Political-Theory on emsenn.net

Assimilation Politics

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assimilation politics names the dominant political strategy of the mainstream gay and lesbian movement from the 1990s onward: securing inclusion within existing institutions — marriage, the military, anti-discrimination law, adoption — by demonstrating that queer people are “just like” heterosexual people in all respects except sexual object choice. The strategy seeks recognition, legal protection, and social respectability by conforming to normative expectations rather than challenging the norms themselves.

The most visible achievements of assimilation politics — marriage equality, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” anti-discrimination statutes — represent real material gains for some queer people. Access to a partner’s health insurance, hospital visitation rights, immigration sponsorship, and protection from employment discrimination are not trivial. The critique of assimilation is not that these gains are worthless but that the framework through which they are secured has costs that are unevenly distributed.

Economies of Abandonment

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Economies of abandonment, as theorized by Elizabeth Povinelli in Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011), names the mode of governance in which late liberalism manages populations and places not primarily through direct oppression but through withdrawal — the removal of resources, infrastructure, and recognition from those it deems unviable.

Abandonment is not neglect. It is a governed process. The state does not simply forget communities — it assesses them, classifies them, and determines their viability through administrative, economic, and demographic metrics. When a community is found unviable — too small, too remote, too costly to service — the withdrawal of resources follows as a rational, procedural outcome. The community is not attacked; it is abandoned. The distinction matters because abandonment operates through the same procedural frameworks that late liberalism treats as neutral: cost-benefit analysis, demographic modeling, infrastructure planning.

Economies of Abandonment and Endurance

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers who have completed the geontologies lesson.

Learning goal: describe how late liberal governance operates through abandonment and how endurance functions as a political practice.

Povinelli argues that late liberalism governs not primarily through direct oppression but through withdrawal. Economies of abandonment names the process by which the state assesses populations and places, classifies them as viable or unviable, and withdraws resources from those it deems unviable — while maintaining the procedural appearance of care.

Geontologies

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Geontologies names the governance of the distinction between Life and Nonlife — the ontological division that structures late liberal power. Elizabeth Povinelli develops the concept in Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016) to identify what she argues is the more fundamental operation beneath biopolitics: not the management of living populations but the prior determination of what counts as alive at all.

The concept works through three figures — the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus — each of which represents a threat to the Life/Nonlife boundary that late liberalism must manage. The Desert is the figure of Nonlife threatening to overwhelm Life (ecological collapse, resource exhaustion). The Animist is the figure that refuses the distinction altogether — that insists rocks, rivers, and ancestors are alive and agentive. The Virus is the figure that crosses the boundary, neither fully alive nor fully inert, disrupting the classification from within.

Geontologies and Geontopower

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers who have completed the overview.

Learning goal: explain how geontologies and geontopower operate through three figures and how they extend biopolitics.

Povinelli argues that late liberal governance manages the Life/Nonlife boundary through three figures:

The Desert: Nonlife threatening to overwhelm Life. This is the figure of ecological catastrophe, resource exhaustion, and extinction — the fear that the inert world will reclaim the living one. Climate discourse often operates through this figure.
The Animist: the figure that refuses the Life/Nonlife distinction altogether. Indigenous ontologies that recognize rivers, rocks, and ancestors as alive and agentive represent the Animist — not as a “belief” to be tolerated but as an ontological challenge to the framework that makes extractivism possible.
The Virus: the figure that crosses the boundary, neither fully alive nor fully inert. The Virus disrupts classification from within — it is the uncanny entity that the Life/Nonlife distinction cannot accommodate.

Geontopower is the form of power that manages these threats to the boundary. It operates not through dramatic acts of sovereignty but through the quiet maintenance of ontological categories — the classifications embedded in property law, environmental regulation, and scientific taxonomy.

Geontopower

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Geontopower is the form of power that operates through the governance of the distinction between Life and Nonlife. Where biopower names governance through the management of living populations, geontopower names governance through the maintenance of the boundary that determines what counts as living in the first place. Biopower presupposes the Life/Nonlife distinction — it governs populations already classified as living. Geontopower governs the classification itself.

Povinelli introduces the term in Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016) to identify a mode of power that Foucault’s framework cannot fully capture. Geontopower determines whether a forest is an ecosystem (Life, with interests to be managed) or a timber resource (Nonlife, available for extraction); whether a river is a living entity (as in Maori and other Indigenous legal traditions) or an inert waterway (as in settler-colonial resource law); whether a geological formation has standing or is merely substrate.

Late Liberalism

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Late liberalism, as theorized by Elizabeth Povinelli, names the phase of liberal governance that follows the recognition of liberalism’s colonial, racial, and environmental violence — in which that recognition is managed through inclusion, multiculturalism, and procedural reform rather than structural transformation.

Late liberalism is not post-liberalism. It does not abandon liberal commitments to rights, recognition, and tolerance. Instead, it intensifies them as techniques for managing the crises those commitments produce. The settler-colonial state acknowledges Indigenous dispossession — and establishes reconciliation commissions. It recognizes environmental destruction — and creates sustainability frameworks. It admits racial violence — and expands diversity programs. In each case, the recognition becomes the mechanism of containment: the system demonstrates its capacity for self-correction without altering the conditions that produce the harm.

