Fan Zine

There are a series of crossways in the popular imaginary that quietly link a balanced combination of well-roundedness and specialization, entrepreneurial achievement, positivism, linear thinking, capitalist growth, efficiency, intellectual focus, and success. All of these things are conceived as more or less good--a category of judgement which allows no room for multitudes, obsessions, distractions, failures, doubts, fanaticisms, hybridities, sensitivities, inspirations, or any abundance of feeling. Abundance in general is negated in this scheme, which privileges and attributes value to all that is sharp like a knife and nothing that is fuzzy. The fuzzy is negligible. The fuzzy is wrong.

The fuzzy is aberrational in this scheme (which, if it is not obvious, is structured around capitalism). When French President François Hollande spoke this week on the recent spate of terroristic murders in Paris, he identified the African killers as "madmen, fanatics."In this way, fuzzy thinking is almost interchangeable in the popular imaginary with both criminality and difference (as well as darkness and unknowability, but that is for another essay). We see this in the case of every single high school shooting over the last fifteen years: the popular question always boils down to What went wrong at home and how did nobody see it? We do not ask the questions: Who else feels this way? or What other manifestations of this feeling are possible? or How could this feeling--the feeling (i.e., the knowledge) of being different--have been alternatively manifested?

It took a team of psychologists reporting in Psychology Today and elsewhere to determine that Christopher Dorner (the black ex-cop who declared war on the LAPD two years ago) is not, officially a psychopath. The focus was on his difference--his doubtful nature in regards to a racist patriarchy--as a perfect example of criminal fuzz. Feelings of difference such as this, and their violent manifestations, are not easily decoupled from what we call madness, and more legible professionals were thus deployed to help make sense of these violent acts stemming from confusion and sorrow in the professional and social realm.

And that coupling is powerfully leveraged to deny the very social forces that drove Dorner so crazy. If I never see another image of a lynching from the early 21st century, or another picture of Nazis marching through Germany with some sort of copy discussing the otherwise innocent white folk as people who had somehow become complicit in evil by putting aside their good sense of humanity and logic and delving into the darkness of madness.... White families who have picnics at lynchings aren't crazy, they're racist. They're dealing with white supremacist capitalist patriarchy--which may indeed encourage fuzzy thinking, or may exist side by side with fuzziness--but it is not their craziness that explains their violence. Being crazy is not necessarily the same thing as being violent. However, being racist (among other things) is.

But I want to return to this question: Who else feels this way? I recently found myself in an emergency intake for psychological counseling. I was/have been/might always be having a breakdown (again). If you've never done a psychological intake, consider yourself privileged: they are really uncomfortable, oddly reassuring, and yet simultaneously dissociating things. Anyway, they are a series of questions, which in the best environments are used to help you find a therapist, and in the worst cases are used to medicate, incarcerate, or commit you (or some combination of the three). During my intake, I was asked Have you ever thought of killing someone?

What a question!

To be honest, I don't know. I'm fairly sure I've never premeditated murder--and I can guarantee that, in this life anyway, I have never taken anyone's life knowingly. But have I ever considered it? I very well may have. How many times have I been scared by another person--really terrified? How many times have I been sexually or otherwise violently offended by another person? How many times have I been so angry at someone that I did not feel in possession of my own actions? How many times have I felt dispossessed?*

It is a sharp question that elicits only fuzzy answers. But fuzzy is aberrational, after all, and even in a building constructed to house and treat aberrations like me, I was scared to say any of this. This response--fear of my own difference--is very, very normal; of this I am positive.

So imagine the difficulty of normalizing the fuzz outside of such spaces. How do you tell someone you barely know, when they ask How have you been? that you have spent the last five months contemplating suicide? That you have felt so confused and so angry that you've premeditated killing not someone else, but yourself? That you sometimes lose your sense of who you are and where you are, and it makes you cry uncontrollably? How do you tell someone you've shared a drink or two with that you struggle in a deep way with depression, that you sometimes fantasize so intensely about disappearing that you hurt yourself in an attempt to deny your physical presence? And that this is why, I'm sorry, I didn't get to apply for that thing you nominated me for, or I didn't show up to your event, or I had to cancel our plans so many times. How do you apologize for the unspeakable? And how do you explain to someone that these feelings are chemical but also based on your heightened sensitivity to world horror? Why isn't that obvious?

Better yet, how do they receive the information once you tell them? How do they re-imagine you, police you, and negate you--or vice versa, celebrate this version of you to whom they've just become closer? The three overarching questions I suppose I have to ask are How do we safely come out about who we really are in relationship to madness and How do we support those around us coming out? And How can we reimagine ourselves as necessarily diverse, and thus cease using diversity as a metonym for criminality?

The thing about diversity is it demands community. Being a little or a lot fuzzy means the constructed world is not made for you, and the only way to survive it is with support. I know that right now I have so much to learn from those in the disability community who have been thinking about disability justice and the complexities of community for so long. (I am partially writing this blog to step my conversation and research game up, esp. with folk like TL Lewis, Allie Cannington, Theri A. Pickens, Micha Cardeñas, Moya Bailey, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and so many others who criss-cross fields to talk about safety, community, and self-actualization (because a part of my fuzziness has always been social phobia, but I am committed to growing stronger as a fuzzy person).)

