a few words on militant wandering

ok, i'm a little late on the uptake, but robert kramer's route one/usa, which screened at anthology film archives earlier this summer, is really the perfect opening to this road trip. finished in 1989, it's an extended (yes, 4 beautiful long hours) meditation on the united states in places along route one from maine to florida. kramer's scenes capture the materiality of labor during a long period of deindustrialization, and his shots of the sky, swirling water, and the odd squirrel give viewers a visceral sense of presence.


so at its best, the road trip is a meditation on place, and passing through and intersecting with folks living their lives. i hope that by spending time moving through the south and southwest i'll have a better sense for how and why immigrant detention and mass incarceration collide so intently in this region, and how militarization fits into the picture. this is, of course, the post-WWII Gunbelt and site of earlier territorializations of the United States through military conquest and colonialism. how is this founding/ongoing militarization at once possible and impossible to miss?

i take wandering seriously as a way of shifting time scales of daily experience, provoking new collisions of ideas, consolidating thoughts. other folks, like Kramer, of course, have used the method, and enshrined it as a rite of passage. i suppose for me it's the passage - finding magical routes - that's not a rite but a way of being. [and which is why i was so offended earlier this summer up at the Thousand Islands on the US-Canadian border to see a huge tour boat, with rows of neatly seated tourists, named the Intrepid Wanderer]

militant wandering's material in its attention to detail and its sweeping, imaginative claims; deliberative and open to unexpected conjuncture and diversion. and it signals dislocation, and potentially a way of dealing with what feels like permanent dislocation [precarity].

and militancy,
oh, militancy.

i reference militant inquiry as a genre of collective inquiry into conditions shaping our lives that seek to link research and action, knowledge and practice. as part of a group in new york who looks into this method and sometimes practices it collectively and individually, and most often enjoy spending time in each other's company, even creating the possiblity for militant inquiry is a project. and it's one where we also need to take care of each other, hence our jokes about militant hangout. but without this, other work and thoughts and collisions of experience are not possible. oh, mil dining!

i'll post more links to readings on militant inquiry and my thoughts on militancy and anti-violence as i get round to it. you can always share your favorite readings, too. for now, check out constituent imagination published by ak press and this short [dense-ish] piece, "On the Researcher-Militant" by Colectivo Situaciones.