At approximately 11:18am, Ben hurried in the door expressing apologizes for being slightly late. He proceeded to make announcements about American Assassin, Vince Flynn’s most recent book, which Ben described as being “too expensive for you to buy”, and also Extreme Measures which comes right after Pursuit of Honor. Ben passed the two books around the circle, and requested that we take a look at the first page which described Mitch Rapp in a sexual rendezvous.
Then Ben proceeded to write on the board:
PROGRAM
1. Housekeeping- assignments/ slapping you on the wrist
2. Contemporary states of exception- mini-case studies
3. Back to Rapp vs. Adams, w/ Hong Fa, Tam, Shukri
4. Building a metacommentary on Flynn
Ben brought up the protests occurring on campus, and there was much confusion amongst the historical truth. This sparked a discussion amongst the class in which details were shared from those in class who witnessed the protestors or knew anything about what was going on. Ben encouraged that we continue discussing these descriptions while he took attendance. He then asked what knowledge has been produced in the room. Paige answered, “We have no idea what is going on.” Jordan said, “They look homeless.” Rachel answered, “They have one little sign, and they’re just sitting there.” Marika retorted, “They have no passion.” Mandi replied with, “They have some sort of passion if they’re sitting out there.” Rachel continued by saying, “If they think it’s really important, and really believe it, other people might.” Paige questioned, “What exactly are they protesting?” Kate thought that it was about the $170 million budget cuts. Ben said that had something to do with it, and asked how we found out about what was going on. Jordan said she found out via facebook, and I read about it in the daily. Ahmed finds it ironic that the US is willing to spend their money overseas but cut their budgets over here. Ben encouraged that Ahmed hold onto that thought because we would return to it in a bit. Ben asked why these protestors didn’t appear more convincing or didn’t seem “passionate”. Marika said if they each had a sign, it would look better. Kat didn’t think there were enough people to truly make a statement. Rachel said if they have different signs, it would be better because all of the signs just said UNFAIR with little writing underneath it. They were difficult to comprehend, and she didn’t think that anyone would take the time to read the fine print and figure out what was going on from a tiny group of disoriented homeless-looking people. Ben invited us to question the following: All of the things about it being ineffective- put this in terms of our work. How would the things we’ve been reading lead us to believe this/ relate to this?
The class proceeded to discuss that if they don’t have enough people along with a lack of passion, they don’t have the charismatic truth necessary to convince people. One way of convincing people with charismatic truth is that the world spirit is on your side or is with you. If you see some homeless-looking people, there is little convincing that history is being made. When people to get press or do seem to be making history, they are possessed by something larger than themselves. Ben explained that, “If there’s massive amounts of people with huge media coverage- my God something is happening here; this is where Hegel and Weber meet.” At 11:30am, Shukri walked in, and Ben said sarcastically, “Welcome! Thank you for joining us!”, marked her attendance, and returned back to the discussion. Many people don’t understand the cause or the aim. Essentially what is happening is that the people are occupying the building and will not leave. Ben said that this building-occupying protesting all began with Vietnam- people occupied buildings in protests of the war. Ben wrote the word “nostalgia” on the board and defined it as “when you make up a fake past that may or may not have existed”. “There is a tremendous amount of nostalgia here”, he said. Ben explained how Hallie, being very lively in her anarchist actions, offered to have Ben hold his class over in the building being occupied. He declined with the reasoning that he didn’t think it was right to declare a state of exception and say that the conditions were right for us to say we aren’t going to meet where we usually meet, inconvenience the students, and take class all the way over there.
Paige was still unsure as to what exactly was being protested so Ben pulled up the group’s blog while others were encouraged to talk of what they know.
Ben also interjected with that in response to Ahmed’s recent blog post, Tuesday is going to be all about liberals.
Ben found the site- www.studentactivism.net and read about how the students occupying the building have made it through their first night, and they’ve released a list of demands. On their website was the following:
“Because we are residents of Minnesota, and because this is a public, land-grant university,
We demand the right to peacefully occupy space at our university,
We demand that the general public has reasonable access to university resources;
We demand that the university respect the rights of all workers to organize and to earn at least a living wage;
We demand tuition and fee reductions;
We demand that regents be democratically elected by the university community;
We demand that the university treat student groups fairly and equitably with respect to funding and space. We demand student groups on the 2nd floor of Coffman Union be able to keep their spaces.
