Colonialism In The Brush

The book describes the Hill Country as a trap, baited by grass. Thick, hearty grass that came up to a rider’s stirrups.

The tall grass of the Hill Country stretched as far as the eye could see, covering valleys and hillsides alike. It was so high that a man couldn’t see the roots or the bottoms of the big oaks; their dark trunks seemed to be rising out of a rippling, pale green sea. There was almost no brush, and few small trees – only the big oaks and the grass…
The grass had grown not over a season but over centuries. It wouldn’t have grown at all had it not been for fire – prairie fires set by lightning and driven by wind across tens of thousands of acres, and fires set by Indians to stampede game into their ambushes or over cliffs -- for fire clears the land of underbrush, relentless enemy of grass. The roots of brush are merciless, spreading and seeking all available moisture, and so are the leaves of brush, which cast on grass the shade that kills it, so if brush and grass are left alone in a field, the grass will be destroyed by the brush. But grass grows much faster than brush, so fire gives grass the head start it needs to survive; after a fire, grass would re-enter the burned-over land first – one good rain and among the ashes would be green shoots – and by the time the brush arrived, the grass would be thick and strong enough to stand it off…

As the white settlers planted their crops and grazed their cattle during the driving days, this same grass became thinner and thinner. The soil had taken time to accrue. Many fields of grass had been taken in flame or had died over the seasons, bending and falling, to form the thin layer of what was, over the slick face of Texas limestone. After the tall grasses were all eaten, this soft padding the cattle ate. The roots pulled, the soil remained in a loose arrangement. The heavy rains of the Hill Country came and, with settlers watching, washed this soil away.

When the settlers pushed westward, deep into the Hill Country, Comanche attacks, the book says, were common. For this reason, the first settlers were few and scattered. Over the years, as they grew in number, experience, and frustration, they began to push the natives back. Those white men north in the Comanche homeland purposefully slaughtered the buffalo: food, clothing and shelter to the natives. For this slow eradication 1869 was the final year of Comanche attacks, “forcing them to move onto reservations or starve”. Without the vast acreage of grass needed to sustain a lightning blaze, and no natives to start one, the brush came.

So the brush began to move out of the ravines and off the rocky cliff-faces to which it had been confined. It began to creep into the meadows: small, low, dense shrubs and bushes and stunted trees, catclaw and prickly pear and Spanish dagger, shrub oak and juniper – and mesquite, mesquite with its lacy leaves so delicate in the sun, and, hidden in the earth, its monstrous, voracious taproot that reached and reached through thin soil, searching for more and more water and nourishment. Finally, even cedar came, cedar that can grow in the driest, thinnest soil, cedar whose fierce, aggressive roots are strong enough to rip through rock to find moisture, and which therefore can grow where there is no soil – cedar that grows so fast that it seems to gobble up the ground. The brush came first in long tentacles pushing hesitantly forward into a grassy meadow, and then in a thin line, and then the line becoming thicker, solid, so that sometimes a rancher could see a mass of rough, ragged, thorny brush moving implacably toward the delicate green of a grassy meadow and then in huge bites devouring it. Or there would be a meadow that a rancher was sure was safe – no brush anywhere near it, a perfect place for his cattle if only grass would come back – and one morning he would suddenly notice one shrub pushing up in it, and even if he pulled it up, its seeds would already be thrown, and the next year there would be a dozen bushes in its place.

Whenever you see President Bush, on TV or in print, clearing cedar brush at his Crawford ranch, remember that it has its roots in this.


Oh holy shit, this LBJ book is good.

FoucaultFoucaultFoucault -or- The most important thing I've written in a while

We still have no idea what liberation looks like. There’s no way to know you’ve reached something that can be called ‘freedom’ – people all too often desire their own oppression. Freedom is only a faculty of the mind. All too often our definitions of liberation and freedom affirm a very narrow and particular sense of the word. The liberation of women’s movement’s second wave was a white/western/capitalist one, with power jobs and access to power that structures the reality of biopolitical systems. The power to control, whether it’s yourself or others: this power coincides neatly with the demands of political systems that leach and exploit us in terms of capital and other means. Freedom must involve an analysis of systems of power – not merely the overcoming of a privileged/underprivileged divide. Oppression/control does not have a scale, a vertical set of boundaries, it exists as a set of relationships between people who come to be defined and privileged in particular ways that relates to a system of power. systems of power that allow us to ‘know’ what freedom is. Is privilege freedom?