I am really upset about what the French President said, and what silly statements like that do to neurodiverse people, crazy people, sensitive people--people like me living in the fuzz. It refuses our right to humanity. It encourages our desperate desire to perform passing behavior (and as we know, passing is always tied to violence). It denies our need for community--and thus denies the need we all share for mutual support. It makes things sharp, efficient, easily considered and disregarded; when, in reality, madness is anything but. Madness is not inherently criminal, and it is not negligible. Madness is fuzzy. Madness demands respect.


*Another way to think of this, one which I borrow from Fred Moten, is to understand the flip of this question: How many times have I been possessed? To be possessed can occur in unison with the forces of oppression and dispossesion, and denies one the right to their own self-possession. I could be talking about zombies here just as easily as I could be talking about colonized thinking.

What Do You Know? (an argument for an internet free of violence)

Someone says, “I think the FBI is doing a sweep in West Oakland.” I am in a kitchen in LA; I don’t know what they mean. Frantic messages go out and come back from Northern California: 300 cops. Helicopters. Think some kid got shot in the face. What do you know? I know only as much as the next friend will tell me. What I don’t know about what the cops do could fill an ocean. We tell lots and lots of stories and hope none of them stick, but it almost always all do.

A couple people tell me they get their news from Facebook now. I do not know where to buy a newspaper in my neighborhood, and I rarely care. I bought an LA Times yesterday for any mention of Dhaka and found none, but I guess I should have known better. I have been liberated from the tyranny of news to the freedom of an algorithmic awareness of things-of-scrolling-interest. Sometimes I miss Indymedia, but mostly I forget to think about it. 

Now I do not go outside to know the weather, and that both is and is not a metaphor. 

The internet -- the height of neoliberal creation -- is the human invention that no human understands. Pixelated and hypertextual, everything seems to virtually progress without ever really moving. We travel through cyberspace but our bodies are still our bodies in chairs, the vessels for so many troubled memories and desires. We still have to get up to eat, to shit. We still have to pay our taxes.

Just two weeks ago I willingly filed my taxes and paid for any number of things... the tin used on a drone in Pakistan, or for one week’s hardship compensation for a mercenary in Afghanistan, or for several dinners and a lunch for a Congress person that will stifle any gun control bill, or for the new holsters on the belts of four LA police officers who will draw their weapons from those holsters when they raid my house, or for the gasoline in the vehicles of the 150 FBI and 120 Oakland PD and 30 San Leandro PD that have spent the last 24 hours terrorizing a neighborhood to make four arrests (one of a minor), or for two days’ salary to the FBI public investigator who used one of those two days to ask the internet for support in identifying the Boston Marathon bombers.

Because we have bodies and because these bodies hold memories we don’t even remember and desires too secret to mention even to our own hearts, a federal institution has no right to ask anyone with a modem to identify a bomber. Not when Trayvon’s or Oscar’s or Sakia’s murders spark debate. Not when Sunil Tripathi was still missing. 

If things were different -- if we really were on the other side of a revolution and the internet really did function as a window pane through which we truly see each other, and come to know and know of each other through that seeing -- then the FBI call would land on different and more critical ears (or eyes, as it were). In fact, there would be no FBI call for citizens’ arrest because there would be no FBI; the internet would’ve taken care of that, along with the CIA, DHS, ICE, and etc. 

But the FBI knows that the internet does not work that way -- they know this, they helped to invent it. They know that we do not see through the internet at all; it is a tool for reactionary feedback loops and gossip. Gossip can indeed move bodies to action, and in this way it can be a radical force for justice. (I am thinking of gossip circles that support survivors of sexual violence by de-prioritizing police and giving primacy to the survivors’ needs as expressed by the survivor.) But when gossip happens in a vacuum without awareness -- without hyperlinks to this or this or this -- it is not a radical kind of gossip. It is just plain ol’ gossip, Salem Witch Trial style. 

The other thing about bodies is that bodies die. Bodies sleep and are woken up in their sleep by cops with AK’s and bodies shake with trauma and bodies watch their mothers get led out of the house with their hands cuffed and bodies run and bodies get shot. The internet simply cannot do away with our bodies. What it does do away with is our ability to see each others’ bodies, and to know we exist physically. 

The FBI had no right to make that call in the Boston case because they more than anyone know that 300-person SWAT team sweeps happen in West Oakland precisely because West Oakland bodies are unseen bodies -- as unseen by Facebook algorithms as by the LA Times. The FBI (the US Government, the police, etc) uses the blanket of unseeingness provided by our most popular news source to erase and disappear real bodies without accountability. 

They understand that brown and black bodies exist phantasmagorically in the collective imaginary almost entirely as specters onto which fear and desire can be projected, in much the same way that the FBI projects their own desire and fear of black bodies onto the bodies of the 4 people they arrested in Oakland. And when, in Boston, they asked for help finding a body... oh, any body, but which body will you choose when there are so many...  their feedback loop is in full swing. (You see, even our ability to re-imagine the Tsarnaev brothers as non-white subjects was a kind of unseeing, a true cop-in-the-head in which the public watched and re-watched the boys in that footage and found itself unable to see them as white.) 

The FBI should not expect critical visuality to emerge Phoenix-like from the unseeing internet it has propagated in the name of legal terrorism. They have no right to ask people to see that way when all they have ever wanted of us is to never see at all.