I think the reaction to these accounts, and the supposedly “dissenting” elements of the US state they represent, is dangerous to be honest. Celebrating these accounts overlooks a lot of the fundamental problematics we have to engage with, and creates a fictional division between some form of rational, proper, scientific state and an irrational, improper, populist perversion of the state.
I think that’s dangerous because it occludes a lot of the actual features of the American state which make it so lethal and which are responsible for the current series of differentiated catastrophes which people are experiencing. For example, it’s weird to see the National Park Service (NPS) become this embodiment of American liberalism given that the NPS is literally a protracted celebration of a form of wilderness made possible by genocide against Indigenous people. Then again, perhaps it’s a good icon for the liberal resistance, because the NPS sets out to preserve a certain kind of pristine purity from the devastation of modernity embodied by urban life (and its associations with blackness). It’s actually a colonial myth very similar to American liberalism itself.
I think you can also say related things about the Rogue NASA (@RogueNASA) Twitter account. As part of the military-industrial complex, NASA’s history and its self-mythologizing as a colonial “explorer” makes it a depressing, if unsurprising, hero for the liberal #resistance. I guess that’s what I felt was dangerous about that particular moment in which people started fetishizing a certain form of civil-service resistance. It occludes the nature of the American state and I think we should be careful not to allow populism, or Trump’s form of populism, to distract us from the nature of the American state as an organization of forces of heteropatriarchal, settler colonial, capitalist domination—that whole murderous configuration shouldn’t be overlooked just because some civil service people don’t like Trump.
D: The one thing I would say is that it remains to be seen what kind of forms these movements will take, and certainly in the March for Science there was a lot of very unhelpful exceptionalism—“we are scientists, we produce truth”—which kind of suggests that as scientists they should be protected. In this sense, they failed to join up with already existing struggles and with other movements because they even exceptionalize themselves in relation to other movements. That’s worrying, but I’m sure there are elements that do want to connect and do want to join up and are doing so. The NPS, of course, is massively colonial: it has literally forced people off their land and continues to do so. But there may be people who work for the NPS who would like to address this, are aware of this, and would like to remedy it in some way. Just because they are struggling at the moment as rogue employees of the NPS doesn’t necessarily mean that they are struggling for a return to what was—you can struggle against your own history as well. Whether that is happening or not, I don’t know. We certainly saw it in the student movement around tuition fees and privatization of higher education in the UK—that wasn’t just a struggle for the return of the university as a space where relatively privileged people could have a free education or even be paid to have an education, at its best it was a struggle for a fundamentally different kind of education. So perhaps those struggles will take that kind of direction. I’m sure elements of those struggles will and they are the ones I guess that will potentially have the most interest for radical politics, against and beyond the world as it is.
A: And I guess this is the point where it might be important to talk about a certain form of “treachery” against the manifestation of power that one is willingly and/or unwillingly incorporated into. I have been thinking a lot about treachery in the context of recent discussions around the term “ally.” I mean, I think a lot of people have come to realize that the term ally is problematic, but there seems to have been an easy shift towards “accomplice” instead and I don’t think that has actually resolved the fundamental problem: both imply that there is some form of easy movement that one can make towards someone in quite a different structural position, which means that you can then unilaterally declare “okay, I am an accomplice now.”
I think what this often means, especially for people like myself who are in a particularly privileged position, is that I have to actually think about what it means to be traitorous or treacherous. I think the interesting thing about the figure of the traitor is that you never fully escape the thing that you are betraying. The traitor is always an ambiguous figure who can never be fully trusted because they can always be drawn back into the form they are betraying. So, I guess there is something interesting to think about in terms of these state workers. You know, whenever the police commit another atrocity, they usually pull out some policeman who has a critique of the police, but it never goes into a full betrayal of the police. It’s never treacherous, it’s always restrained in some way, and I guess it’s at that point when you’re willing to start comprehending the abolition of yourself, that you might become a useful traitor rather than a very dangerous ally who just seeks to incorporate a more critical edge into the reproduction of violence.
So, there is something about treachery and a willingness to be dangerous to the thing that reproduces you—simplistically speaking, to bite the hand that feeds you. I think if those rogue accounts do become dangerous, it will be if they leak things, if they cause a problem and then are willing to go beyond that. What would be interesting is if those people doing the rogue stuff started quietly talking to and helping Indigenous people reoccupy parts of the National Park Service that have been stolen from them. Maybe that would be a good form of treachery.
BASE Magazine: When it comes to activities to support and build on, people often point to the numerous struggles, many on Indigenous/First Nations land, aimed at preventing the extraction of resources which directly lead to climate change—but much of this seems far beyond the reach of this island. Meanwhile, similar UK-based activity around antifracking seems also to have been rooted in a reactionary nationalism—somewhere between NIMBYism and a defense of the English countryside. How might we better confront and resist the causes and effects of climate change or, if the determining moments are to be far from these shores, how might we better offer solidarity?
A: Once when OOTW were doing a talk, someone from the audience raised this point about Indigenous struggles and was like “we’ve seen these Indigenous struggles elsewhere and they are really good, important, and fundamental to any kind of environmental practice in the twenty-first century.” Which was cool, but then he went “so, what do we need to do in the UK? We need to do something around our local places, our local environments, do we need to become Indigenous?” And that’s the moment when you are like “Noooo!” It’s ridiculous, but you can see this kind of thing comes up often in the Kingsnorth stuff. It is obviously a real problem and it’s interesting because it seems to spread across the political continuum.
Kingsnorth is actually a properly dangerous ideologue who has all of these ideas which have been coalescing around a very fervent nationalism-fascism complex. What’s dangerous is that it has been taken up by a lot of people on a liberal Left, who nevertheless seem to find something in it. So, I think part of the problem is that people start making easy equations with the land and start thinking about things in terms of “Nature.” What we have always been trying to insist on in OOTW is that there is not some kind of pure nature to go back to, and that any implication of some kind of perfect wilderness is colonial dreaming, and a dreaming which will only vivify an incredibly dangerous form of enclosure of the wild as a means of preserving the world. And, what we’ve been talking about more in OOTW is the cyborg ecology or the cyborg Earth, in which there is no perfect nature to go back to; and in which we have to face up to the complexities of the interrelation between human and nonhuman life—which ironically enough, is exactly what Kingsnorth says he is trying to resolve! Kingsnorth says he is doing it through the nation, but he can’t talk about human and nonhuman life without pitching nonhuman life as some kind of perfect and pure thing. As soon as human life is removed from that, for Kingsnorth, it becomes dirty, polluted, and corrupted because, for Kingsnorth, nature is what rejuvenates the nation.
The thing that we have to resist here is Western colonial romanticism—this
