Airbnb v. The Housing Question

By Kerry Mitchell

Part 2 of 2 

The gilets jaunes or “yellow vests” protests, driven by rural poverty and general economic stress, continue across France more than three months after they began. Policy adjustments put forward by the government have not succeeded in quelling the unrest. Rejecting these measures as insufficient, protesters contend that French President Emmanuel Macron is blind, uncaring, and/or out of touch with their concerns. Macron’s nationally televised address on the protests only reinforced this perception. He gave it from the ornately decorated salon doré, the “golden lounge” of the Élysée Palace, formerly a residence of French nobility.

This image of Macron parallels the one discussed in part one of this series (see below also). There, a smiling woman sat in a Burger King looking out onto the riots as she supposedly snapped a selfie. That image spread widely and was identified as emblematic of the “spirit of the times.” Likewise, Macron’s choice of setting was considered remarkably tone deaf and indicative of his inability to grasp the true scope and nature of the tensions driving the protests. In both cases, figures that should be quite aware of what’s going on around them appear hopelessly blind, rooted in a perspective that reflects their own position rather than engaging those they purport to see.

This blindness is not visual or informational. Rather it is a self-seeing that is both all-encompassing and impoverished. Such self-seeing sees the riots in the streets perfectly well. It may even understand the perspective of the rioters. But even when face to face with the rioter, or face to numbers with sophisticated socio-economic analyses, such seeing does not change the position of the seer. The other remains the other and the self remains the self. Self and other, even and especially in their collective dimensions (e.g., class), can communicate and empathize with near perfection and still remain in fundamentally different places with different conditions. Macron calmly explains his thinking from the salon doré of the Élysée Palace while the woman sits smiling under the protection of the Burger King. They both see quite clearly.

Ceci n'est pas un selfie

By Kerry Mitchell

Part 1 of 2

France has recently seen its most significant social unrest in decades, with hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets since November 17. The “gilets jaunes” or “yellow vests” protests, named for the reflective vests that vehicles in France are required to carry, ostensibly erupted from the planned imposition of a new fuel tax. Designed to push people toward greater use of public transportation and the purchase of more fuel-efficient, lower-emission vehicles, this tax formed part of the administration’s efforts to mitigate climate change by helping France meet its emissions targets as per the Paris Agreement. French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to withdraw the planned tax and has offered other concessions, but protesters have indicated that their concerns are much broader than the single tax. They have called for Macron to resign among other more fundamental, wide-ranging reforms. While the protests have decreased in size from their original peak at around 300,000 people country-wide, they have also involved successively greater degrees of violence. Burned buildings and cars, looted shops, smashed windows, and general vandalism have accompanied the originally peaceful protests, as have battles between police and protesters. The ongoing protests, occurring predominantly on the weekends, have spread to six countries.

Habermas Is Dead (He's Not, But Still)

Jürgen the Bear

 By Kerry Mitchell 

Ever since Jürgen Habermas, the public sphere has been pretty boring. I’m not talking about the drama that plays out in the public sphere. That drama can be as exciting as anything that happens. But the public-ness of the drama, the way in which the drama is given shape as public as opposed to private, that is a boring process. To be clear, I’m not talking about the process being boring. One can be excited to look at how that process works or not. Rather, I’m talking about the process doing the boring—not being boring, but boring. I’m talking about the process of making public as a process of boring.

Often such a line of thought highlights the civility of public discourse, the rationalization and sanitization of its subject matter, the seriousness and normalcy that it lends. Of course one could counter that making public often sensationalizes, shocks, or calculatingly manipulates to generate interest. To one who would argue in such a way I say, Jesus, God! Are you completely fucking stupid?

Notice how the counter to the counter does not bore. It excites with outrage, transgression, aggression, not so much appealing to the passions as slapping them—completely inappropriate for the public sphere. To employ such vulgarity does not bring the question into the public in an operable way. One can only leave those who utter such vulgarity to work out whatever issues they have with whoever volunteers to engage them further. But whatever and whoever are not the public. The public is everything and everybody. Vulgar exchanges are for private disputes, and their place in public is transgressive: the ones who shout death threats at each other beneath one’s window on an early morning city street. No, the proper counter to the counter, the counter to the counter made public, made appropriate for the public, belonging to the public, is the one that says yes, of course, the process of making public also excites, but within limits, is a balance of sanitization and excitement, but weighted more toward one side than the other.

Now that’s boring. Or more precisely, that bores. In the tradition of public discourse any tension that arises is enveloped and mitigated in a self-replicating and self-mollifying series of argumentative involutions. All of which brings me to the Badlands National Park Twitter Feed. 

