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ITS
FUCKING
ABOUT A
BICYCLE
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Danielle LaFrance & Anahita Jamali Rad, editors.
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AAB | about a bicycle
issue 4 | winter 2014

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Unceded Coast Salish Territories | Vancouver, B.C.
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AAB issue 4, Its fucking about a bicycle!
Winter 2014
Unceded Coast Salish Territories, Vancouver, B.C.

Edited by Danielle LaFrance & Anahita Jamali Rad

Layout and cover design by Anahita Jamali Rad
This journal is set in Seravek and BlairMdITC TT

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aboutabicycle.wordpress.com
About a Bicycle journals are available by print and online.
Please contact us at aboutabicycle@gmail.com for information
concerning our projects and to obtain a copy.

Contents

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Preliminary Materials for Bad Students

Danielle LaFrance & Anahita Jamali Rad

Respectable Sexism
Asuman Gencol

The Mouth of Cinema

Rafaela Kino

Home is where my eyeball is

Asuman Gencol

The Economics of Unusable Surplus

Penelope Hetherington

We did it, we exploded theory!

Anahita Jamali Rad, Megan Hepburn, and Stacey Ho

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Preliminary Materials for Bad

Students

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Danielle LaFrance: Beginnings are trying. This is not really

about beginnings, but where About a Bicycle, as a collective,
as a social site, as a social space, is located, or situated, or
contemplated. There was a conscious shift between the first
three sessions and the fourth an overlay of presuppositions
concerning the groups political positionality. Not only how
we were defining ourselves, but how we were and have been
perceived publicly. This began with the first launch of
Concatenate, Concatenate, Concatenate! held at the STAG
sometimes I wonder if the journal became too much of
brand. An object that had to account for everything. What of
this social phenomenon could the journal actually transmit?

!7

On a personal note, I feel like I spent the last couple of years

wrestling with the way relational cultural practices have
transformed. Or how this practice has become a
methodology in artistic production, in some cases. Creating
social sites for the purpose of public engagement became yet
another object, and, ironically, a barrier, a constructed
situation. It all seems to result in depletion, or aectlessness
[as it encourages an aective response]; it doesnt seek to
know the other or oneself anymore than anything else. I
guess what Im trying to say is, I became really sick and tired
of manufactured situations of encounter, as though a stage
had to be set in order for mutuality to occur. That we had to
record a conversation, for example, in order for it be
considered a conversation. I think this has something to do
with legitimising particular moments in life most are afraid
of, its called boredom. Ennui. While aect theory seems to be
a hot meal ticket, the discourse itself does not always result
in knowing or forming aective bonds. I feel incredibly
sensitive when inferences are made to community, the
commons, friendship, allyship without addressing the
messier fabrics that constitute relationships.

Anahita Jamali Rad: AAB, as an entity, encapsulates so

much, that to apply language to it would be impossible. And
so, each session, each subject, each text, each conversation
was also made up of multiple layers simultaneously. There's
never one trajectory, one, let's say, narrative. So, in talking

!8

about AAB, we either end up making vague statements, or

pointing to very specific instances. There's so much going on
at all times, that it becomes dicult to really focus on
particulars.

Lets talk about the third session. I always thought of aect

theory and its discourse uninteresting, but couldn't quite
figure out why. After that session, it started to make sense to
me. I think what we wanted out of that session was to have
better tools to be able to tap into sincerity, better tools to
tap into the depths of the kinds of conversations we were
already having in previous sessions. I was disappointed, which
I guess was pretty naive on my part, and I felt myself getting
more and more cynical as a result of that disappointment,
and then I realized what was going on. (Audre Lorde: the
master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.) I
felt that aect theory was an instance of the master's (or
oppressors) tools just getting in the way of the sort of
interpersonal developments we were making.

DL: Oddly enough that session was while I was away in

Calgary, and I think there is something to say about that
distance and how using Skype contributed to this further
alienation. You can never look someone directly in the eyes on
Skype, always looking removed, slightly anesthetized by the
screen. Im curious about how we subjected ourselves to the
oppressors tools. Each project was a result of a political and

!9

emotional catalyst. Did you think something was tempered?

