothing wrong with us. We don’t want to be correct and we won’t be corrected.”

Three pieces on neurodivergence, queerness, and anarchy:

1. “Max Stirners Embodied Egoism | From Self-Empowerment to Neuro-Anarchism” [Video Conference in Prague, February 24th 2018]

2. “What is neuroqueer? | Intro from “Neuroqueer Heresies” by Nick Walker”

3. “Neuroqueerness as Fugitive Practice | Against the grain of Applied Behavioral Analysis”

[CONTENT WARNING]: This compilation contains mentions of applied behavioral analysis, ableism, institutionalization, torture, murder, and death.

1. Max Stirners Embodied Egoism | From Self-Empowerment to Neuro-Anarchism” [Video Conference in Prague, February 24th 2018]

2. What is neuroqueer? | Intro from “Neuroqueer Heresies” by Nick Walker

What is neuroqueer (or neuroqueerness, or neuroqueering)?

“I should first of all acknowledge that any effort to establish an “authoritative” definition of neuroqueer is in some sense inherently doomed and ridiculous, simply because the sort of people who [engage] in neuroqueering tend to be the sort of people who delight in subverting definitions, concepts, and authority. That said, the [outline] that follows is the closest thing to an “authoritative” definition as is ever likely to exist.” – Nick Walker (She/Her)

Neuroqueer was originally conceived as a verb: neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously. It was an extension of the way queer is used as a verb in Queer Theory; expanding the Queer Theory conceptualization of queering to encompass the queering of neurocognitive norms as well as gender norms – and, in the process, examining how socially-imposed neuronormativity & socially-imposed heteronormativity were entwined with one another, and how the queering of either of those two forms of normativity entwined with (and blended into) the queering of the other.

So neuroqueer was a verb first, and then, like its root word queer, it was also an adjective. As a verb, it refers to a broad range of interrelated practices. As an adjective, it describes things that are associated with those practices or that result from those practices.

One can neuroqueer, and one can be neuroqueer. A neuroqueer individual is any individual whose selfhood, gender performance, and/or neurocognitive style have in some way been shaped by their engagement in practices of neuroqueering, regardless of what gender, sexual orientation, or style of neurocognitive functioning they may have been born with.

Or, to put it more concisely (but perhaps more confusingly): you’re neuroqueer if you neuroqueer.

So what does it mean to neuroqueer, as a verb? What are the various practices that fall within this [outline] of neuroqueering?:

• Being both neurodivergent and queer, with some degree of awareness and/or active exploration around how these two aspects of one’s being entwine and interact (or are, perhaps, mutually constitutive and inseparable).

• Embodying and expressing one’s neurodivergence in ways that also queer one’s performance of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and/or other aspects of one’s identity.

• Engaging in practices intended to undo and subvert one’s own cultural conditioning and one’s ingrained habits of neuronormative and heteronormative performance, with the aim of reclaiming one’s capacity to give more full expression to one’s uniquely weird potentials and inclinations.

• Engaging in the queering of one’s own neurocognitive processes (and one’s outward embodiment and expression of those processes) by intentionally altering them in ways that create significant and lasting increase in one’s divergence from prevailing cultural standards of neuronormativity and heteronormativity.

• Approaching, embodying, and/or experiencing one’s neurodivergence as a form of queerness.

• Producing literature, art, and/or other artifacts that foreground neuroqueer experiences, perspectives, voices etc.

• Producing critical responses to literature and/or other cultural artifacts, focusing on intentional or unintentional characterizations of neuroqueerness and how those characterizations illuminate and/or are illuminated by actual neuroqueer lives and experiences.

So there you have it, from the people who brought about the term. This definition is, again, not an authoritative “last word” on the subject, because that would be a silly thing to attempt. Rather, I hope this will be taken as a broad working outline from which further theory, practice, and play will proceed.

3. Neuroqueerness as Fugitive Practice: Against the grain of Applied Behavioral Analysis

In its relatively short lifespan, applied behavioral analysis—the shaping of human [and non-human] behavior through operant conditioning—has risen to a state of eminence in the teaching and treatment of autistic children. This article reads the archive of behaviorist scholarship with and against the grain of ABA to two ends. First, I argue that behaviorism is a prevailing form of biophilanthropy: a form of biopolitics in which the technologies of control are rebranded as philanthropic ventures. I use biopolitics to demonstrate how inclusion into the capitalist society marks some (the includable) for life, some (the nonincludable) for death, and some for violence aimed at recuperating the normative future.

I use a case study from the corpus of behaviorist scholarship, “Effects of Punishment Procedures on the Self-Stimulatory Behavior of an Autistic Child,” to demonstrate how futurity is leveraged to seduce the teacher into the biopolitical project. My second use of this archive is to engage in a critical rereading of the text, locating moments of embodied resistance by the subject of the experiment. I make critical connections between the overlooked resistances within the archive of behaviorism and place these fugitive practices in continuity with contemporary notions of “neuroqueering” theorized by autistic scholars and activists.

INTRO:

Applied behavioral analysis (ABA) is a leading form of therapy and pedagogical method for autistic students in the United States. ABA is the practical arm of behaviorism science, which uses operant conditioning—contingent reinforcement and punishment— to shape behavior. ABA emerged as a scientific subfield in the 1960s as B. H. Skinner and his contemporaries tested their hypotheses about the experimental control of behavior on live subjects—including animals, children, and the disabled. In roughly 50 years, ABA has evolved from Skinner’s early experimentation to a full-fledged institution. As children are brought under the analytic lens of ABA, their future capacity for labor and social participation are evaluated. At a young age, those deemed to be lacking the potential for inclusion become marked for violence (intensive intervention and punishment) or displacement (institutionalization or incarceration), in the name of restoring the child’s threatened future.

