Are You an Extremist?

8/11/2019 Are You an Extremist?

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Te School of Potential Engagement Potential

(SPEP) is a transient space for collaborativelearning. It is and always will be unaccredited.Its walls are temporary, its curriculum is ad hoc,and its occupants collectively assume the rolesof students, professors, and administrators atonce. Tis free experimental education model,in a perpetual state of redesign, is orientedtowards the radical supplementation andredenition of higher education during an eraof actualized academic capitalism.

SPEP was conceived as a by-product of creativeresearch conducted by Te Naught Collective.It was founded upon a rm belief that highereducation should be free and accessible to all,and a dedication to the diverse ways knowledgeis made.

[email protected]

HQHQ is an artist runexhibition and projectspace located in arenovated office in inner

southeast Portland. It wasestablished in April 2014by HQ Objective (Andr CFilipek & Johnny Ray Alt.)

http://[email protected]

232 SE Oak St #108Portland, OR


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@SNL#NL!Preface 1

Post-Syllabus 3

Te Dyspeptics 5

A Preposterous Meditation on a Preposterous Question 10Quiz: Are you an extremist? 13

A seeing (obscene) 15

R U X-TREME Or Nah?or Emotionz Takin Me Over: A Marginally CriticalAnalysis of Tings Tat Are Passably Extreme. 17

Te Citation 23

Creating the Counter-Hegemonic Image 25


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"S!L.!VKK>?W!Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War(Intro and Chapter I)

RETORT

Te Spectacle Today: A Response to RETORT

W. J. T. Mitchell

Te Architect of 9/11

Daniel Brook

#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics

Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek

Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance fromWelcome to the Desert of the Real!

Slavoj iek

What Do You Believe In? Film Scholarship and the Cultural Politics of the DarkKnight Franchise

Martin Fradely

Te Politics of Batman

Slavoj iek

Te Politics of Te Dark Knight Rises

Ross Douthat

Te Dark Knight Rises

Cristopher Nolan

Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, Youre So Paranoid, You Probably

TinkTis Essay is about You

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Here We Accrete Durations: Toward a Practice of Intervals in thePerceptual Mode of PowerAmit S. Rai


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> "T#"S!L#TSW!I#B\L>L\SN SN >"T#"S!L#TSW!9W#!L\SNAre you an extremist?

Immediately I am defensive. What a pointed and seemingly narrow question.Tecontemporarily pejorative identier extremist, paired with the directedness ofare you causes an especially politicized accuser/accusee relationship. Unlikeother less politicized accusatory statementsare you a swimmer? Are you awearer of shoes?are you an extremist? implicates at the same time a history ofhorric acts of violence, and indoctrinated mass-paranoia. Within this colloquialread, the accuser has been predetermined. If I am however to attempt to assumethat the accuser is not a personication of the current state of Western moderni-

tyor more speci

cally, spectacular neoliberal hegemonythe question becomesmuch more complex. Te question is evasive in nature. It accuses whoever readsthe question, in this moment myself, and later you. And the accuser simultaneously

jumps around in my imagination, from individual, to organization, to regime,ad nauseam. It is directed towardsand delivered bymoving targets, ghosts. Iam imagining other mysterious yous toiling over the question, while facelessentities wring their hands diabolically as they ask it. As the question is sourced/perceived from/by various subjectivities its contents change dramatically. Tisis not, however, just because the pronoun shifs in meaning as it is perceived byothers. Te term extremist also shares this evasive quality.

What then is extremism?

Tis would be similar to dening a vessel. A most supercial reading denes thevessel as a simple grouping of material that together have the ability to surroundobjects of an applicable size. Central to its denition is not just what it is but alsowhat it surrounds. It has a shadow. Only in the context of another implied material

can the vessel nd any utilitarian meaning. Te vessel contains; it is a container.Extremism is a similar container. A Saussurean analysis of this sign is usefulhere. However, the word e-x-t-r-e-m-i-s-m does not point to, or contain, anyspecic referent.Te referent(s) in this case are composed of other undeterminedsigns, and the words only socio-linguistic utility is to contain them in referenceto a specic context of use. Te meaning of extremism requires activity, a llingwith other signs by the user, or utterer. I can identify someone as an extremist, but


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what really am I referring to without adding a never-ending string of adjectivesthat will eventually provide some trace of specicity? Extremism is an ideological

vessel. Upon its utterance ideologies compete for its content.

When I consider what extremism is, I must consider positionality. What vantage

point, or prevailing ideology, is the word directed from? I see my extremitiesfrom the center of my bodyor rather the eyes positioned in the center of thehead. When I look at my arm or leg I can thoroughly examine its form. I canconsider them in their independent objectness. In a way they are apart from mybody. My position, the vantage point of my head, gives me the ability to considermy extremities in this way. In many ways, I am blind to my own vantage pointbecause I cannot look directly at it, or isolate it, without my theoretical death.Without the aid of some technology that would allow my vantage point to be

altered, I cannot stare into my own eye or see the back of my head. Only from agiven vantage point can I locate extremisms. I locate them to the lefand to theright of a given ideological head; from the American ideological state apparatusI can see black bloc, and I can also see the Islamic State.

T

e value here is the critical function of the question. A theoretical occupation ofextremity, or imaginative identication with it, can be utilized to closely exam-ine the ideological head, so to speak; I can imagine myself within extremity andthrough this vantage point I can analyze the ideological apparatus that activelylls it with meaning.Tis however requires a paradoxical shifin perspective. Asif I were to hold a mirror in my hand and stare into my eyes. My vantage pointstays the same, but at the same time I am able to see from a drastically different


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perspective. What once was the head is now the hand; what once was the centralideology, is now extreme. Here lies the evasive nature of extremism. It is identiedonly by a commanding ideology, and would be nullied without it. Extremism iscontextualized, aestheticized, and mediated through a specic ideological vantagepoint and can never be perceived independent from it.Trough this mirror I can

examine Islamic extremism, and can source much of its image power to theAmerican ideological state apparatus from which it is constructed. Tis form ofextremity is dened through representation in mass media, but more importantlythe torrential onslaught of Islamophobic images proliferated via new democraticsocial mediasRETORTs reinvestigation of Debords Spectacle in relation to theWar on Terror is useful here.

In continuing to entertain the question, would the extremist ever refer to them-

selves as an extremist? It seems to me that without a rejection of the ideologicalframework that rst declared the subject an extremist, or of an extreme ideology,this gesture would be nonsensical. If one were to declare himself or herself anextremistor rather respond to the pointedness of the original questionI couldonly understand it to be a political action. Answering the question affirmativelyactively rejects the commanding ideology, but through that same ideological

vantage point. It would be to identify with what is upside downwhat is back-wards and outsidethrough a given ideological lens, if we recall Marxs camera

obscura of ideology. Within the political dimension the question is a potentialsite for antagonism, resistance, and/or dissensus. And if this is the case, I canimagine many contexts in which I would answer the question in the affirmative.


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Are You an Extremist?

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