At times I could see this. Through my screen I noticed your
frustration. I remember calling you (during work hours
mother fucker!) to see where you/we were at. I think
anchoring ourselves to terms (precarity, aect, commons)
can flatline potential for movement in thought.

When we made utterances to About a Bicycle as a social

space or as cultivating a space in the past, we were
addressing the abstract ground of relational dynamics, but
had yet to really decipher what this space necessarily means
to us. Who comprises About a Bicycle? What do these bodies
look like, sound like? How do they collide/expand/diverge,
and what intersectional web materializes through their
varying lived experiences? What do they mutually and
individually want from being together? Taking a cue from the
first few paragraphs of Sara Ahmeds Whos Counting,
where is About a Bicycle?

AJR: I almost forgot about the whole Skype phenomenon. I

guess I just didnt want to think about it. I hated it. It was
awkward and annoying and always breaking down, but it was
the best we had. It was a connection to you, however (and
obviously) fraught. So, I guess some of the texts we were
reading (Massumi, Deleuze & Guattari, blah blah blah) felt
like they were doing to aect what Skype was doing to our
social space. The theory became a mechanism for

!10

constraining and channeling in a direction that made the

subject so far removed from the real thing (let's not get
Kantian) that it became uninteresting. I guess thats why Im
so bad at keeping in touch with people long-distance.

I guess AAB itself came out of a constraining. Almost out of

desperation, out of a thirst for another context. We assumed
gender-exclusivity itself would imply a sort of political space,
an understanding amongst those participating. But over the
course of the past two years, we discovered that it doesnt.
Not on its own.

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Respectable Sexism

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DL: Can we agree that the initial catalyst for having AAB a
gender-exclusive space had much to do with our personal
experiences in reading groups over the years? Perhaps youd
even want to discuss the parallelisms (or striking dierences)
between the Undercommons reading group that took place
over the summer and AAB? The traditional gender dynamics
found in the academic classroom tends to manifest in these
seemingly paraacademic or outside of the academy social
spaces, where predominantly white men are given yet
another platform on which to pontificate their thoughts and
ideas. Even the good men which Id like us to talk about
later ... I think we were initially excited just to see what it
would look like without those unequal power dynamics
where women tend to listen. Would these patriarchal
tendencies be present in other ways amongst our comrades?
How would power shift within the collective? Would we
notice who was speaking more than others in similar ways we
do in co-ed classrooms and reading groups?

A friend wrote to me regarding my recent re-entry into

academia: don't try to prove youre smarter than the boys.
And Ive been thinking about the amount of energy that goes
into thinking about these dynamics, and how, spawning from
her comment, Id like to go another way with it or do
something else with this internalised anger.

!13

I have to say, every time I sit down in the classroom at SFU I

think about and miss AAB. I miss you.

AJR: Thats exactly the experience I had at the

Undercommons reading group. I remember telling you that I
felt I had almost taken you and AAB for granted. I hadnt
quite realised the significance of that space, the relative lack
of structural power dynamics. I feel like academia breeds the
kind of white man pontificator in a way that its designed to
create them as professionals, as leaders, as agents for the
maintenance of the same system, and those who already
have that tendency (as a result of privilege, previous
education, entitlement, etc.) thrive in that environment. It
also not only silences other voices, but those voices are
illegible in that space. Thats why other paraacademic scenes
in which weve both been involved tend to mimic that
structure (Im talking about non-AAB reading groups, activist
spaces, art spaces). Ive often found myself feeling ignored,
but later realised that it is a fundamental issue of language,
and that my voice is illegible (not inaudible) in those spaces.
More than anything, upon leaving those other spaces, I often
felt dirty, like Id allowed myself to be taken advantage of.