I begin with two assertions: First, ABA is a technology of control that seeks to manage “unruly bodies”. Second, both disability and childhood contain an inherent queerness and precarious relationship to futurity, marking autistic or otherwise neurodivergent children as doubly-queer. I draw on two bodies of literature: behaviorist studies identifying queer behaviors in autistic children (Stimulations i.e “stimming”), and queer theory scholarship theorizing queerness as inherent in childhood itself. I argue that ABA serves the state in the management of embodied difference, through restoring normalcy. Specifically, I use gender studies scholar Kyla Schuller’s concept of biophilanthropy to demonstrate how biopolitical technologies are rebranded as a philanthropic venture.

Finally, I theorize resistance through an emergent concept of neuroqueer(ness). Neuroqueer(ness) represents an array of relationships between neurology and queerness including being both neurodivergent and queer, actively choosing to embody one’s neurodivergence, or queering ones cognitive processes. Queering, or the act of purposeful engagement with the non-normative, is a form of political disruption, an exercise in radical visibility, and a subversion of state control. I argue that neuroqueering can act as a fugitive practice that resists discourses of rights/recognition shaped by the neoliberal principles of individual freedom, rationality, and capitalist production.

Fugitivity, or a fugitive practice, is one that occludes capture; that exists outside of the formal structures of the state; invoking transience and elements of criminality). Essentially, I am interested in resistance in the most impossible of situations—the everyday fugitivity of children who occupy seclusion rooms, clinics, segregated special education classrooms, prisons, etc.

I purposefully contrast neuroqueering with the dominant mode of disability rights activism: advocacy for increased rights, compliance with disability law, and oversight. To do so, I use a case study from the journal Analysis and Intervention in Developmental Disabilities (Friman et al., 1984), focusing on how the subject of the intervention, Bob, is emblematic of both biopolitical discipline directed toward the queer body, and a fugitive practice of neuroqueering. I demonstrate how rereading the archive of behaviorism against the grain (Benjamin, 1940/ 2006) can provide evidence of liberatory praxis. I specifically look for moments of neuroqueerness as fugitive struggle within the archive of behaviorism, a body of work that claims to solve the problems of unruly bodies and minds.

BACKGROUND:

Behaviorism emerged as a distinct field of scientific inquiry in the mid-20th century. In the tradition of Watson and Pavlov, B. H. Skinner began exploring motivation through animal experimentation, training animals such as pigeons to perform simple tasks through conditional reinforcement and punishment. In 1958, Skinner and other early behaviorists established the first journal for behaviorist research, “The Journal for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior” (JEAB). With the establishment of the JAEB in 1958 and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1968, the scope of behaviorism quickly expanded from small-scale animal experiments to eradicating perceived social maladies through operant conditioning. Early behaviorists donned a philanthropic role, claiming that their new science had tremendous potential to rehabilitate those previously thought to be irredeemable and to solve complex social problems.

Skinner’s firm rejection of the mentalism of Freudian psychoanalysis and his commitment to extreme positivism was a departure from psychoanalysis, as well as classical conditioning, and his theories drew wide criticism (Breger & McGaugh, 1965; Chomsky, 1959). Despite criticism, behaviorism has risen from a niche, experimental science to a highly professionalized field that has established preeminence in the treatment and education of disabled children. There is a particularly well-established connection between behaviorism and schooling for autistic children largely due to claims from the ABA industry being the only evidence-based therapy for autism (Keenan et al., 2015, p. 123). One of the defining features of early behaviorist scholarship was an interest in eradicating difference through the use of aversives. Aversive is a behaviorist term for a variety of negative consequences, such as electroshock, ingesting unpalatable substances, and physical restraint or seclusion (Moore & Bailey, 1973; Sidman, 1958). Although ABA, as a field, has shifted toward the use of positive reinforce- ment, “restrictive interventions” and variety of neologisms for punishment such as “over-correction” are still part of the practice of ABA, and current research on aversives continues to be published (Lydon, Healy, Moran, & Foody, 2015, p. 470–484).

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

This article uses biopolitics as a theoretical frame. Biopolitics, as defined by Foucault, has two interdependent features: the increased surveillance, discipline and control of the individual body; and regulatory control—governmentality—through which society is oriented toward economic production (Foucault, 2007). In US public schools, the school is tasked with the making of proper citizens and securing national futures through discipline and compliance (albeit sometimes masquerading as classroom management or positive behavior supports; Acevedo, 2018; Ball & Olmedo, 2013). Scholars in educational studies have explored the ways schooling reproduces hegemonic cultural norms and how students are socialized for a future congruent with White, heterosexual, middle-class values and embodiments (Anyon, 1980; Lugg, 2003; Piro, 2008). The future child, or rather the fantasy of the future adult, one that is a willing and productive addition to a liberal capitalism, functions to continuously orient the teacher to the not-yet-arrived. The specter of the imagined future adult haunts the extant child who is always in tension between the present version and their potential.

