Monday, January 02, 2017

from The Camp (or Camp Amerika)


The camp extends everywhere
comprising the exceptional jouissance

of suffering’s hyper-visibility, and general
dishonorment, and natal alienation

and gratuitous violence, but also en-
compassing what we do everyday

without interruption
                                    while our wills

to this public sentiment called progress
and participation and democracy

survive the president being cooler than
any who preceded him, this coolness 

being precisely what should have worried us
while I.C.E. was being built-up.

The camp is a function of constitutionality
and not giving a fuck really except when

it concerns us to do so.
                                    It is otherwise un-

concerned with freedom, except the freedom
to not be fucked with by others and to critique

identity selectively (Locke 101).
It views our freedom in other words negatively,

freedom being the denial of others' capacity to
fuck with us but it also views our freedom

positively,
                 retaining notions such as universal

human rights and the public sphere when
we know quite well (or we only pretend not to)

whose interests these conceptions serve and
who gets excluded by the practice of law.

Like the Black Codes did not endure, or the
flesh, or we did not know exactly where the

detainees were interned,
                                      though they transmit no

sound and how can you listen anyway to some-
thing no one wants to hear because it would take

more than ears to hear it,
                                        by which I mean, one

would have to act in the world as though they
had registered social death as fundamental, as

though they had ears with which to see the musique
concrete of forced feeding.

As if one’s conscience itself were on mute—that’s
what it feels like to live in the camp which is

everywhere and yet no place in particular,
sensing only our differential places within it,

distinguished by the whiteness of mobility, and

wealth, and history—by the capacity of art, of poesy.