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The Mouth of Cinema

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DL: That is such an important distinction youre making here

between illegible and inaudible. And there is also a tension
we must consider where we desire acknowledgement (being
seen) and legibility (being heard). It suggests that in order for
women to be legible in such intellectual spaces they must
perform in a way that mirrors white men. So white men can
!15

then see himself in the other. There are all these seeming
risks involved in claiming space and AAB has experienced a
cacophony of questions and interrogations directed at our
presence as a threat to men.

AJR: This is also something that's ignored when people talk

about representation in institutions/spaces like the academy.
You often hear claims about women and people of colour
being equally represented in grad programs, etc., without
considering that these individuals often have to take on (and
are capable of taking on) a white man persona. Anyone who
doesnt do that is a threat, and thus expelled/made illegible.

An interesting example is what happened a few days ago at

our friend's birthday gathering, when we were at the bar in
the DTES and the conflict broke out between the "guard dog"
server and the guy who was on the bus with you, who kicked
down the sandwich board in the front of the store. All the
antagonisms and percolating aggression of the upwardly
mobile white man against the poor (economically) black man
exploded in front of us at that site. What was noteworthy in
terms of this conversation is when were talking to the
proprietor of the establishment after the incident: how you
and I were aggressive in our speech, calling him out on his not
taking responsibility, and holding him accountable for his
part in the incident. He reacted strongly and negatively,
antagonising us, ignoring us, not looking at us when he spoke

!16

to the "group," gesturing at us and speaking about us in the

third person.

DL: I wish I could determine a way to call people out that

doesnt give them power. I used to have less of a problem
with this, but as the city becomes more and more paranoid
and angry, it seems like the call out pumps up personal
projects or egos. How about this?

!17

Some of my thinking at this very moment is influenced by

Peggy Phelans Unmarked. In a chapter on the ontology of
performance, she situates feminists as having to write in
between the speaking bodies of men and the mute bodies
of women. Between presence and absence. I suppose these
lines excite me because the men in my class are required to
read them as well. It wont necessarily mean anything to
them. I am embodying these words in a way perhaps dierent
than how they will or wont. I wonder if they will reflect on
their speaking bodies as I am reflecting on my mute
body. (This can also continue the reifying trap where women
are essentialised as mute in the discourse. Uncomfortably
taking on this mute body at the same time as experiencing
intense sensations of muteness.) A line strikes me: the hope
of becoming valued prompts the subject to make
sacrifices (152). I wonder if feeling ignored also parallels
the hope of becoming valued the demand for space is
also a question of value. These thoughts might not be
completely clear yet, but I think this is where pent up rage
(not dismissing the value of rage) metabolizes into
something where women are suddenly and absolutely
responsible for managing all aspects of ugly feelings/nasty
aects.

Something else I wanted to draw on, particularly in

relationship to the troubling (yet completely harmless)
question what is About a Bicycle? is how visibility, in terms

!18

of race and gender representation in politics and culture,

does not guarantee equality nor adequate acts of
empowerment. I find it interesting how we didnt go about
drafting a synopsis or title for this current project. (Usually
we would collaborate on a hook together, something that
would best illustrate the syllabus. We often referred to the
first three projects and issues as a trilogy of sorts.) We left
this project unnamed.

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Home is where my eyeball is

We visit the same streets each time, with a bigger crowd. From a dis-
tance, we look at what is left behind us, the light, our voice and warmth,
to silhouettes when were still in the streets. Momentarily, I come face-
to-face with myself and the person behind me. Traces leave light silhou-
ettes over time.
Forced to be idle with conservatism becoming prevalent, women are re-
acting intuitively more to the social issues and they are getting more
crowded on the streets as being the ones who are affected most and
first.

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AJR: That definitely relates to another idea I've been working

with: how the voice of the voiceless" is valued in a way that
turns it into a commodity and how that commodity is traded
on the market of cultural capital. When the subaltern speaks,
we all listen, and spit it out again as a sign (repeated/
replicated) of radicalism a monetary tokenism. If youve
got access to the discourse, youve got it all figured out.

Like, how the male-bodied students in your class have to read

Peggy Phelan, but the text doesn't penetrate them in lived
experience. They can master the discourse and still be
misogynistic assholes in their personal and professional lives.
These voices, discourses, ways of knowing are used for
gaining cultural capital by those who aren't moved by it,
whose experiences arent already entangled in it.