The teacher/therapist is thus engaged in what gender studies scholar Kyla Schuller terms biophilanthrophy, a “mode of incremental life” in which “racialized youth were gradually made to live and enter the capitalist economy” (Schuller, 2017, p. 21). Schuller (2017) argues that biophilanthropy “work[s] within institutions of discipline such as charities, schools, churches, prisons, orphanages and domestic homes, with the larger goal of creating useful cohorts of workers to further the accumulation of labor, power and wealth” (p.162). ABA is particularly exemplary of biophilanthropy because of its claim to rehabilitate its subjects, and to “make live” what once was set to be left to die (Foucault, 2003, p.241). Behaviorism emerged as a disciplinary technology of inclusion and momentous form of biophilanthropy in the 20th century. A successful application of the science of behaviorism allows for the recipient to be made includable in liberal capitalist society—and thus allows for any of the inherent violences contained within to be considered necessary, a preferable alternative to social (or literal) death.

CASE STUDY:

To demonstrate how ABA disciplines the disabled body through biophilanthropy, I turn to the following case study from the Analysis and Intervention in Developmental Disabilities titled “Effects of Punishment Procedures on the Self-Stimulatory Behavior of an Autistic Child,” (Friman et al., 1984). The case study was selected for several reasons. First, current critical scholarship on ABA has focused primarily on Ivar Lovaas, a polemical figure most famous for his work at UCLA’s Young Autism Project and his infamous text Teaching Developmentally Disabled Children: The Me Book (Douglas et al., 2019; Gibson & Douglas, 2018). This text is often cited by anti-ABA activists on account of its unabashed ableist rhetoric and unapologetic endorsement of physical punishment (Anonymous, 2015). However, I resist singling out Lovaas, who is often misattributed as being the first to apply the science of behaviorism to the disabled. More accurately, Lovaas was one of many behaviorists experimenting on the disabled, a population of immediate interest to the emergent field. Second, the case study is relative chronological median in the history of ABA. This demonstrates both the past and future of the field. Friman was trained during the early development of the field yet is still research-active and continues to publish and present widely.

The subsequent abstract describes a three-variable experiment, with three separate interventions arranged as a comparison. The behaviors targeted were “hand-touching,” defined operationally as “whenever any part of one hand made contact with any part of the other hand in an apparently non-functional manner” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 42). The function of the experiment was to determine which of three punishments would be the most effective in lowering the rate of hand-touching. The study’s abstract reads:

Consulting psychologists evaluated the application of several aversive treatment methods for a self-stimulatory behavior exhibited by a severely retarded l l-year-old male. Three punishment procedures—the contingent applications of watermist (sic), lemon juice, and vinegar—were evaluated using a reversal design. Substantial reductions occurred for self-stimulatory hand-touching following the application of each procedure; low rates were maintained using water-mist during sessions conducted by group home staff members across a 6-month follow-up. The watermist procedure was as effective as lemon juice or vinegar, presented less physical threat to the client, and was preferred by the staff. (Friman et al., 1984, p. 39)

Behaviorist science is focused on observable change in the topography of an operationally defined behavior. A behavior targeted for intervention is first defined, and baseline data is collected on the rate of the behavior with no intervention. Then, intervention is planned and carried out. Data is collected on the rate of the behavior during and after intervention. In the first condition, each instance of hand-touching was responded to by misting Bob in the face with water using a trigger-type squeeze bottle. In the second condition, similar to the water mist condition, each instance of hand-touching was responded to by squirting 5–10cc of lemon juice into Bob’s mouth using a plastic liquid dispenser. The third condition was the same as the second, except that table vinegar replaced the lemon juice. This intervention was deemed necessary by the researchers and staff members because “numerous strategies to reduce Bob’s high rate self-stimulation had been unsuccessfully employed previously by the group home staff. These included differential reinforcement, time-out, hand-slapping, overcorrection and 2- and 4-point restraints” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 41). Although the researchers and staff mem- bers objected to Bob’s hand-touching, it was not inherently harmful to him or to others.

DISCUSSION:

“Queer Futures”

In this case study, the researchers indicate that they chose Bob’s self-stimulatory hand-touching behaviors because they “could lead to more bizarre forms of self-stimulation” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 41). Bob’s body is described as potentially “bizarre,” signaling a future threatened by the queerness of his body. The threat of “more bizarre forms of self-stimulation” requires the teacher to reorient Bob toward a future as a productive laborer. Resisting this charge could threaten the teacher’s own claims to life, livelihood, employment, etc. I draw this connection to resist reifying a binary between teacher and student. Rather, within a biophilanthropic regime, both teacher and student are disciplined and surveilled. To reject this enterprise is to destabilize claims to humanity, for both researcher and researched.

A requisite to be included in the biopolitical sense is the desire for the heterosexual family unit, i.e., the familial relation favored by the capitalist economy. Children occupy a liminal space where their potential as heterosexual adults is cultivated religiously; the child is also constructed as asexual, without desire, and innocent. The child who resists the aggressive socialization of the schemes of childhood – who is bizarre – amplifies tensions around children, autonomy, and raising proper citizens. Queer theory has offered insight into the ways children’s sexualities are policed and oriented toward heterosexual futurity. In The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the 20th Century, queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton troubles the notion of child as void of sexuality, positioning the queer child as occupying a space of altered temporality, growing toward a future that is already defined as socially illegible. Stockton writes:

Anglo-American cultures, over several centuries, thinking that the child can be a carefully controlled embodiment of non-complication (increasingly protected from labor, sex, and painful understanding), the child has gotten thick with complication. Even as idea. In fact, the very moves to free the child from density – to make it distant from adulthood – have only made it stranger, more fundamentally foreign, to adults. Innocence is queerer than we ever thought it could be.” (Stockton, 2009, p. 5)

