Imagine, by contrast, a domain of scholarly enquiry that based its theories on multiple and conflicting intuitions about the basic nature of the phenomena under study. It would struggle to get off the ground because of interminable turf wars among competing coalitions with widely differing foundational assumptions about the nature and purpose of scholarly enquiry. Unfortunately, we don’t have to imagine it. That is exactly the problem, or at least has been the problem historically, with social and cultural anthropology.
Since we lack dedicated cognitive machinery for reasoning about social complexity, we are prone to borrowing intuitions proper to alien ontological domains. Consequently social scientists at turns reify institutions, biologize social categories, anthropomorphise offices, and mentalize corporate groups.

— Anthropology in crisis - what, still?

We have articulated a new discourse of freedom: as the freedom to be offensive, in which racism becomes an offence that restores our freedom: the story goes, we have worried too much about offending the other, we must get beyond this restriction, which sustains the fantasy that ‘that’ was the worry in the first place. Note here that the other, especially the Muslim subject who is represented as easily offended, becomes the one who causes injury, insofar as it is the Muslim other’s ‘offendability’ that is read as restricting our free speech. The offendible subject ‘gets in the way’ of our freedom. So rather than saying racism is prohibited by the liberal multicultural consensus, under the banner of respect for difference, I would argue that racism is what is protected under the banner of free speech through the appearance of being prohibited.(…)

— Sara Ahme, Liberal Multiculturalism is the Hegemony- Its an Empirical Fact- a response to Slavoj Zizek [via]

Some of us refuse to accept the impositions of exploitation and domination. We strive to create our own lives and in the process of create our live and in the process create relationships that escape the logic of submission to proletarianization and commodity consumption. By our own will, we redefine our commonalities and our differences, clarifying them through the alchemy of struggle and revolt, basing them on our own passions and desires. This makes the form that friendship tends to take in this society completely unpalatable: to simply tolerate another out of loneliness and call this one friend-how pathetic! Starting from that sense of pride that moved us to rebel, that point of selfish dignity that will not tolerate further humiliation, we seek to build our friendships upon the greatness we discover in each other joy, passion, wonder sparked both by what we share in common and by how we differ. Why should we expect less of friendship than we do of erotic love? Why do we expect so little of both? Rebellion sparks fire in the hearts of those who rise up, and this fire calls for relationships that bum: loves, friendships, and, yes, even hatreds that reflect the intensity of rebellion. The greatest insult we can give another human being is to merely tolerate them, so let us pursue friendships with the same intensity with which we pursue love, blurring the boundaries between them, creating our own fierce and beautiful ways of relating free of that logic of submission to mediocrity imposed by the state and capital.

— “Against the Logic of Submission” by Wolfi Landstreicher

Axiom q. Anarchy is not about the worker. Most people don’t like work. Why would we want to organize our lives and our politics around something we usually try to avoid? Workers’ collectives are good in that they try as much as possible to remove the oppressive relationship inherent within the capitalist conceptualization of work. But the products people make, or the services they offer still have to slot themselves into the capitalist system. Forget that. Anarchy is about not working for other people at all. It is about working for yourself. And I don’t mean self-employment in the tax collectors’ definition. What I mean is, working on your own garden so that you can feed yourself, working on your own artwork, videos, websites or writing so that you can express yourself, working on building your own collective home so that you can house yourself, working on relationships and learning things that are relevant to your life, working on your sexuality so that you can please yourself. Working for other people is no fun, and an identity based on the exploited role you play in sustaining capitalism is no identity at all. Fuck work. And read Bob Black. Anarchist theory has to move away from Marxist notions of the reified category of worker, and consider the possibilities of creating a world without poverty in a world without work.

— Seeing Past the Outpost of Post-Anarchism. Anarchy: Axiomatic [via]

There was, however, one thing that I found odd—the scene where Jones tells a student to read V. Gordon Childe. Would a die-hard anticommunist really recommend a Marxist archaeologist to a student? And what would Jones—who spends most of the time in the field and seems narrowly focused on philology and case studies rather than grand theory—think of an archaeologist who was best known not for his fieldwork, but for high theory? And have the archaeology blogs already picked this one to pieces?

— Jones and Childe?

Paul Rabinow: You have been read as an idealist, as a nihilist, as a “new philosopher”, an anti-Marxist, a new conservative, and so on…Where do you stand?
Michel Foucault: I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on. An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.

— Michel Foucault - Interview: Polemics, politics and problematizations

One of my fellow alumns told me years ago of the one of my undergraduate professor’s quip about the historical moment when, as he put it, what has once been “gay pirate criticism” turned into “queer bucaneer theory.” I’m not sure what he meant by this phrase, but to me its always been a nice way of encapsulating the historical shift from a somewhat nebulous interdisciplinarity (think “blurred genres”) to the birth of ‘theory’ as a consolidated thing that academics ‘did’ (think the “culture/power/history” reader). The transition—here somewhat spitefully dismissed as mere relabelling—definitely happened. But when? At what point did the confluence of philosophy, literary criticism, and social science become ‘theory’ in the sense embraced by some, and denounced by the detail-minded?

— From “gay pirate criticism” to “queer bucaneer theory”