Late Liberalism and Quasi-Events

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers who have completed the economies of abandonment lesson.

Learning goal: describe late liberalism as a political formation and explain why quasi-events are its characteristic political form.

Late liberalism is the phase of liberal governance that follows its own recognition of colonial, racial, and environmental violence. It does not abandon liberal commitments — it intensifies them as management techniques. Recognition, inclusion, and procedural reform become the mechanisms through which structural conditions are maintained while the appearance of self-correction is produced.

Povinelli Overview

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers familiar with Foucault’s biopolitics and basic critical theory.

Learning goal: describe Povinelli’s central question and how her framework extends Foucauldian analysis.

Povinelli asks: what happens when we look beneath biopolitics — beneath the governance of living populations — and examine the prior operation that determines what counts as living at all? Her answer is geontologies: the governance of the distinction between Life and Nonlife. This distinction is not natural but governed — maintained through law, science, property regimes, and environmental regulation — and it is the ontological infrastructure on which biopolitical governance depends.

Adult Supremacy

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Adult supremacy is the political arrangement in which adults hold power over children and young people, and in which this power is treated as natural, inevitable, and justified. The term draws a deliberate parallel to white supremacy and male supremacy: it names not individual prejudice but a system — a set of interlocking institutions, norms, and ideologies that concentrate political, economic, and social power in the hands of adults and exclude young people from participation in decisions that affect their lives.

Adultism

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Adultism is the systematic discrimination against young people by adults. The term was introduced in its current sense by psychologist Jack Flasher in a 1978 article, where he defined it as the abuse by adults of the greater power they have over children. It names not individual acts of unkindness but a structural condition: the set of behaviors, policies, and assumptions through which adults exercise unquestioned authority over young people and through which the perspectives, capacities, and interests of children are treated as subordinate to those of adults.

Childism

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Childism is prejudice against children as a group. The term was developed by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children (Yale University Press, 2012), where she argues that prejudice directed at children operates through the same mechanisms as racism, sexism, and homophobia: it constructs its target group as fundamentally different from and inferior to the dominant group, and it uses that construction to legitimize a broad range of practices — from neglect and abuse to paternalistic overprotection — that are not in the interests of the subordinated group.

The Black Radical Tradition and Russian Semiotics

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This text surveys the engagement between thinkers in the Black radical tradition and Russian semiotic theory (the Moscow-Tartu school, the Bakhtin Circle, and Russian Formalism). The connections range from direct citation and critical appropriation to structural parallels that operate without explicit acknowledgment.

¶Direct Engagements

¶Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Mikhail Bakhtin

The most sustained and explicit engagement between these two traditions appears in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1988). Gates builds his theory of Signifyin(g) on a synthesis of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “double-voiced word.” Gates uses Bakhtin to argue that Signifyin(g) works by inserting a new semantic orientation into a word that already has and retains its own orientation.

Geontologies

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Geontologies, as theorized by Elizabeth Povinelli in Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016), names the governance of the distinction between Life and Nonlife — the ontological division that undergirds late liberal power. Where biopolitics governs through the management of living populations, geontopower governs through the maintenance of the boundary between what is alive and what is inert, what counts as a living being with interests and what counts as mere matter available for use.

Geontologies

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

precarity

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Precarity names the condition of vulnerability — to economic deprivation, to violence, to abandonment by institutions — that is not randomly distributed but structured by race, class, gender, disability, citizenship, and other axes of power. Some lives are made precarious by the same systems that secure others.

The concept has two overlapping lineages. In labor studies, precarity describes the condition of workers without stable employment, benefits, or legal protections — the growing class of contingent, gig, and informal laborers whose insecurity is a structural feature of contemporary capitalism, not a personal failure. In political philosophy, Judith Butler developed precariousness as an ontological condition (all lives are vulnerable and dependent on others) and precarity as its political distribution (some lives are recognized as grievable and others are not, and this recognition determines who receives protection).

Discord and Patreon as Organization

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

¶Discord + Patreon as “Organization”: why the assemblage feels like a political body before it is one

¶Thesis

A Discord-with-a-Patreon can experience itself as a political organization because networked presence (persistent communicative space + recurring media outputs + a revenue trickle) produces many of the signals of organization (continuity, identity, legitimacy, and “we”-talk) while omitting the mechanics that historically make organizations real (membership, mandate, roles, enforcement, and decision-binding capacity). The result is not hypocrisy; it is a predictable substitution of communicative persistence for organizational structure.

Gramsci's Organic Intellectual in the Post-Snowden Era

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How Legibility Under Surveillance Facilitates Neutralization

¶I. Introduction: The Organic Intellectual and the Problem of Legibility

I am writing to understand how the figure of the organic intellectual—originally posed by Antonio Gramsci as essential to counter-hegemonic struggle—has come to occupy a more precarious, if not paradoxical, position in the contemporary landscape of power. Where Gramsci cast the organic intellectual as a strategic asset in the long war of position, I argue that in today’s infrastructural and institutional conditions, the very legibility that once enabled political effectiveness has become a site of vulnerability.