The child’s innocence, that is, the psychological fantasy of the virtue of children, functions as a space where adult goals, motives, fears and anxieties can be projected – an uncanny set of object relations that feminist literary critic Lauren Berlant (2006) calls “cruel optimism”, p. 23 (Berlant, 2006). If the heterosexual child represents a dream, the queer child symbolizes death (Edelman, 2004). The overlap between the regulation of autistic bodies and the policing of gender and sexuality has been explored by education scholar Patty Douglas and social development studies scholar Margaret F. Gibson (2018) in “Disturbing Behaviors: Ole Ivar Lovaas and the Queer History of Autism Science.” The article explores Lovaas and his stu- dent George Rekers’s collaboration in The Feminine Boy Project, a grant-funded project that used the science of behaviorism to correct the behavior of “gender-disturbed children” and restore their chances at a heterosexual, gender-normative future. Gibson and Douglas aptly point to the “queer” history of autism science, and the way “The cruelty [of behaviorism] lies in how the measurements and interventions of this ‘optimism’ dehumanize, coerce, regulate, and do bodily violence to those deemed in need of a ‘cure,’ while recruiting and training others (teachers, parents, community members) to extend this pathologization, even at a cost to themselves” (Gibson & Douglas, 2018, p. 5). The queerness of childhood is a threat to the suspension of knowledge that creates a normative sense of growing towards a heterosexual future, and thereby requiring the intervention of the teacher, parent, therapist, etc.

“Righteous Death”

This case study illuminates how ABA is involved in the biopolitical project of managing difference; marking some bodies as worthy of life, some as worthy of death and some for recuperative violence with inclusion in mind. It also demonstrates the necropolitical mode of biophilanthropy. Necropolitics, as a departure from biopolitics, locates power as “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” – rather than the investment into life – to “make live” (Mbembe, 2003, p.14). Similarly, within Schuller’s conceptualization of biophilanthropy, redemption is predicated on a figural death, and the redemptive capacity of the enterprise is bestowed upon those who are doing the redeeming, who are described as “build[ing] up children originally marked for death in order to suspend them in exploitable life, enabling the nation to extract their vital energies for agrarian, domestic and reproductive labor” (Schuller, 2017, p. 165).

By constructing the autistic body as a threat to national futures, those responsible are absolved on their guilt and their abuses are reconstructed as an act of service. This is necessary to seduce the teacher into administering punishments. The participation of the teacher is necessary and their buy-in is carefully considered. Friman et al. demonstrate this in their discussion of aversives:

“Several problems confront consultants who advise teachers and other direct care personnel about what aversive treatment to employ once positive approaches have been ineffective. First, to comply with legal and ethical guidelines governing aversive procedures employed by human service programs, the least aversive yet most effective method should be identified and used. Second, the staff responsible for administration of treatment should be in agreement that aversive treatment is less harmful than no treatment at all. Third, the treatment should not be so unpleasant that those responsible for its administration on a daily basis would be reluctant to implement it consistently.” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 41)

The researchers are strategic in convincing the teacher that no treatment would be worse. This mobilizes what feminist scholar Sima Shakhsari calls the “politics of rightful killing” which she describes as “the rightful living dead,” a liminal space between necropolitcs and biopolitics in which one cannot be killed by anyone (certainly not by the illiberal states), but only – righteously – by the liberating states, in the name of rights, freedom, democracy, free market and global security” (Shakhsari, 2014, p. 104). The child’s queer body then is availed to righteous death at the hands of the protectorate of subject-citizens (therapists, teachers, etc.) for rebirth and potential inclusion into sovereign life.

The threat of social death is omnipresent and a compelling motivator. The teacher is confronted by the harsh truths of biophilanthropy: the alternative to making live (even through violence) is figural (or literal) death. Within the unrelenting conditions of biopower, the staff is made aware of what is lurking on the other side of the biopolitical vector – an effective strategy to solicit the buy-in of the staff. This theme has been explored by scholars in a variety of disciplines. In “The Political Language of the Helping Professions,” political theorist Murray Edelman (1974) describes the ways that the language around disability and the helping professions effectively defines the limitless potential for abuse and state-power that is unquestionably exercised in the name of “therapy” (Edelman, 1974, p. 297). Edelman argues that the construction of the “helping professions” extends state power and seeks to code the exercise of power as benevolent care, obscuring the more nefarious particulars such as control, abuse, and loss of autonomy that are inherent in this exercise (p. 300).

In a more contemporary example, disability studies scholar Ann McGuire (2016) also conceptualizes how the therapist’s violences are dressed as care work. In War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence (2017), McGuire describes how panic regarding bodies, normativity and deviance justifies filicide, or the murder of autistic children by their parents (pp. 1–3). She describes a rhetoric of autism kidnapping children (p. 144) and violence being normalized through parental desire to liberate children from autism (McGuire, 2016, p. 215). To be included requires the individual to be made includable, and for difference to be managed through the discipline of biophilanthropy.

“The Right to (be) Maim(ed)”

A schism has occurred in the field of special education between those invested in “curative violence” (Kim, 2017, p. 9), and those who wish to challenge medical models of disability. Scholars of inclusive education, for example, have contested how special education students are segregated from the mainstream classroom, and posit inclusion as a solution (Marshall & Goodall, 2015; Wilson, 2017). Within this discourse, the problems of special education have been framed as a debate about inclusion versus exclusion, and as a struggle for rights and recognition. However, using the case study of Bob, and the myriad other ABA studies that leverage recuperation as a precursor to inclusion, we can understand how the production of includable bodies vis-a-vis punishment and containment is a hallmark of contemporary biopower. Inclusion, therefore, exists in a recursive with exclusion. The right to be included contains within it a right to the disciplinary technologies of biophilanthropy.

