Dan Moshenberg: RE: More on the affects of organized abandonment
Four quick points concerning organized abandonment:
First, what is the value, what are the values, of calling the abandonment organized? does this cast us into zones of intention, will, system. ..
Second, organized abandonment as banning. According to Agamben, in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, "If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, the sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical category, a power external to law … or the supreme rule of the juridical order …: it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it. . . . (W)e shall give the name ban … to this potentiality … of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying. The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguished. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order. . . . It is in this sense that that paradox of sovereignty can take the form `There is nothing outside the law.' The originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment" (28 – 29, Agamben's italics).
Third, organized abandonment as urban development as banning `blight': According to Mindy Thompson Fullilove's Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, over the last couple decades in the United States, "1,600 black neighborhoods were demolished by urban renewal." (20). How does demolition of Black neighborhoods equal renewal? Blight is the key: "The land-claiming strategy...is fairly straightforward. An interested city had first to identify the `blighted' areas that it wished to redo. Having defined `slum' and `ghetto', we must add this concept of blight, which was invented specifically for purposes of redoing aging downtown areas, and meant, quite simply, that buildings had lost their sparkle and their profit margin. Quite a remarkable array of buildings could fit under the definitions of blight that were enacted into law" (58). As Fullilove notes, near the end of her book, "By ordering the landscape so that the poorest and most vulnerable are hidden out of sight, white America has `invisibilized' (to invent a word) the problems of poverty and racial discrimination. This would seem to work, but, paradoxically, the creation of an apartheid system actually accelerates the spread of calamity, rather than reining it in." (238)
Organized abandonment in the context of US urban development policies means destruction and occupation in the name of social well being. Welcome to Baghdad.
Fourth, this too brief too schematic run through is a reason I posed prison with transnational women's domestic labor. Among the growth industries of so-called global cities: private security, domestic service (household and industrial, the latter including, for example, office and hotel housekeeping). Be it multitude or mass, the disorganized body impolitic of economic and social `development' in the US is comprised of prisoners, parolees, maids, childcare providers, eldercare providers, home health care providers, groundskeepers. Individually and perhaps visually and visibly coming from all parts of the world and all parts of the `rainbow', but in the space of organized abandonment, which they are meant to inhabit as they are meant to uphold occupation force, they are all Black, they are all Women, they are all under a banning order.
White sadness is too kind a phrase. Call it apartheid.
> Dan Moshenberg
First, what is the value, what are the values, of calling the abandonment organized? does this cast us into zones of intention, will, system. ..
Second, organized abandonment as banning. According to Agamben, in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, "If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, the sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical category, a power external to law … or the supreme rule of the juridical order …: it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it. . . . (W)e shall give the name ban … to this potentiality … of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying. The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguished. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order. . . . It is in this sense that that paradox of sovereignty can take the form `There is nothing outside the law.' The originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment" (28 – 29, Agamben's italics).
Third, organized abandonment as urban development as banning `blight': According to Mindy Thompson Fullilove's Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, over the last couple decades in the United States, "1,600 black neighborhoods were demolished by urban renewal." (20). How does demolition of Black neighborhoods equal renewal? Blight is the key: "The land-claiming strategy...is fairly straightforward. An interested city had first to identify the `blighted' areas that it wished to redo. Having defined `slum' and `ghetto', we must add this concept of blight, which was invented specifically for purposes of redoing aging downtown areas, and meant, quite simply, that buildings had lost their sparkle and their profit margin. Quite a remarkable array of buildings could fit under the definitions of blight that were enacted into law" (58). As Fullilove notes, near the end of her book, "By ordering the landscape so that the poorest and most vulnerable are hidden out of sight, white America has `invisibilized' (to invent a word) the problems of poverty and racial discrimination. This would seem to work, but, paradoxically, the creation of an apartheid system actually accelerates the spread of calamity, rather than reining it in." (238)
Organized abandonment in the context of US urban development policies means destruction and occupation in the name of social well being. Welcome to Baghdad.
Fourth, this too brief too schematic run through is a reason I posed prison with transnational women's domestic labor. Among the growth industries of so-called global cities: private security, domestic service (household and industrial, the latter including, for example, office and hotel housekeeping). Be it multitude or mass, the disorganized body impolitic of economic and social `development' in the US is comprised of prisoners, parolees, maids, childcare providers, eldercare providers, home health care providers, groundskeepers. Individually and perhaps visually and visibly coming from all parts of the world and all parts of the `rainbow', but in the space of organized abandonment, which they are meant to inhabit as they are meant to uphold occupation force, they are all Black, they are all Women, they are all under a banning order.
White sadness is too kind a phrase. Call it apartheid.
> Dan Moshenberg