I think that's part of the reason why in previous sessions we

chose not to read more explicitly personal/political texts,
because (although I don't think that we ever directly talked
about this) we wanted to talk about something other than
our experience, because we wanted to consume the other
(white male western philosophy), because we chose praxis. It
wasn't until this session that we realised being explicit is
often necessary, not just for when engaging with folks
outside of our community, but also within it. We can't
stand together unless we know where each of us stands.

!21

DL: I like this shift. We consumed the texts of white male

western philosophers, at times ravenous, tearing these texts
a part, spitting them out. We scrutinized these theorists,
sometimes as an act of defence, but more often than not, as
rooted in our experiences of reading texts. And I don't mean
this in a nave sense, but I see how one is interpolated by
texts, coming into their subjectivity by way of reading and
knowing or not knowing. One has a dierent rapport with
oneself, even a dierent experience with time, when one is in
the midst of reading and writing. Sometimes I find it
unnatural, or unhealthy, even though much of my own self
worth is bound by these unsocial practices.

I assumed our experiences were at the forefront more often

than not, mostly in relationship to our labouring lives and
psychosomatic residue, from capital to racialised poverty.
This hatred, this madness, this frustration was repeated over
and over again in order for us to not only hear one another
but hear what it sounded like, as it rolled o our own
tongues. Sometimes the space was chaotic and crazy, no one
could get a word in. Sometimes there were moments to
breathe and mull over these things that had to be repeated.
Sometimes I didnt want of these moments and wanted more
crazy. The way collective members embodied the texts as a
way to read them. Penelope Hetherington would often
remind me, particularly once my frustration with a text was
noted, how theory and critique are a pattern, not a blueprint.

!22

I dont want to discount the way we did work together, or

commune together, the way we read and parsed through
texts, regardless of whether they were mostly written by men
before this session. Did we ask new questions of old texts?
Did we expose ourselves to these texts in ways we couldnt/
didnt before?

There's a precedence set to understand one another through

communication, through reading, talking, and listening.
There are similarities between reading texts and reading
people, we look for signs of entry, a welcoming. Hostility.
Through osmosis some relations with texts and people have
already been preestablished. We have just met, but we
already know each other so well. Or a reencounter where
intelligibility sways stupidly, and a new sense of meaning is
revealed to have always been known. These activities, these
practices, cumulate and, in a roundabout way, involve
understanding and knowing. But, it is presumptuous to know
or to state "I understand this, I now claim this knowledge as
my own. I understand you. You understand me." Avital Ronell
notes, "The irony of understanding is that the only
knowledge we could have is that we have not understood,
not fully understood. This irony, I think, does produce, in part,
the articulation for a kind of political commitment." It is an
endless task to know and be known, and results more often
than not in a kind of dominance over a reading, a reading of
the other. I think that the germ of every question contains its

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answer, both in an absolute and a conceptual way.

Questioning we can't get away from. But maybe there's
something about the interrogation that's dispensable. Why
do I question? If I can't accept questioning as a mode of
being, what do I have? What, through questioning, am I
attempting to form?

There is another contention to consider within critical theory

whereby becoming-woman, as per Deleuze, or the
feminine function, as per Derrida, or mothers tongue, as
per Berardi, serves as a vessel for defining human subjectivity,
as articulated by male theorists. Terms lose their impact
when racialised bodies and women are instrumentalised as an
ontological starting point for male theorists. Dierence is
flattened for the sake of establishing a utopian commune or
a common subjectivity.

The reading lists started to shift something grew

conflicts arose after the first project we disagreed with one
another we were hurt and assaulted. (bell hooks notes,
[v]iolation is a transgression. Betrayal can make a boundary
where there has been none.) We removed women o the list,
not in spite of disagreements, but for how actions against
one another didnt fit with our non-existent mandate. It
wasnt against ideas per se, but against how ideas were
enacted. Women against women?