The slipperiness of rights is explored robustly in queer studies scholar Jasbir Puar’s Right to Maim (2017). Puar demonstrates how the right to maim “is a right expressive of sovereign power that is linked to, but not the same as, ‘the right to kill’” (Puar, 2017, p. xviii). Complicating Mbembe’s necropolitics (2013), Puar contends that maiming is a means to extract value from populations who would otherwise be disposable, carving out a middle space between biopolitics and necropolitics. Puar calls for disability studies to contend with the disability caused by settler-colonial violence, and to think through how liberal models of disability enact state power and control. She demonstrates how disability rights discourses can act as an instrument of violence by expanding the purview of the state, under the guise of beneficence, while simultaneously debilitating segments of the population. Inclusion, or the project of inclusive education, demarcates who is includable and who is available to be maimed in the name of inclusion, fitting with Puar’s assertion that maiming is a means of extracting capital from an otherwise disposable population.

To demonstrate the ineffectiveness of rights-based intervention and the need for alternative theorizations of liberation, I turn to a policy document titled “The Right to Effective Behavioral Treatment,” published in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1988 (Van Houten et al.,1988) which outlines the rights of disabled people to “access to the most effective treatments available.” The document states:

“It is equally unacceptable to expose an individual to a nonrestrictive intervention (or a series of such interventions) if assessment results or available research indicate that other procedures would be more effective. Indeed, a slow-acting but nonrestrictive procedure could be considered highly restrictive if prolonged treatment increases risk, significantly inhibits or prevents participation in needed training programs, delays entry into a more optimal social or living environment, or leads to adaptation and the eventual use of a more restrictive procedure.” (Van Houten et al., 1988, p. 283–284)

In this model, the child has a right to restrictive intervention, like punishment and the use of aversives. In fact, the time away from inclusion and more optimal living and social environments is used as a justification for more restrictive treatment. Rights are inverted to serve the biopolitical function of producing a population available to be maimed, with the always present but never arrived future as a discursive shield to the material and immaterial violence of the therapy space. Inclusion, or inclusive education, as neoliberal, rights-based intervention is constitutive of bodies available for maiming. Violence is justified as a means to an end, a temporary process of extinguishing what is queer about the autistic child, in a trajectory toward inclusion – the purported solution. I, therefore, propose an emergent strategy that runs counter to the established solution of inclusive education and disability rights. I do so through reading against the grain (Benjamin, 1940/2006) – looking for the moments of resistance within the archive and situating my protagonists in continuity with contemporary grass-roots tactics.

“Neuroqueer Resistance”

I return to the case study to offer a rereading of Bob’s actions as furtive resistance. I do so to link together resistant figures within the archive of ABA with contemporary autistic scholars and activists theorizing resistance outside of the discourse of rights, recognition, and inclusion. In returning to Bob, we can mark his bodily resistances in the following passage:

“The subject showed an intense reaction when both the lemon juice and the vinegar were delivered and his reactions were as much a deterrent to on-task behavior during training sessions as his self-stimulation. His reaction consisted of trunk-twisting, arm-flapping, and leg-extension as well as grimacing, spitting, coughing, screaming, and crying. He also would turn from the bottle when it touched his lips or bite the spout once inside his mouth. It was apparent that prolonged use of either lemon juice or vinegar could cause possible physical injury, due to either Bob’s violent reactions or the physical effort necessary to decrease his avoidance.” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 44)

Notice, Bob’s well-being, autonomy or an internal sense of ethics is not what constrains the violence. Rather, Bob’s “intense reactions” become a deterrent to the administrator of the punishment. The abandonment of harsher punishments is a direct result of Bob’s “trunk-twisting, arm-flapping, and leg-extension as well as grimacing, spitting, coughing, screaming, and crying” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 44). The researchers conclude that prolonged use of vinegar or lemon juice could cause injury. Although it is not explicitly stated, we can infer that injury to the staff member is the ultimate deterrent, as the “physical effort necessary to decrease his avoidance” (p. 44) is of concern to the researchers. The body, in this case, refuses to be disciplined and queers the experiment.

Disability studies scholar Carrie Sandahl describes queering as “[spinning] mainstream representations to reveal latent queer subtexts [or] deconstructing a representation’s heterosexism” (Sandahl, 2003, p. 37). Sandahl notes the parallels between queering and cripping, which she describes as “spin[ning] mainstream representations or practices to reveal ablebodied assumptions and exclusionary effects” (Sandahl, 2003, p. 37). Taking up queering, autistic activists and scholars such as Melanie Yergeau, Nick Walker, and Elizabeth ‘Ibby’ Grace theorize a form of queering focused on the radical visibility of neurodivergence, which they term neuroqueer(ness; Grace, 2013; Walker, 2015; Yergeau, 2017). Neuroqueer(ness) is a means of understanding ephemeral confrontations such as the struggle between Bob and researchers. Neuroqueer both is something someone does and something someone is.

Much like the praxis of cripping, neuroqueering does not represent a legible activist strategy, a policy program, or a cogent philosophy. Neuroqueering represents what is available to the incarcerated body in a materialist sense. Bob, in this case, has little available in terms of modes of resistance. The purposeful segregation of autistic youth from autistic adults forecloses the possibilities of durational and coalitional resistance practices in a traditional sense. Bob is under guardianship, surveilled, and subject to brutal punishment. Thus, Bob’s writhing, combative body is what is accessible to him. In effect, Bob’s body becomes a site of fugitive struggle. His sputtering, spiting, and biting make it so difficult for staff members to administer the punishment that the lemon juice and vinegar are abandoned. Bob’s unruly body produces effects of material significance for him. The body-mind (Price, 2015) of the autistic subject makes chaotic which is meant to be controlled, and dutifully exposes the cruelty, making the frontline worker work for their right to maim (Puar, 2017). Within a carceral space, such as the one in which Bob resides, resistances are corporeal and fleeting. However, Bob, and the many resistant figures within the archive of ABA scholarship, can be understood as in historical continuity with contemporary autistic activists envisioning fugitive practices and evidence of a neuroqueer tradition.