In doing so, we stand in solidarity with the people of Wisconsin, and students and workers worldwide.”
Ben mentioned that if they’re trying to declare a state of exception that they are going to occupy a building, this is the same stuff they could have protested last year. Minus the Wisconsin thing, it is almost as if the World Spirit passed through already, so he found it seemingly belated.
Mandi expressed that she doesn’t think that the university is going to adhere to any demands. These actions are not pressuring anybody in the university to do something; people are simply occupying a building. She continued to say that she thinks there are different ways to go about it. The counterargument is that they are not trying to shut down the university, but rather create a learning space for all students, Ben replied.
We discussed how things could be viewed, and Ahmed, representing Hayek, shared his views on how this is an economy. They’re not paying for it, they shouldn’t get it.
Kate represented the modern liberal argument- It’s a public school, we should all have access to it.
It was concluded that there’s no answer which is part of the problem- there is no right answer.
We continued to discuss being in a state of exception. Why people may not be convinced is because, as Ben put it, they just aren’t showing it very well. Sophie believes that we more willingly accept things that come from administration, but if a group of students come together, you have to have a really good strategy because they have less authority. Rachel said that she didn’t think the protestors were all students and that they all seemed like random people. Ben clarified that “It is a lot of people in the anarchist community.” He also wanted to emphasize that Sophie’s comment is really important. Newspapers, government, they have bureaucratic authority. Anybody with the title President in front of your name, you have immediate legitimacy as opposed to ‘anarchist bums’ or ‘lazy ass students’. Even if they have the title, it does not mean that they are more informed”, he concluded.
Ben shared how he found a few other contemporary states of exception. On the http://startribute.com/politics website, Ben read part of an article titled, “Bachmann slams Obama over Libya intervention” to the class.
He explained that what is going on here is that there is a dispute in whether we are in a state of exception. Obama claims he doesn’t have time to talk to Congress, that there is immediate danger, that slaughter going on now. Bachmann says that this does not constitute as a state of exception. Ben brought up how one of the most important/dangerous things about how we handle history is that we don’t agree on the facts. But he brought up a good point: he dislikes Bachmann very very much and likes Obama fairly well, and agrees with his view on how we are currently in a state of exception with Libya; however, when Bush was essentially doing the same thing and the democrats did not view America as being in a state of exception, Ben was very much so against Bush going into Iraq without declaring war.
‘GOP plans may mean mothballing some state parks’ is another article that Ben opened. Many Republicans and Tea Partiers are saying we are in a state of exception and have to cut serious funding to state parks because we are broke. We are in a budget crisis, and we need to cut, cut, cut. Paul Krugman (a really brilliant economist, Anti-Hayek, has a column in the New York Times in Ben’s view) expressed an opposing view in that the nation always has a deficit, and it isn’t going to be bankrupt tomorrow. He finds this issue not an exception as the Republicans views it, but rather just a tactic to cut budgets.
We then moved onto covering some housekeeping details. Ben felt the need to slap us all on the wrist for a re-occurrence on the blog assignment. Many of us were not sure whether in our comments whether we were still supposed to be Vince Flynn, but he made it very clear and even italicized it in the description. Ben really wants us to read the whole assignment; he puts a lot of time and effort into wording it perfectly.
Ben asked if we have any questions about the External Writing Assignment #3. Paige asked if he has any ideas for us. Ben replied by saying he has ten thousand ideas for us. He said anything having to do with the tea party, the media establishment, state of exception politics, esoteric and exoteric truths with the Libya invasion, anything in White Noise that you can bring back to the Adorno/Arent capitalism, any aspect about contemporary culture you can link back to this are all possibilities for the assignment. Also, just to clarify, he said that it does not have to be a current state of exception that is being covered given that that is the topic we would like to write about.
Then Ben shared that he has actually learned a lot from homeless people.
He encouraged that in our “copious spare time”, we should read a book by the journalist Gary Webb called Dark Alliance. It is the very well documented story about how the CIA has imported crack to kill off pats of the low-income black community; there is a lot of documentation, Ben shared.