Similarly, we seem to remain tied to the hegemony of ‘reality.’ We surely don’t know what reality is, or have the means to access it. The claim to do so serves as a mask of the real power, which is to define what is even possible for you to achieve or know. the process of line drawing, demarcating forms of knowledge into authoritative and non-authoritative forms constitutes the basis of any political system. Real freedom, real power, real reality: each claim affirms an interpretive schema that serves a particular end. The claim to truth/reality both masks the positive, creation that comes with any process of describing the world, but certainly also masks a great deal of power. The less we understand (or choose to think) about how the world is understood, the less it becomes possible to understand what liberation is.

Freedom itself, defined in the liberal/sovereign mode has a strong association with whiteness. A racist society privileges whites, allowing them to accumulate capital, through the means of property ownership norms, a relationship to capital and the state that is demarcated by notions of freedom in a liberal/modern sense. A person is free if they can own and not have their shit stolen. The relationship to basic means to live – the blackmail of artificial scarcity at the root of capitalism – forces underprivileged groups to adopt alternative modes of relation to capital – perhaps theft, perhaps communal forms of sharing (pirating – bootlegging). The structure of class and race divisions means that the protection of a liberal, bourgeois sense of freedom can only affirm the freedom of people already with the means to survive in the world of absolute property and personal sovereignty, ie white people. Why not a freedom to steal, to share, to graffiti, to drop out?

Similarly, what faculties are required to become equal with someone? Is it merely access to the same amount of wealth, the same jobs, the same colleges? This is a narrow form of equality that measures with gauges set in the context of power relationships that require exploitation through other means such as capital. It privileges a notion of the free subject because it implies a teleology, whereby inequality comes through a comparison of wealth, or access to a particular form of power. Another form of equality may come as equal psychic comfort, equal access to food, equal democratic control over the means of production. Equality comes as a process of line drawing, and scale weighting, specific political conditions define our choices in what to call equality.

The most important part of any image, any world, any knowledge are the invisible parts that demarcate what we cannot see. To be effective, power must hide itself: otherwise, it becomes an object of contention, avoidance, movement. To be known means to be know limits, leaving marginal space for escape.


Duncan

The banality of good

The humanity and individual plausibility of a theory also influences it’s validity for activists.

Humans believe what they are doing matters, that they are doing it for sake of goodwill and with good purpose. Unless a theory is able to describe the way that people, in a casual, banal way engage in stupefying acts of evil, then it has not captured a reality that seems to be at the crux of systemic violence. Just as social evils arise out of banal acts, so should social goods. Humans have exigencies of existence that concern food, water, shelter, kindness, etc. – radical change must concern these, and the way these regular needs influence change. Theory that involves merely faceless, inhumane, commandeering forces appear to exclude any role for the people affected by those forces. They neither see themselves as part of the problem or the solution.

Vignette 1 – The Beehive Collective – a poster I saw created by this collective depicts the US of A as giant larvae consuming resources. This is depicted by a totalized image of the US as a nation state. There is no room for activists, or anyone else seeing the picture, to find themselves. No one wants to be a larvae. The US is faceless.

Vignette 2 – Bush. The new face of evil for the left. Lack of complexity and the depicted lack of humanity leaves many without a political lexicon after Bush leaves office. The absolute, cronniest, evil, corrupt picture of him scapegoats personal action out of the picture.

Radical, immediate change seems tied to a very particular way of thinking about politics. I think there is an analogy between calls for immediate, violent revolution and something like the invasion of Iraq. Both require the ability to marshal a great deal of force, on the scale of an entire nation. This requires the creation of systems of force and control that change the nature of a political goal you’ve set out to achieve. It also presumes a level of knowledge and authoritative control over the truth that we may not have. The death of god makes our ability to tie down the truth to any political goal nearly impossible.


Duncan

School: Education or Something

I feel like right now I need to write down my thoughts about education even if they arent the most coherant. I've had a good amount of coffee and a spanish class.

Normally I don't feel the urge to write because I 1) havent done it seriously in a while, and 2) because I feel that conversation, for me, is a better way of formulating an idea or a system of ideas. The writing I do is somewhat loose and may in the end be better structured as short blurbs rather than long essays.