“The Productive Capacities of Flesh”

Although the field of ABA has attempted to distance itself from the overtly violent practices of early behaviorism, facilities utilizing aversive treatments like electroshock, such as the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, have continued to operate. The Judge Rotenberg Center is a residential facility/day school that has been at the center of public controversy on account of its prolonged use of electric shock as punishment, specifically its use of a custom-designed device called the gradual electronic decelerator (GED). The GED device is carried by the student in a backpack and controlled by staff members, and delivers charges of up to 41 milliamps—10 times the amperage used in most stun-guns—to the student’s legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers, or torso via electrodes placed on their skin (Pilkington, 2018). Numerous targeted campaigns have been launched against the Judge Rotenberg Center, including #StoptheShock, a grassroots advocacy campaign lead by autistic activists and focused on bringing public attention to the human rights violations committed by the institution. The Judge Rotenberg Center operates within a biophilanthropic logic, by continuously arguing that without this treatment, their students would never be integrated into social life due to their severe behaviors.

In “Unexpected Spaces of Confinement: Aversive Technologies, Intellectual Disability and ‘Bare Life,’” Nirmala Erevelles and DL Adams (Adams & Erevelles, 2017, p. 348) conceptualize the Judge Rotenberg Center as a “camp” and “zone of indistinction between law and violence,” using Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of ‘bare life.” Agamben, an Italian philosopher influenced by Foucauldian biopolitics, argued that within spaces such as a camp (the concentration camp in Agamben’s primary example), the inhabitants are reduced to “bare life,” a biological substrate that is not conceived of as human or rights-bearing (Agamben, 1998, p. 11). Agamben uses homo sacer – a figure who exists in a banished state under Roman law and can be killed by anyone, without consequence—to describe the state of bare life, arguing that there is a binary between bio (political life)/and zoe (bare life). Erevelles and Adams use Agamben’s concept of the camp and the homo sacer, to theorize the violence of the Judge Rotenberg Center, thinking through how disabled bodies—racialized bodies—are subjected to inhumane treatment despite multiple law suits, first-person testimony from survivors, and continued advocacy efforts. Erevelles and Adams concede that rights-based interventions are ineffective within a camp, as those within the camp are not conceived of as rights-bearing. They further speak to need for “radical alternatives” and gesture to Alexander Weheliye, who exhorts readers to “recognize and refuse the discursive and material violence directed towards subjects confined to a ‘state of exception’ in these unexpected spaces of confinement where brutal punishment is meted out to those conceived of as zoe (bare life)” (as cited in Adams & Erevelles, 2017, p. 362).

Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human is a notable intervention in Agamben’s bio/zoe binary (1998). Weheliye (2014) offers a compelling challenge to biopolitics discourse that decenters the Western humanist concept of Man by exposing the racialized logics that render segments of the population as normatively bare under existing juridical systems. Building on the work of Black feminists like Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, and assemblage theorists like Puar, Weheliye introduces racializing assemblages as a means of understanding race as a set of political and social processes that discipline people into the “full humans, not-quite humans, and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 3). Drawing on Spillers’ “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers, 1987, p. 64), Weheliye deconstructs the writ of habeas corpus (you shall have the body) and posits habeas viscus (you shall have the flesh) as his contribution. He theorizes a politics and poetics of the flesh, imagining a political potentiality for those reduced to bare life, asking: “What ... might [it] mean to claim the monstrosity of the flesh as a site for freedom beyond the world of Man?” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 113). Weheliye’s work is generative in thinking through inclusion, as disabled students are required to prove their humanity through their proximity to neurotypicality, Whiteness, and legibility as Man, through compliance and performance of desired traits. Race and disability are co-constitutive, and equally participate in an exclusionary logic. To be granted habeas corpus—to have a body—requires personhood-as-property, a process that requires others to have flesh.

In contrast to Agamben, Weheliye (2014, p. 2) opens up political possibility for those reduced to flesh, by conceiving of “fleshy surplus” through which subjectivity (humanness) is co-constructed within and through violence. Weheliye explores the human born from political violence while at the same time not losing sight of the ways the law unevenly bestows humanity. Here the connection to neuroqueering is most salient: Being autistic—rather having an unruly, queer, autistic body—in these spaces negates personhood. The subject of behavioral experimentation is ren- dered nonhuman or not-quite-human. However, fleshiness has a capability for production, as evidenced by Bob.

