February 18, 2024
Notes: The Xenofeminist Manifesto
Reading: The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation by Laboria Cuboniks (2018)
When I first skimmed read this book a year ago, my opinion of it was uncharitable. I was skeptical of the idea that we could drive ourselves away from patriarchy in lithium-battery cars, that "diversity in tech" is a radical concept, that XF is nothing but Promethean accelerationism, and that the manifesto's relative absence of race necessarily prohibits XF from being antiracist. Rereading the first chapter, titled "Zero," I'm both embarrassed and pleased that I am probably wrong about at least some of my first impressions. (It still gives me some Promethean vibes, but I'd like to reassess this later.)
(Regarding race, it might be worth rereading the article "Losing Manhood: Animality and Plasticity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative" by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson.)
As a budding anarchist (I guess), I could see XF as a critique of primitivists, of deep ecologists, and historical narratives of how our societies were more egalitarian before the rise of agriculture. And as a "radical" vegan (and all vegans should be radical), I find XF an answer to the "naturalism" of vegans who fantasize about some distant time or culture in which nonhuman animals were/are not exploited. It's often been a sticking point for me, because this pretending is both incorrect and pessimistic; it resigns itself to the conclusion that nonhuman animals can only be liberated to the extent permitted by "nature." Vegans also oppose animal experimentation and testing and advocate for the development of alternatives, which I personally consider one of the most important ethical issues today. XF's liberation through technology may also support animal liberation in instances where naturalism fails.
One caveat I had with this chapter is the definition of the word technology. When most of us talk about technology, we are usually referring to things like modern computers, cars, and automated factories. But prior to these developments were many other technologies now called "primitive" - things like obsidian knives, bow drills, and largely abandoned methods of working metal and glass. Archaeologists also call these technology, but they are implicitly excluded from XF's focus on the "modern." This isn't necessarily a difficulty for XF, but it does raise the question of whether XF is a completely new and radical development, or a concept that was, to use the often colonialist term, "discovered." Decolonial analysis is needed, and I hope the following chapters are more fruitful.
Some quotes I liked from the chapter:
"Freedom is not a given - and it's certainly not given by anything 'natural.'" (p. 15)
"XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology - the sooner it is exorcised, the better." (p. 15)
"Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly of techno-political interfaces responsive to these risks." (p. 17)
"Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role." (p. 17)
"Rationalism itself must be a feminism." (p. 20)
"XF ... names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular." (p. 21)
February 24, 2024
Notes: American Possessions
Reading: American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States by Sean McCloud (2015)
I've read this book before, but this time I am reading it with a friend who is a D&G fan. His take is that the demonologists are "like schizoanalysts in reverse, sensitive to all the same molecular forces ... but committed to stopping them rather than following them." (See page 62's "supernatural hermeneutics of suspicion" as an inversion of Marxist hermeneutics: "In the place of social inequalities and laissez-faire neoliberal markets, the Third Wave imaginary conjures demons - summoned by the sins of individuals or groups - to explain social problems")
Some main points I took away from the intro I just read:
- Third Wave evangelicalism is a convergence of consumerist, haunted, and therapeutic themes (p. 3)
- The "spiritual" and the "material/natural" worlds are tightly intertwined in Third Wave theology (p. 8)
- Demons 1) provide a very material and spatially located form of theodicy, 2) are the focal point of attention and attack in spiritual warfare, and 3) simultaneously assert (through demons' reality and physical presence) the entire Third Wave theology of God, Satan, and the spiritual world (pp. 10-11)
- Consumerist theme: cultural forms (including religions) in the US have become commodities, creating a "consuming convert's republic" in which religious identity is a "project of the self" (pp. 13-14)
- Haunted theme: Americans are increasingly interested in the paranormal, as exhibited in stories featuring "uncanny" histories and a return of repressed familial, social, and material entanglements (despite the consuming convert's republic emphasizing autonomous consumers freed from said past histories and entanglements) (pp.15-17)
- Therapeutic theme: Modern therapeutic discourse focus on the "optimization" of personal feelings (instead of diagnosis and containment of illness), with positive mental attitudes as a major tool in the quest for stable identities and well being - and for many conservative Protestants, self-realization is salvation (pp. 17-18)
Sections of the book outlined in the intro (pp. 18-19):
- "Delivering the World": Third Wave views of demonic activity in American popular culture, the nation-state and its politics, and non-evangelical religions
- "Possessed Possessions, Defiled Land, and the Horrors of History": Third Wave concerns with demon-possessed consumer objects, places, and land
- "The Gothic Therapeutic": Third Wave deliverance manuals 1) register modern therapeutic discourse with a dark twist and 2) complicate (neo)liberal notions of individual agency by focusing on how the demonization of individuals occurs through willful sins, family inheritances, and traumatic experiences
- "Haunting Desires: Agency in an Age of Possessions": How the Third Wave's imaginary demonology ambivalently mirrors neoliberalism with regard to its desocialization, dehistoricization, and dematerialization of the world
Quotes:
"In more than one way, 'secular' only exists through its equally dependent binary, 'religion.'" (p. 5)
"Third Wave evangelicalism is also deeply involved in and largely dependent on mission fields outside the United States, in countries such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, and other locations in Africa, South America, and Southern and East Asia. The 'dependence' suggested here lies in the importance of international missions for fantastical first-person supernatural tales and the development of Third Wave demonology, which views all non-evangelical religions as satanic because they are believed to promote 'contact with, worship of, homage to, and even use of spirit beings other than the one true God.'" (p. 8)
"The detail of every haunting is different. Sometimes the spiritual culprit is an abusive father who refuses to go to hell; other times they are the ghosts of slaves who are angered that their history of suffering has been ignored. But while the specifics vary, the stories are also very similar in that they feature something 'uncanny,' something the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud described as 'nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old - established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.' While the consuming convert's republic stresses autonomous consumers freed from past histories and entanglements, the haunted present ambivalently suggests that the spirits of history, family, community, and institutional structures cannot be discarded but continue to haunt the present. In the contemporary period, supernatural entities signal a 'return of the repressed' in which, to quote the scholar Judith Richardson, 'things usually forgotten, discarded, or repressed become foregrounded, whether as items of fear, regret, explanation, or desire.' In the case of the haunted present, the repressed that returns seems to be history itself, with all of its familial, social, and material entanglements." (pp. 16-17)