He also mentioned that in regards to the Final Assignment- what we should start doing is start talking about it and think about who you’re going to work with.
Resuming Rapp vs. Adams, Hong Fa asked that we take out the sheet of paper that we wrote on last class period. Tam asked what our reaction was to the scene and what our thoughts on the characters were. “Who do you side with and why?” was asked. Gina said that she felt really bad for Adams because in the first chapter that he showed up, she thought he was the good guy even though later on, it was apparent that he wasn’t. Mandi said she felt the same way, but she realized that when the doctor was evaluating Adams’ mindset, she realized that Adams was the only one who thought he was doing the right thing. Emily reacted differently. She knew that with Rapp being the main character, he was the good guy and Adams was the bad character. To further her intuitions, she also felt that Adams was bad because he was initially being watched. Ben found Adams to be a deeply unsympathetic character. He’s a drunk, he’s hypocritical, he says he’s defending the law but he breaks it. Adams also thinks that he’s special. Ben found it difficult to empathize with him. Ben described him in this way: “He’s the liberal elitist who thinks that anyone who disagrees with him is a dumb-ass and is simple-minded.” Britney said two really strong things: #1, this scene makes you choose. One way the rhetoric in this book works is that it makes you take a side. Either you’re with Rapp or you’re with Adams. This is classic Schmittian logic. Second thing is: the choice is between two different ways of breaking the law. This is where Ben finds the book insidious and dishonest- every person that opposes what Rapp is doing ends up doing something even worse. He shared a quote from Rapp on page 104: “I break these laws to keep people safe. Real people. You break ‘em to protect some piece of paper you don’t’ even understand.” Liz expressed her thoughts, “The reader is also constantly required to choose between the two sets of characters, there’s this binary way of presenting them.” Hakim and Karim were talked about as examples as well as Nash and Rapp. They functioned much like the thesis and anti-thesis; friend and enemy. It was also noted that in this book, there’s a third character to be included such as Ahmed with Hakim and Karim. Liz also viewed the bigger guy (with Rapp and Nash) as the binary to Ahmed.
Ben gave everybody a hand-out of a list of people who you were grouped with to talk about the themes regarded in our blog posts. It also included page numbers from the book and articles we’ve read to be used as references. We were to take about five minutes to see what we come up with to see if we come to some rare moment of clarity.
Ben said, “We are going to come back to this in the context of Lowen on Tuesday. So let’s talk about the friend and the enemy. Let’s talk about the enemy. What’d you all discuss?” He referred to a small group by the window, and they said that they discussed how the enemy always seems to have extreme narcissistic qualities; the psychologist points that out. Turning to the page on the enemy (page 487), we found that the psychologist gives the same diagnoses for Adams as Karim, and the enemy always has a problem. Schmitt says the enemy is the enemy because we say he’s the enemy, but in the book it is that there is something wrong with the enemy him/herself. Britney mentioned that Jared Lee Loughner is being medically evaluated right now. Ben expressed interest and asked if she would keep us posted.
Then we moved onto the group that discussed the friend theme. Sophie said Nash’s family becomes the prize at the end of the book. Nash’s family is kind of the American dream. After he gets released to the public, then his gun is working again in the bedroom on page 447. On page 468, it showed his authority over his kid. It presents a relatable tone to that family atmosphere. It was also noted that the book doesn’t talk about the terrorists have a family.
Our group covered concepts of how Rapp is being possessed by the World Spirit because he is essentially the one dictated to make history. We shared a quote that described how Rapp felt foolish to think he could ever lead a normal life in regards to his wife’s murder, emphasizing that the World Spirit is with him. We also touched on the problems with the FBI and how if you’re in a constant state of exception, then is there even an exception anymore?
The class came to a close as Ben exclaimed his disappointment in that, “We didn’t even get a chance to talk about chapter 50 where abortion is the same thing as terrorism!” He reminded us to keep these sheets, they’re a decent guide as a knowledge that we all produced on this. He may send out a PDF of a little bit of American history text to contextualize Lowen. Blog posts will be up tomorrow, we’ll get an email. We were reassured that the blog post assignment will be about Lowen. At 12:33pm, people began to gather their belongings and head out the door.
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