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Seeking bonds and/or appetites for texts, appetites to take

texts into our actions, to take our feelings and project them
onto texts. In a loose way, Im trying to trouble how this
chosen praxis you mention was, perhaps, about the prospects
of dierentiating sameness, where we could consume and
other white male theorists. Only then could we ignore
Lacans brutal assertion about how there is no Other of the
Other such attempts of consumption are futile for Young
Girls.

AAB become a new kind of labour (physical and aective) for

both of us.

AJR: I remember in one of our earlier sessions, there was

some talk of collaborating with friends, and whether it's
better to develop a working relationship with a friend or
develop a friendship with a collaborator. I remember we were
boasting that our friendship and working relationship
developed at the same time, and how that was the best to go
about it. We were so entangled in our personal conversations
and developing this project, that we weren't really able to see
it from the outside. Our personal politics became a given, and
we acted as if it was obvious to everyone else. Our friendship
also became the project. At times, it was, for me, like working
on the project was a sort of safe intimacy. It was a way to talk
about our lives intensely, without the explosion of all the
messy bits, without actually talking about the things I didn't

!25

want to deal with, that didn't fit into a theory of labour or

cultural production. In a way, using the master's tools
became a system of tempering all of the explosive emotional
functions. I guess I felt like working on AAB would make me
feel productive, that I was making real bonds, that your
integrity would be my integrity, and all that would make the
messy bits pass, or just disappear.

There was this desire to be productive that was coming from

an internalisation of the white supremacist patriarchal
ontological framework, the same system which, as Frank B.
Wilderson III points out, makes the Khoisan tribe illegible to
the Western anthropologists.

Without the textual categories of dress, diet,

medicine, crafts, physical appearance, and, most
important, work, the Khoisan stood in refusal of
the invitation to become Anthropological Man. She
or he was the void in discourse that could be
designated only as idleness. Thus, the Khoisan's
status within discourse was not that of an
opponent or an interlocutor but, rather, that of an
unspeakable scandal. His or her position within the
discourse was one of disarticulation, for he or she
did little or nothing to fortify and extend the
interlocutory life of the discourse.

!26

By participating in this desire, we lost any sense of real

intimacy. We resented each other. I actually thought you
hated me. This session wasn't even going to happen.

So, I guess this session started with our being explicit about
how we felt in terms of our relationship, and making explicit
our politics: both an internal and an external making visible
(not just legible rolling o the tongue).

The political is personal in surprising ways, not just the

expected ones.

DL: I feel this urge to recuperate the loss in our

conversations, because there is always possibility in failure.
For me the project and us became so intense, it was dicult
to dierentiate what was a relationship and what was a
project. What was my integrity and what was yours?
Curiously, I can see the scope of my depression, having to
disentangle myself from people in order to die a slow death,
alone, in peace. In retrospect, I think the not-so silent
collapse was real intimacy and sincerity. We did resent each
other. Little cuts were made. I was angry with you. I was cold.
I wanted to remove myself from AAB, perhaps, in order to
recognise where our relationship was situated. I needed to
see what it looked like outside of a project, but when I came
back from Calgary we had diculty communicating, there
was no project, I couldnt look you in the eye. When you came

!27

over to my house to talk about this session, we had to look at

each other. I assumed I had been explicit regarding my
feelings (do you know why I was upset?). It left an impression
for a long time. Its a process. There are many ways to
communicate even if only one or two ways are ever executed.
It would be inauthentic if there had been no conflicts.
Although there will always be little pieces of the truth held
back, disclosing our feelings towards the other restabilised
my comforts and anities with this idea of our relationship
embroiled in a project. The project was no longer a Macgun
in that moment. There is also something about a notion of
reinhabiting relationships and spaces to make these more
real than the violence of the neoliberal political economy.