Although Bob’s body has been racialized and disciplined into a nonjuridical subject within a camp, he is also able to produce material change through his fleshiness. Fugitive practices like neuroqueering and cripping intervene in neoliberal rights-based discourses by availing themselves to subjects enfleshed within contemporary biopolitical regimes. Both race and disability are mechanized to demarcate who is includable into political life, and who exists outside of its protections. A racializing assemblage is a political violence that acts hierarchically to position certain bodies as always harmful, always dangerous, always flesh. Similar to racializing assemblages, Schuller (2017) describes racialization as a set of social processes, stat- ing, “The racialized body was a disabled body (and vice-versa), deemed unfit for social life due to its reduced cognitive and corporeal capacities, which rendered in capable of self-constitution” (pp. 13–14). As such, the disabled body will never be served fully by the laws of Man. This is not to say that there are not moments of fleshy surplus within the edges of the law, as Bob demonstrates in this case study. This afterlife of the flesh invokes new possibil- ities and bodily imaginings outside of the realm of legible, rational resistance and agency and gestures to potentials for coalition between all who are disciplined within the current structure. Weheliye argues that the law can “bequeath or rescind ownership of the body” but it cannot “nullify the politics and poetics of the flesh found in the traditions of the oppressed” (Weheliye, 2014, pp. 136–137). I submit this rereading practice as an archive of a tradition of neuroqueering, as poetics and politics of the flesh.

CONCLUSION:

In bringing biophilanthropy to bear on educational practice, I provide a critique of rights-based interventions that neglect the slippages inherent in the venture of rights. I also trouble inclusive education as a panacea, noticing the ways inclusion is mobilized within a biopolitical regime. This is not to say that scholars of inclusive education are conceptually misguided, rather that the discourse of inclusion has been appropriated in unanticipated ways. And although most critical education scholars understand inclusion to mean the deconstruction of ableist spaces, the term has come to mean the production of includable bodies; what disability studies scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder term “inclusionism” (Mitchell & Snyder, 2015, pp. 12–14). ABA is one biopolitical technology aimed at recuperating the future of the subject through corporeal violence and displacement, but other parallels exist in social work and psychology, as well as within the prison industrial complex. By marking the historical specificities of this particular technology, I map connections to other biophilanthropic ventures and provide a means to reread those archives for moments of resistance and corporeal rupture. This extends to the prison, the school, the clinic, the therapy practice—all endeavors that require an individual death for the promise of national future. In the context of educational research, this article calls for engagement with irrational, fugitive resistances that happen outside of the formal structures of education; practices that resist biophilanthropic narratives of top-down activism. By invoking fugitivity and flesh, we can understand liberation outside of the courtroom, the policy document, the inclusive classroom, situating resistance in the racialized/disabled body; considering what resistance means when the only liberation available is to bite the teacher.

CW: too many links to too many subreddits

As of June 27, 2022, the “About Community” sidebar for the subreddit r/makenuditylegal reads as follows:

This page is for spreading the word that public nudity isn't sexual in nature, and is about expressing yourself without wearing clothing. This community hopes to change the minds of those that think being naked is about sex and make it legal in the near future, as America and surrounding areas are very negative about it. We aim to legalize public nudity in the U.S. and abroad. Please subscribe and spread the word :) Being naked is human, freeing, and society has a backwards view on it. Be free!

The subreddit presently has just over 3000 subscribers, which puts it far below the r/nudism subreddit with its 83,000+ subscribers as well as the more modest r/naturism subreddit with 17,000+ subscribers. It is a forum of ideas more than images, too, which is to its credit. There are many other ostensibly nudism-focused subreddits that have anywhere between one (1) and tens of thousands subscribers (for instance, r/nudists has ~46,000), but the posts on most these subreddits are overwhelmingly made up of photos, with very little in the way of links to news articles or to meaningful discussion (insofar as meaningful discussion is something that happens on Reddit).

The likes of r/makenuditylegal, r/nudism, r/naturism, and a very small number of other subreddits with even fewer subscribers (like the puny r/anarcho_naturism with its ~800 members) stand out, then, from the dozens of subreddits catering to those who wish to see photos of naked people in the woods, naked people gardening, naked people camping, etc.

Next, within this small group, r/makenuditylegal has the distinction of actually being committed to a fulsome “nudist politics”, i.e. the realization of a world in which nudity is “legal”, which I take to mean a world in which people can be naked in public places without risk of detainment, jail, fines, and/or the fear of any of those three.

Within the “idea space” of nudism on Reddit, then, the “Pro-Legalists” (as I will hereafter refer to them) of the r/makenuditylegal subreddit constitute a sort of activist or pro-revolutionary hardcore with respect to realizing an expanded option of nudity in society. Obviously posting on the internet isn’t really activism, but in the post-Gamergate era, it should be recognized that there is at least some kind of relationship between discussion forums, on the one hand, and social movements and subcultures that exist in the real world, on the other.

So, the problem with r/makenuditylegal isn’t really the subreddit’s name, even if that is objectionable to me as an anarchist. As far as I’m concerned, as much as I might personally benefit from public nudity being legal in the place where I live, legality ought to be done away with insofar as legality is a function of societies being dominated by states. But that’s a topic for another day, and probably, another outlet.

If anything, I respect the Pro-Legalists for the immoderation of their rhetoric in articulating their political objective, which—though framed in a statist way—is really not so much about the legality as it is about the nudity. The Pro-Legalists don’t see any good reason for nudity to be criminally sanctioned and punished, and they speak clearly and to the point on that subject with reference to their principles. This is in contrast to moderates on r/nudism and social progressives on r/naturism who often argue that the status quo vis-à-vis nudity is fine, and that those who push for social change (the existence of a non-arduous option of nudity in public, the legalization and/or decriminalization of nudity in public, broad social acceptance of a “right to nudity” and/or the basic inoffensiveness and banality of naked human bodies, etc.) are extremists who do nudists as a whole a disservice. Never mind that not all nudists can afford the resort and nakation lifestyle, and some will never be able to!

There is a much bigger problem with the Pro-Legalists. It's that they—that is, a large proportion of the most active users of r/makenuditylegal—are basically kooks and cranks.

