[iDC] The difference between privacy and anonymity

[naxsmash]

Wondering:  in agon/antagon relationships => 'basic political issues'   
we have no (?) basis to ask how or if this is a knowledge domain, or  
space of essential characteristics?  Jodi writes:

-snip-

>> Why? Because there are no
>> ontologically given 'basic political issues.' Rather, the claim for  
>> issues is political, which means divisive and antagonistic, part of  
>> a stand for
>> and against.


-snip-

Just trying to get a grip on this I am asking,

1is an 'antagonistic part of a stand for and against'  equal to a  
condition(space) precluding existential claims about itself--could we  
imagine it's just an on/off switch=== relational dynamic presumably a  
formal jerk-off ?

2 Is the 'polis' is no place other than a division or boundary between  
relational adversaries?

3 Is the  polis-space sort of like a  line, not a volume-- more  
vividly, a violent-boundary: -like the national borders across which  
the  so called illegal trafficking occurs, or through which the  
impoverished migrant laborers are forced back 'home'?

If so, then could one conclude that to exclude ontology from political  
issues is to go to these two points?----

  A  No politique-- and in the material world, physical violence  
attendant thereupon--  can be legitimized as even partially true or  
described formally as a series of meaningful relations ? (=attain a  
positive value or positive marker) AS opposition (antigon) As such?


   B The agon stands for nothing except in reflection (mirroring)  his/ 
her not-agon, her 'whatever singularity'.  (A nonagon or  
nanogon? )_?   (......whoa, ....watch the antagonist  
dissolve............).


  Jodi and I accidentally agree that 'singularity is not particularly  
positive'; Marcel Stoetzler in a new essay "Where Nothing is  
Produced," in MUTE vol 2 #13  notes,  "....in the sense that  
individuality is any individual's identity against his or her  
identification (as Adorno would later put it in Negative  
Dialectic)...." http://www.metamute.org/en/content/when_nothing_is_produced

Else: and here's  a dodgy ethical problem:  let's say we only may be  
allowed to develop knowledges as  'positive' markers ,  differentials/ 
derivatives,  of 'identity'.  What then if the agon is unproductive?  
(groan)  (Check out Marcel for more..)

Sometimes I feel my words resonate only as shouts and calls against  
the walls of a city, a city inside which  politics and public violence  
converge in bloody real time.  Yes I feel sometimes as if "identity"  
may as well be some kind of mini celebrity concoction, subjectivity  
cocktail, extra olives, xtra dry, no vermouth, no lies. Kafka's  
Amerika blissed.

   "On Saturday 26 September, Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack  
dwellers movement, was attacked in the Kennedy Road settlement,  
Durban, by an armed mob chanting ethnic slogans and backed, fully, by  
the ANC. Kennedy Road, as Mute readers may know, is one of the poorest  
shack settlements in Durban...."  http://www.abahlali.org

If here are no ontologically given 'basic political issues.'  then how  
can I ever find an heuristic, a 'what is to be done' ? not even  
empathy with the poor shack dwellers can follow from analyzing the  
'individual' /flip, 'collective'  only as degrees of difference.  True/ 
false, fake/real ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCcurSAUzHY&feature=related 
   ... and yet, and yet....... "I know you know I know I"......


Hey maybe just take a chill on the effort to brand 'identity politics'  
as a species of repressive capitalist commodity.  (isn't this  
rhetorically impossible if we were to accept the claim"  there are no  
ontologically given 'basic political issues'.)  This seems like an  
exhausted line of thought. I rather like how Sareeta puts it, in a  
related thread yesterday, with her word 'container' .........

> In this respect, we can trace out the ways in which identity  
> politics has
> emerged as a container for selfhood that may enable certain forms of  
> political
> action..... it might be more useful to think about kinds
> of agency that can be marshaled by people in particular contexts.

And Jodi reflects, too,

>
> I guess my appeal is for organized solidarities rather than  
> temporally singular experiences of commonality.  But, perhaps the  
> opposition
> is less stark than I'm suggesting and the latter are a means of  
> producing the former.


Yes, I think so too.




-----------







Jodi writes,
>
>
>
> Brian: " In the best and worst of cases - in massive outbursts of  
> political protest and in disaster
> situations - there is an actual, material experience of commonality,  
> where
> the differences among people do not exclude shared action, concrete
> solidarity. These are the circumstances where the singularity of each
> person appears as indifferent to the events at hand, so that everyone
> becomes a "whatever singularity." That phrase by Agamben, from The  
> Coming
> Community, is a very strong and positive one. It insists on the  
> material
> difference and historicity of each human thrown into the world, but  
> says
> those diverging existential conditions are our common lot, whatever,  
> no
> distraction from the basic political issues.
>
> I think that whatever singularity is not particularly positive, even  
> if that's the way Agamben meant it. More specifically, I don't think  
> that
> one can get to the claim of 'basic political issues' if one presumes  
> something like whatever singularity. Why? Because there are no
> ontologically given 'basic political issues.' Rather, the claim for  
> issues is political, which means divisive and antagonistic, part of  
> a stand for
> and against.


>
>
> I guess my appeal is for organized solidarities rather than  
> temporally singular experiences of commonality.  But, perhaps the  
> opposition
> is less stark than I'm suggesting and the latter are a means of  
> producing the former.