So now the texts we selected for this session were

predominantly written by radical women (and men) of colour.
Where the aect session was perhaps too packaged and too
categorised by the end, the journal slick and glossy, cute, to
use Ngais vocabulary, something had to explode. Could we
say something here about uncontainable and undisciplined
excess in relationship to race, gender, and class? Im thinking
precisely here of how a type of demand is excessive along
with the emotional bodies that activate the demand. As per
Frank B.:

The positionality of the slave makes a demand that

is in excess of the demand made by the

!28

positionality of the worker. The worker demands

that productivity be fair and democractic
(Gramscis new hegemony, Lenins dictatorship of
the proletariat, in a word, socialism). In contrast,
the slave demands that production stop, without
recourse to its ultimate democratization. Work is
not an organic principle for the slave. (22)

Were the oppressors tools used, as you mention, because

such excess became contained/enclosed/accessible/
understandable/relatable?

AJR: Thats what I meant by the disappointment. And

maybe thats why the paraacademic is often disappointing in
the same way. But a space like AAB is somehow always
implicated by academia.

I have to say, when you told me you were going back to

school, it made me feel uneasy, like the foundations of our
relationship were under threat. I've always seen myself as an
abject figure within the institution, always being spit out. I
was always the "bad student." There's no redemption in being
the bad student, a blatant refusal (intentional or not) to
participate. Any work produced within academia is always
determined by its context, by the source of its funding, by its
internal structures and hierarchies, by professionalisation,
and it's dishonest to say otherwise, but so many of the

!29

"radicals" with whom we associate succumb to it, mostly

because it comes easy to them. I hear academics in our circle
complaining about their students, the "bad students," and I
hear the contempt with which they refer to these students.
There's rarely any criticism about the construction of the bad
student. The only favourable reflection on these students I
heard was from a friend who said that students with less
than ideal grades should "get out while they can."

Anyway, is there a way to get out from the grip of academia,

to be rigorous without being para, without using the
oppressors tools in order to make what we're doing
accessible/understandable/relatable? Would you say that
AAB has been doing that?

DL: In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into
the university and steal what one can. To abuse its
hospitality (The Undercommons).

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The individual will not dissolve in the collective.
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The academy refers to these spaces as para, as circuitous, as

supplementary to the academy. Academics love to hate
academia.

More public about fears and anxiety around writing and

thinking and producing. Return to the academy has much to

!30

do with seeking some kind of comfort in solitude. Theres

promise of time and space, of slowness. Whether it fulfills its
promise is another story.

Conference paper over the summer included the line: given

the irony of viewing my return to academia as a form of
momentary relief from precarity; given that capitalism
breeds impassivity

Something Lisa Robertson said about how women are not

naturally subversive. Abjection is a prelinguistic
psychoanalytic stage language is complicit in how we feel
about ourselves. It fails the abjected social subject. Covered in
choked up gobs of language. Give less and less shits about the
good students or how to look like one. Manicured pilgrim
beard. Corrects.

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A friend tells me theres more at stake, theres more

conviction in work shared within your community, amongst
your peers. Easier to be angry at the university than it is to
scrutinize spaces like AAB? Anger and frustration dicult to
mitigate because of whats at stake, because these spaces are
more easily dissolvable than any institutionalised system.

!31

Suspicious of potential utopias yet completely hopeful for

openings in thought and criticism as it becomes inextricable
to finding the energy to get out of bed in the morning.
Exhaustive sentence. Necessary. Necessary. Endings.

AAB was never conceived as a supplement to academia, but a

deliberate counterpublic to other counterpublics. In that
regard, its not a matter of AAB vs. University, but AAB as an
interventionary gesture directed explicitly at paraacademia
itself, at the conception of the reading group as outside of
the academy. What could not be said or expressed in one
space is said or expressed in another. What is often denied is
an expression of the internal workings of the group, the
individuals who comprise the group.

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How can he be both a feminist and a rapist?
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AJR: Right?
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DL: AAB is an expression of complex, not sincere (Chris Kraus

notes sincerity is the denial of complexity), feelings.
Demands internal scrutiny. Demands duration. Longer breaks
in between sessions were necessary, so as not to mimic
semesters or terms. Provide enough space and time to
circumlocute loose ends not to tie them round a bound our
necks but to see what aective remnants were available to

!32

belabour in its wake. Demands solitude. Contemplation.

