Please enjoy this sanitized version of my yet-to-be-published manifesto, now purged of “discouraged words under Trump” (plus a few more)
My is a process and related methods.1
There are many: some personal, others specific.
My is not about anything as much as it is about everything because is my set of approaches to the world and its ideas and.
My is a set of orientations and related ideas and actions—practices—focused upon changing or celebrating material and ideological conditions.
My is not about and, or, or.
My is not about , class, , the, the environment, the internet, film, video, politics, my family, my friends, my Jewish non-Zionism, my community, or myself.
My is a set of methods to engage ethically and collectively in thinking, teaching, collaborating, and making art and ideas about the issues and material conditions that concern me and others, including all those listed above.
My is good work. It is an ethical way to live. Learning from and with others, I strive to change a world structured by arbitrary, stupid binaries that are also hierarchies that apportion rights, power, access, and ways of living unjustly.
Male/.
/White.
Rich/Poor.
North/South.
Nature/Culture.
Road/Home.
Abled/.
Sick/Well.
Theory/Practice.
Form/Content.
Home/Work.
Jewish/.
My is because stupid binaries are mutually inflecting and dense.
My is a process and related methods to think and act past intertwined binaries. It is an amplification or extension of my—a technology. It helps disrupt and refashion the world and how we live in it. Learning from and with others, I strive to make a world structured by other. My methods are grounded in process and based in:
▪ collaboration
▪ power-sharing
▪ being situated in a place and a community
▪ naming our shared and responsive ethics
▪ being aware of power in all circumstances
▪ celebrating and learning from
▪ seeking safety or harm reduction
▪ making use of hierarchies as needed
▪ flattening expertise as needed
▪ affording dignity, agency, and creativity to all
▪ self-reflexivity and transparency2
CODA
This brief and quick and easy-to-do exercise reveals as much as it obscures. Importantly, many attributes I cherish (dignity, agency, creativity, community, safety) stay present! The processes I use (teaching, art, collaboration, power-sharing, situated, self-reflexivity and transparency) are strong as steel. Righteous traditions of thought, still intact (ethics, harm reduction, stupid binaries). As importantly, words that one would imagine to be utterly verboden (non-Zionist, class), are currently left alive. This must be because the censor is looking in the wrong directions. Or lets his stupidity, or lack of information—moving as fast as he is without a proper education—allow for certain areas to stay unattended to (or perhaps attended to, but in ham-fisted ways). What seems clear to me is that without the words that have disappeared, what I believe in, have done, and will do, remains legible. I wonder how many words would have to go before I too, vanish.
- In this quick and easy exercise, I have chosen to entirely excise a word leaving no indication that it has disappeared. BAM. Certainly, another way to embark on this good American work would be to mark the gaps. ↩︎
- With some transparency: I helped the censor by preemptively striking a few terms he didn’t know enough (yet) to pay attention to in the list above:
System
Queer(ness)
Woman
Lesbian
Movement
Sexuality
Muslim
COVID
Long COVID
Long Haul
AIDS ↩︎