I’m not going to get into all the details of it, but we’re talking transphobia, Trumpism, and vacuous freedom talk steeped in an intense form of capitalist realism.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s not exactly fine, but it shouldn’t be a big problem in and of itself. Transphobia, Trumpism (and other forms of reactionary right-wing nationalism), Reddit, climate change, and so on are examples of bigger problems we should be more worried about than we are. Except, there’s one thing... At this time, there is no other space on Reddit—no other space on the “Front Page of the Internet”—for people to discuss the political project of improving options for nudity in the embodied world, except among the cranks.

There is no real welcoming environment for a discussion of tactics, and the ethics of those tactics, on r/nudism. Sometimes the discussion in r/naturism goes in that direction, but not often. Discussions of activism—whether blustering calls to actions, considered strategic proposals, or discussions of historical episodes (which are often poorly documented)—aren’t really on the table on these subreddits. Only on r/makenuditylegal, alongside bad political opinions and somehow even worse image macros, is there actually some good faith discussion about this stuff. Kooks and cranks are absolutely a part of those discussions and often leading those discussions, and that overall sucks, but these discussions still have value to me, an anarchist who wants to be able to talk about this stuff. Because, well, I’m not seeing it many other places.

But r/makenuditylegal is also sufficiently unfit for purpose—if not, at times, dangerously out of touch—that I feel, personally, something better needs to supplant it as the only “political” nudist and/or naturist subreddit that's worth a damn (and sorry, r/anarcho_naturism, but you were never gonna cut it).

It sucks that any energy at all is going to be spent on doing this on Reddit, but I think it has to be this way, at least right now, in the summer of 2022.

So long as Reddit remains the ultimate clearinghouse of information about nudism in English—chiefly in the form of r/nudism and a few lesser subreddits, including the more explicitly political r/makenuditylegal—then I don’t really know what other platform can provide something that the masses (in North America and/or other countries) can use easily enough. And at least Reddit is, ostensibly, about link sharing, e.g. information sharing.

Thus I have made a new subreddit, r/naktiv. (If you want to be a moderator, just let me know.) The name is a portmanteau of two German adjectives, nackt and aktiv, the meanings of which I expect are obvious enough.

It is dedicated to (discussion of) activism—not just spectacular street activism, though probably including some of that—that is aimed at articulating the virtues of nudism as well as realizing more nudity-optional spaces and defending that option where it already exists. Some discussion of adjacent topics (such as the tactical deployment of nudity in other forms of activism) will be allowed, but the goal is to stay overall on topic, and especially to avoid getting bogged down in topics that make up the majority of text posts on the other major nudism-themed subreddits, namely the resort and nakation lifestyle and a litany of newbie and/or adolescent concerns about bodies, social etiquette, etc.

There is no singular, sloganistic demand to unify r/naktiv; basically, anyone can post about anything that is relevant to the topic. However, to the extent that the aggregate conduct of the community that uses r/naktiv has some bearing on how much others will want to use the subreddit and/or how others will perceive the “position” it upholds, then it does make sense to speak of a few practical rules. The most important, I think, is that an account’s post history matters.

Far too often, I click on an account that has posted on r/nudism, r/naturism, r/makenuditylegal, r/nudistmemes, or some other nudism-related subreddit, and what I find is a long post history that in large parts consists of posts on subreddits like [r]preggoporn or [r]hairypussy (I won’t put in the hyperlinks for these ones). Additionally, I sometimes find pretty straightforward bigotry—not just opinions that I disagree with, but rude, insulting, and thoroughly contemptuous comments about entire groups of people. Other stuff is simply embarrassing or perplexing. I am sure the anti-underwearist position (which argues that underwear has no purpose, something that is manifestly untrue) has some merit, but this is actually weird stuff that reveals a manifest unseriousness about the cause.

Accounts that are too horny, or too gross (especially in cases where people are being transgressive for the sake of being transgressive), will be excluded from r/naktiv. No doubt this will drastically reduce the number of accounts that can post on this subreddit, but I believe that will be to the good. Quality over quantity.

To be sure, Reddit is part of the problem, I think. For this reason, I have also set up a mirror community on Lemmy, a Reddit-like forum software built on the ActivityPub protocol. The reader may wish to consult my (dated, imperfect) first post on the fediverse—that is, on interoperable web services using ActivityPub—from last year. Suffice it to say, however, that having a Lemmy community provides redundancy (there will still be a forum even if Reddit bans/quarantines the subreddit or the Reddit servers themselves simply go offline). Lemmy also allows users to better control their own experiences, and to know, within reason, that their data probably isn’t being mined for someone else’s profit.

I have chosen to use the general purpose sopuli.xyz Lemmy instance because I like the rules and, given Finland’s generally better approach to issues around nudity when compared to North America, it seems to me that a Scandy ambience could be a suitable substrate to help give rise to an appealing “naktiv aesthetic”.

Aesthetic, and the related matter of message discipline, are part of being serious. So is a commitment to working with other people who don’t share all manner of ideological presuppositions—but within reason, because certain bigoted beliefs, for instance, sabotage “movement building” of any kind, and risk a repetition of German nudists’ experiences in the 1930s. “First they came for [...] and I did not speak out...”

Being serious also means learning over time. It is not really my place to say, in theory, when a debate about the utility of certain tactics or the merits of a certain strategic approach is actually closed, but I believe that some things ought to be off the table. We cannot remain forever at a 101 level of discussion. In fact, discussion for its own sake, without any connection to real world projects big or small, might best be avoided—unless people are really going to try and inspire others with their imaginations.

Anyway, check it out, either on Reddit or on Lemmy.