Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor in Examined Life
They raise the question of “What a Body Can Do”–read more about it here
‘Paradise Threatened’ – A Documentary on Ian Vantreight’s attempt to develop farmland in Central Saanich
Barbarah Ehrenreich explores today’s corporate ideology of positive thinking
Anti-Colonial Anarchism and Indigenous Resistance
Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control
This is a really interesting and accessible reading of a famous text by Deleuze. It does a great job of spelling out some of the key points, while also problematizing some of the arguments, and looking at how (and why) this essay in particular has been taken up so ubiquitously in cultural studies, arts, and humanities textbooks on Deleuze. The video itself is a bit cheesy and some of the images are arguably a bit misleading when it comes to trying to understand Deleuze’s concepts.
“Daddy’s parking lot sermon” by Shira Erlichman
Spoken word piece about normalization of children: making-human, making-masculine, making-rational, making-heterosexual, etc. This isn’t just about telling a young boy to ‘grow up’, or ‘be a man’; it’s about the enforcement of categories of identity in general, onto a child who won’t be contained by them. The child is always slipping into otherness: animals, plants, etc: “moon man, Tommy; you can’t be the moon, you’re a human!” Creative, productive childishness is always overflowing the binaries in which the child is confined/defined. This overflowing isn’t some primordial, essential innocence; the child’s creativity is subversive, dynamic and political. It’s directly connected to the social, political, and physical world; not simply about fantasy or ‘imagination’. These are what Deleuze and Guattari call becomings. Children are more open to affects and transformations that get closed off through identity and representation. The child is constantly resisting the games of normalization, representation, resemblance: s/he fails/resists being a fireman, or being a man in general. Instead, the child is capable of being affected by non-human, asignifying forces: the moon, fire, animals, etc: he needs to be reminded that he’s a he, that he’s human, etc. These becomings always appear as infantile, feminine, irrational failures from the perspective of Daddy. But the kid is capable of moving through and between the binaries and classifications that are supposed to be mutually exclusive: “don’t say your body is an elevator you’re stuck in–stuck between floors…”
How might we make ourselves individual and collective elevators?
Other spoken word by Shira Erlichman