The Trump Campaign Is Not Taking Place

Jean Baudrillard/Donald J. Trump

By Kerry Mitchell

I have replaced "simulacrum" with "Trump campaign" in the following: "The Trump campaign is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The Trump campaign is true." Ecclesiastes

By this I mean not, of course, that the Trump campaign is speaking the truth, but that the truth of his campaign—what his campaign is—is true: it is what it is. And what it is is nothing. There is no campaign. There is only Trump.

The absence of a conventional campaign was the subject of a recent MSNBC exposé that wondered whether the Donald could triumph while lacking a proverbial "ground game":

Donald Trump is a candidate without a campaign – and it’s becoming a serious problem. Republicans working to elect Trump describe a bare-bones effort debilitated by infighting, a lack of staff to carry out basic functions, minimal coordination with allies and a message that’s prisoner to Trump’s momentary whims. "Bottom line, you can hire all the top people in the world, but to what end? Trump does what he wants,” a source close to the campaign said.

For Trump supporters, the MSNBC report can be dismissed as a hit piece, a takedown. The article argues largely that Trump’s is a lousy version of a campaign, just as some suggest that Trump is a lousy version of a leader (but without the original, what can you do?). But there are threads within the article and other media that are much more threatening than disapproval, which is easily celebrated or dismissed depending on one’s leanings. These threads suggest not that Trump is being a bad leader, but that he is not being a leader at all. He is just being him. This suggestion is so much more threatening than disapproval as it removes the foundation upon which both approval and disapproval rest. Without such foundation political statements do not so much speak truth or falsehood as flash images that affirm or negate. Such statements are immune to argument, gaining their strength from the sense of confidence, joy, and invincibility with which they are asserted. If Trump has no campaign, if Trump is not a leader but just Trump, then the attacks on him will simply affirm this reality, breaking the feedback loop of claim and counterclaim and coming back again and again to the negation.

Partial Leviathan Shutdown: Where Were You When I Set Up the Panda Cam?

by Kerry Mitchell

By and large, descriptions of the US federal government shutdown have followed rational, even quantitative models. There are charts, lists, numbers, items, and stories that outline the specific and general effects, both nationally and locally. To be sure, there is much opinion on the shutdown that bears tenuous relation to logic. Sarah Palin, for example, described the shutdown as a “pinprick,” noted President Obama’s statement, referring to proposed military strikes in Syria, that the US “doesn’t do pinpricks,” and said “but sometimes we elect them” – a use of “pinprick” so acrobatic in its logic that it would qualify her statement as more of an emotional tone poem than a didactic critique. But underlying the variety in rhetoric, regardless of its persuasiveness, there is a solid base of concrete information. The media have described the federal government, not comprehensively, but nevertheless in very clear, definable aspects through outlining the suspension of its activities.

When Hobbes referred to the ultimate sovereign authority governing a society as “Leviathan,” he described something much larger, more sublime, and more mysterious than the US federal government in the amalgamation of its departments and services. It is both too easy and too quick to equate Leviathan with a government so concretely conceived. Subsequent discourse has expanded the use of the term to include many different kinds of social authority. So with the partial government shutdown unfolding in its complex but graspable ways, I do not ask after the small “l” leviathan (the pinprick leviathan). Rather, I ask after this larger, ungraspable but eminently palpable Leviathan that infuses reality with its strange and multitudinous forces. I ask what would happen if this Leviathan were to partially shut down. What would that look like? What would open up?

“Which Self-Organizing Leviathan?” A: That One, the One on the Right.

By Kerry Mitchell

Do I wish to see the State?[1] Can I imagine what it would be like to see it? Does the State have a face and could I see its face and live? Or, like Moses and his vision of God, can I only hope to see the State’s backside?[2]

I have seen the State's backside.

--

I started with a question. Where is the State? I admit it’s a strange question. It asks for specificity and boundaries and promises description, even clarity. I asked it of a long walk through the city. Where, as I walked, could I see the State, locate it, describe it?

Streets: they wouldn’t be possible without the State. The State demands a certain quality of the streets. It builds, organizes, repairs, names.

Vehicles: they are licensed by the State, their physical qualities regulated -- seat belts, brakes, emissions.

Drivers: also licensed by the State. They are tested, monitored, evaluated, punished.

But none of these things is the State itself. The State is behind them, acts on them, conditions them.

I kept walking.  Long Island Rail Road. It’s an organ of the State, a unit within the Metropolitan Transit Authority, itself a corporation operating under the authority of the New York state legislature. It’s more State than the vehicles and the drivers (private corporations and individuals). It’s more State than the streets (which are more State than the vehicles and people). That helped. There were things that appeared to be more State than others. But they were still not the State.