Slowness.

(Reinhabiting space, gendered embodiment of texts, less

barriers to expression, performances arent necessarily
evaluated, hospitality, we oer food and drink, conversation
teeters as relief for ailments, what kills us, how we continue
to persist. Jinx! Refuge for bad students. Refuge. Becominguntameable. Fear of losing control. Out of control. Control.
Seriousness is crucial. And so is secrecy.)

AJR: Sickened by some defensiveness. Backlash. Puts you in

your place. Because no one wants to know how
comparatively insignificant their struggles are. Everyone
wants to be abject, to taste it. Maybe by consuming it. What
ends up happening (from bell hooks): The real fun is to be
had by bringing to the surface all those nasty unconscious
fantasies and longings about contact with the Other
embedded in the secret (not so secret) deep structure of
white supremacy.

Almost all of us have gone through some university

education, if not the public education system, which again
enforces certain desires in us, anxieties of productivity, of
longing for being outside that pressure, of being rejected, its
like a sort of Stockholm syndrome for junior partners of civil
society (Frank B.). We cant (read: shouldnt) take our

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(entitled) place in the undercommons, in a way, consuming

our way into the abject. The backlash comes from
acknowledging this.

And every once in while, [no particular example provided] I

find myself in a group of white people talking about race/ism.
If I have an insight outside of my particular subject position,
(without my claiming to own it), I often get a backlash. A sort
of placing me outside of that system of knowledge, even if all
I had to do to have access to it is read the news, some blog
posts, or have a couple of conversations with friends. The
backlash is a sort of defensive response from those who
haven't done the (actually quite simple) work. (I find that
these individuals are usually bound up in what I like to call
deep theory, and in an attempt to understand the world,
they become further removed from it.)

Its not enough for us to create these spaces and talk about
the texts and intend on making a counterspace, if we are not
constantly doing the work to prevent ourselves from making
those kinds of moves, and from falling into the pit of deep
theory.

Whats the dierence between a response from the

overeducated left and the unconscious racist? They produce
the same response in me; always, Why do you feel okay
saying this to me? (Claudia Rankine), or What did I do to

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make you think that this is an okay thing to say to me? It

leaves me feeling dirty, angry, guilty.

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How did I/did I participate in making it a safe space for this?
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DL: We admit to the other: our teeth want to sink into

something, and this something is not here, in this writing. Is
"the meat" of the matter "the heart" of the matter? When
the initial excitement wanes. I'm still here, baby. "We" are
together a part. Dis/assembled.

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The Economics of Unusable

Surplus

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image 1: tragedy
image 2: comedy

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DL: I feel compelled to end on a note about "safe space" as it

has come to the forefront of discussion yet again. Here is
another moment where no names, no contexts are revealed,
merely for the sake of avoiding how petty all this shit
eventually winds up feeling. Wounded men. Safe space
rhetoric has become a verifiable maneuver for depoliticizing
thought and criticism, a space, as Jackie Wang articulates, for
white people to contemplate their whiteness, safely and
without scrutiny. It's a critique the transcommunity had/has
of feminist spaces

This recent public villainisation is something I experienced in

Calgary as well when a former AAB collective member
audio-recorded me without consent while I blathered on
about killing Harper, and then had the audacity to counter my
request for deleting the file with an innocent declaration
about safe space. Because I had made it apparent how
problematic a post-colonial reading group was without any
mention of indigenous-settler relations in Calgary, nor any
mention of traditional territories. The criticism turned
inwards, which is not necessarily an issue as these acerbic
responses to things we say and do hold us accountable, are
taken as a personal attack. Its a slippery slope, how easily a
valid criticism is reduced or delegitimated for the sake of
maintaining someones established power.

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We have chosen not to frame AAB as a "safe space

because thought is not safe, it's dangerous. Because we are
together, thinking through things together, the trace of the
individual may retreat or become more pronounced. Why
does "safe space" tend to result in the safety of those who are
already privileged? Why should they be safe from the
feminist kill joy?

