Re: <nettime> What is the meaning of Trump's Victory

[Ian Alan Paul <ianalanpaul@gmail.com>]

   I think there were two pressing things to consider in the Post-Trump
   United States.

   First, we must struggle to see "The State" as something that is
   fundamentally heterogeneous and multiple. To assume that it will act
   with one purpose is to purposefully refuse to see that new forms of
   contradiction and antagonism might not simply emerge between the state
   and the people/multitude/etc, but within the state itself, particularly
   under the administration of someone who unapologetically defies so much
   of the grammar that has defined past presidencies. To do this isn't
   necessarily to ally oneself with the state or even with part of it, but
   to attempt to see what intrastate dynamics will emerge as important, or
   not, in the coming years, and how that will come to shape the reality
   of the struggle on the ground. If recent uprisings suggest anything
   (Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, etc.), it's that we have to be able to see and
   understand these competing forces clearly if we mean to act
   meaningfully.

   Second, I think we must struggle to remain attentive to the far-right
   extra-parliamentary forces that may emerge under a Trump presidency.
   We've already seen resurgence of a newly confident far-right in a
   variety of contexts, and I think it would be wise for us to track and
   study how they begin to organize and exert their power in novel
   fashions whether in street actions or other venues. Additionally (and
   drawing upon the first point), we need to track how the state responds
   to the extra-parliamentary militant right, to see if they act
   complicity with them by refusing to police them, or perhaps even come
   to engage in actions with them as has begun to happen in places like
   Greece where police attack refugee camps alongside neonazis.
   Determining this will deeply inform how we imagine and interpret the
   terrain of our organizing and action.

   I hope that these ways of thinking are in some way helpful.

   In solidarity,

           ~i
   ________________________________
   Ian Alan Paul
   Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences
   Abu Dis, Palestine
   www.ianalanpaul.com "History is made by men and women, just
   as it can also be unmade and rewritten,
   always with various silences and elisions,
   always with shapes imposed and
   disfigurements tolerated." -Edward Said

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