My favorite part about high school was not caring, not giving a fuck, because I guess I felt that if it was mandated that I be there, I was going to do whatever I could to go around the prescribed way of doing things and get the knowledge that I needed on my own, whether that meant doing my own reading, talking with friends, or paying attention in class. In college I feel much less free not to care as my attendance is not mandatory, and actually subsidized, in a larger way than property taxes, by my parents. I could very well drop out of school. I could very well go to classes and not pay for them, if the goal was indeed furthering my education. As a friend of mine said, none of the Marxist teachers here who would kick me out for not paying, if they were worth their salt. I am enrolled in school to get a degree. Nothing more or less. That is what those many thousand dollars are paying for. My parents are not paying for me to learn. They are paying for an education at a college specificly structured so that people like me can get diplomas. My father's favorite defense of the general Liberal Arts BA is that most people who get a degree don't usually end up using it in their job. READ: Peter is still employable.

What if I don't want to be employable?

What if I don't want to go to school to serve that end?

Even Evergreen, a semi "radical" institution serves that end. They certify that you are able to teach, be a manager of a nonprofit, work for the state. Evergreen is still the state. Evergreen is a very profitable state run institution. Maybe not as profitable as the UW football team. Evergreen maintains the state function by providing those that will work for it or alongside it. (whether the State itself is Hot or Not, I'm still not sure) But as far as it maintains the running of the service and industrial economy of global capitalism, it is successful. I'm not sure, but I bet that the University of Oregon down in Eugene produces more college attendees that actually blow shit up.

Yes, a college diploma will make me and my ideas more legit, but it does so at the cost of making the ideas and projects of those without that much more illegit. Do I really want to serve that end? To what extent does my being happy at college, with the setting, friends, and the shit that I'm learning about, make me all the more impotent or self satisfied, or passive to recieving information about bad shit through/about the state-corporate rubric? I'm still convinced that killing someone good or blowing someone up or leading global revolution against capitalism would offer more direction to my life than sitting through college.


Alas, I just hope that someday I can sit back and say, "Oh in my idealistic youth, I was depressed about everything, that was until I learned to ignore most everything that was formerly emotionally crippling. Now I contribute just enough to keep those feelings at bay, while I sit here fat and happy in my teaching job with my masters in whatever the fuck, stay in school."

Some shit I'm nothappy with but needed to write.

The notion of the eternal return for me means the deconstruction of all fate or notions of intrinsic meaning to any action. If our reality is an iteration of infinitely repeating and varying realities, there is no reason our actions have to be meaningful, just by their occurrence. The only meaning that actions have arises out of our personal investment and human feeling that we produce as part of living.

I suppose this has something to do with prediction and a little bit the death of god. Future events can never be known, and the degree to which we impose a predictive frame onto them, we impose a manifestation of our own beliefs, rather than a universalizable norm. Because future events are inherently un-perceivable, any reality we extrapolate originates in the perception of the present, rather than a truth. For me, this doesn’t mean I should give up on actions predicated on future events. Rather, it means I should act for the sake of the joy created by that action, instead of the notion that I know how the action will be realized. So: resist! not because it will create change, but because you can save your own soul when you know the extent of an oppression. Also: act! not because you can determine what follows next, but because you know how things have gone before, and change can be it’s own good.

Blah.


Duncan

Maybe this concerns Derrida.

I’m considering the path I will attempt to take for the next few years, and I’ve concluded that unless I’m willing to take myself totally out of my comfort zone, there’s very little reason to be alive. If for some reason I’ve concluded, involuntarily or not, that I have found the right living arrangement, relationship, whatever, for life, there is very little meaning to the continuing of my life. A commitment is a form of closing off just as much as it is a confirmation of an ideal state of affairs.

Unintelligability is the essence of communication, for communication only becomes necessary to the degree that some experience or fact is not already communicated/intelligible. That is why I only feel the need to talk or write when I already am uncomfortable. My relative lack of written communication when I am here is a sign of why I feel like I must leave: there’s nothing to work out, nothing not already self evident about my life that requires me to question my life. Nausea forms the foundation for communication that performs a change in mental approach to the world. I feel that much of my life here in Austin seems like an involuntary reaction that leaves me very little space for change. I’m not convinced that being here helps or would give me any real reason to live my life as if it was worth it.

I suppose on a smaller scale, this is why I think most conversations I have should be inquisitive or in some way confrontational. I want something to be produced problematized or thought about; if someone leaves a conversation unchanged then it may not have happened in the first place; you have created personal communicative amnesia. I need my life to ask better questions of me in order to be happy.


Duncan