I do, however, despise how petty all this shit winds up feeling.
It presents these immediate self-righteous feelings. Even our
questions back and forth about naming certain individuals.

AJR: I feel like the initial naming and subsequent unnaming

itself provided the cathartic experience we were looking for
without getting petty. Although we can agree that some
individuals need to named and called out, others arent worth
the trouble.
In the first issue of AAB, we published someone who did
name someone, her opponent (the neo-neo-marxist) in her
piece. [side note: we have a new policy, no more neoprefixes]. We felt uncomfortable about it, but because we
hadnt grounded ourselves in our politics, we published it
anyway. Even though we knew that her writing was obliquely
taking a jab at us, at our politics. If we could only just be
free, wild. Blow up some shit in the desert.

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[photo: Jeneen Frei Njootli]

The internet often gets talked about as a safe space for

free expression, usually because of the anonymity
associated with virtual identities, or maybe because you dont
have to look anyone in the eyes when you make a statement.
And maybe thats why naming is so easy in writing, and
refraining from naming so much more dicult.
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Its always satisfying to see a safe space become an unsafe

one for the classist/racist/misogynist, for views that are
already dominant, mainstream, oppressive.

Safe spaces become an opportunity for people to open up the

dungeon of unconscious internalised misogyny and racism.
One of the interviewees in The Whiteness Project: White
people in Bualo, NY, talk about race. says it pretty well:

If I was in a room full of white people, I would not feel

uncomfortable talking about race, but if there were other
minorities in that room, I might think a little bit dierent,
and I might be a little more careful opening my mouth, to not
oend anyone or to potentially get in an argument or heated
debate.
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Comfort vs. dis-comfort. A room full of white people is a safe

space for him to express his racist, probably misogynist,
definitely wounded man opinions. Its a safe space for him
to be the victim, indignant. When he talks, his eyes express a
sadness, a sense of being forgotten, of being left out, of not
being recognised. He asks himself, Do I think its beneficial
for me to be white, have I gotten any privileges like that? I
would say no, just plain and simple no.

Men like him litter our everyday lives. Hes someone you meet
at a bar and with whom you have a heated debate, hes the
guy who accuses you of being divisive, not relevant, not
attuned to the working class, who, in an intellectualised
environment, somehow manages to veer the conversation to
be about his. personal. experience.

During our sessions, we often divulge personal anecdotes. We

talk about experiences weve had that relate to our texts, we
name names, we make real (externalise) dealings with the
likes of our previously mentioned friend. Its cathartic, but
theres something else. It gives us examples, real instances of
our theory. Were only able to do this because it is a set stage.
Are these instances manufactured in the same sense that you
mentioned in other social spaces?

DL: No. When something is manufactured, it means that its

trying to represent an authentic scenario. Theory derives

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from experience. The writing itself is either beautiful or bad,

but its reflecting on something material and situational. It
was important for us to intellectualise gossip, deintellectualise theory there was something in that play a
reversal.

AJR: Experience is behind the theory, but it doesnt always

come out in reading its mediated, again, distancing and
alienating the reader. When we talk about our own
experiences, we take it back to the source, the root.

DL: And, yet, parsing through ones experience can be

distressing and ridiculous.

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AJR: Exhausting.
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DL: And we almost have to give up the improbability of

accounting for all aspects of experience, the impossibility of
finding a common place.

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AJR: Its why I need frequent smoke breaks.
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We did it, we exploded theory!

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Acknowledgements

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Although this particular publication does not have a huge
textual presence from our membership, wed like to thank all
those who contributed their valuable time and insightful
discussion this session: Orla Adams, Mariam Faqeri, Asuman
Gencol, Megan Hepburn, Penelope Hetherington, Desiree
Jung, Rafaela Kino, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Sara Sagaii, and
Maria Wallstam; as well as those who attended our open
house session: Scott Inniss, Patrick Morrison, and Gabriel
Saloman.
And thank you to all those who have supported our projects
and assisted with the production of our publication
throughout 2014.

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