Globalni odpadek, planetarni preostanek

The line separating the “good life” and the savagery that the “good life” requires, or, perhaps what might be articulated as the line between the space of biopolitics and the space of necropolitics, is maintained in the present through both practices of global policing and imperial war. These practices of policing and war produce the very global refuse that constantly threatens the “good life”—actively wasting the lives and livelihoods of people and non-human lifeworlds Western colonialism established as the raw materials, instruments, and objects of its civilizational goal—against which violence acts to protect a fundamentally human life worth living. At the same time, through capital-intensive projects of “saving” the very targeted populations it destroys, permanent war also produces the subordinated life that will come to serve as the means of maintaining and upholding that “good life.” Beyond this mode of colonial inhabitation, however, subsist other ecologies of life-making practices on the part of those deemed disposable, a planetary remainder which might well be our only hope for a possible future.Meja, ki ločuje »dobro življenje« in divjaštvo, ki ga »dobro življenje« zahteva, ali morda to, kar se lahko artikulira kot meja med prostorom biopolitike in prostorom nekropolitike, se v sedanjosti ohranja s praksami globalnega policijskega nadzora in imperialno vojno. Te prakse policijskega in vojnega delovanja proizvajajo prav tisti globalni odpadek, ki nenehno ogroža »dobro življenje« – ki aktivno zapravlja življenja ter preživetje ljudi in t. i. nečloveških življenjskih svetov, ki jih je zahodni kolonializem vzpostavil kot surovine, orodja in objekte svojega civilizacijskega cilja. Edina zaščita temeljnega človeškega življenja, vrednega življenja, pa je nasilje proti »dobremu življenju«. Hkrati z intenzivnimi projekti kapitala, ki na videz »rešujejo« prav tiste ciljne populacije, ki jih ta nenehno uničuje, permanentna vojna proizvaja podrejeno življenje, ki služi kot sredstvo za ohranjanje in vzdrževanje tega »dobrega življenja«. A onkraj takšnega načina kolonialnega bivanja obstajajo še druge ekologije praks, ki ustvarjajo življenje. Prihajajo od tistih, ki so obravnavani kot odvečni, planetarni preostanek. Ta pa je morda naše edino upanje za možno prihodnost

Remaindered Life of Citizen-Man, Medium of Democracy

The widely-lauded progressive achievements of U. S. colonialism in the Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century included the installation of modern technologies of public sanitation, mass transportation, communication and education as necessary conditions of a developing democracy and its underlying humanism. This article discusses how emergent media of communication established under U. S. colonial rule contributed to the implementing of universal standards of human life and experience towards the formation of citizen-man, as the currency and code required for Filipinos' political self-rule. I analyze the reorganization of perceptual and subjective forms entailed by U. S. imperial forms of governmentality, including the gender and race effects of social accommodations to the protocols of personhood of citizen-man, through the media apparatuses of literature, photography, and radio. Finally, I examine other modes of sensorial experience and perceptibility and forms of human and social life, which are remaindered, devalued and/or rendered illegible in the reconfiguration of natives according to the normative ideals and structures of liberal democracy, in order to expand the parameters of our understanding of the relation between social media and democracy

A guerra para tornar-se humano: Tornar-se humano em tempo de guerra

http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-026X200100020000

Challenges for Cultural Studies Under the Rule of Global War

Based on a lecture delivered not long after the US launched its so-called war on terror in Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, the paper addresses the challenges for cultural studies in the midst of “the emergence of a global network of quasimilitary states in tributary relations to the US super security state” and “the emergence of a global counter public or constituency.” With a note of urgency and particular attention to the Philippine context, the paper expresses the need “to interpret, articulate, and participate in the social struggles taking place in and through cultural practice” which begins with the recognition of “the continual subsumption of people’s labor—physical, mental, experiential, and psychical—into systems of domination and exploitation.” It asserts that “the realms of freedom” are “getting smaller” even as “small spaces of creativity and freedom are won,” thus, the challenge is “to locate and extend these spaces as well as their political potential and to extricate these cultural practices … from those that contribute to the containment, expropriation, and alienation of people’s labor, processes which operate everywhere, even in the most politically radical sectors.” In these spaces, cultural practice becomes “not only the means of a transformation” but “part and parcel of that very transformation we hope and strive for.

Remaindered Life of Citizen-Man, Medium of Democracy

The widely-lauded progressive achievements of U. S. colonialism in the Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century included the installation of modern technologies of public sanitation, mass transportation, communication and education as necessary conditions of a developing democracy and its underlying humanism. This article discusses how emergent media of communication established under U. S. colonial rule contributed to the implementing of universal standards of human life and experience towards the formation of citizen-man, as the currency and code required for Filipinos' political self-rule. I analyze the reorganization of perceptual and subjective forms entailed by U. S. imperial forms of governmentality, including the gender and race effects of social accommodations to the protocols of personhood of citizen-man, through the media apparatuses of literature, photography, and radio. Finally, I examine other modes of sensorial experience and perceptibility and forms of human and social life, which are remaindered, devalued and/or rendered illegible in the reconfiguration of natives according to the normative ideals and structures of liberal democracy, in order to expand the parameters of our understanding of the relation between social media and democracy