<underfire> More on the affects of organized abandonment

[Dan Moshenberg]

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.

See ya, Dan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://underfire.eyebeam.org/pipermail/underfire/attachments/20061209/6f379b9c/attachment.html