
Alter-Being as Permanent Insurrection: Defining and Destroying the 21st Century Counterinsurgency Machine
Drawing from a book in progress tentatively titled “Counterinsurgency Machine,” this lecture unfolds by constructing an analytical and conceptual framework that re-reads a promiscuous political logic that radically exceeds state-centered tactics and strategies of militarized repression. While the term “counterinsurgency” commonly refers to military and police strategies that attempt to neutralize and/or “pacify” (exterminate) militant mobilizations of resistance to various forms of national oppression, colonial invasion, militarized occupation, and other forms of hostile state power, counterinsurgency also—by official definition—encompasses the activities of nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations, civil society/grassroots groups, media and popular cultural forms, and academic research institutions. The current (post-2006) version of the U.S. military’s Joint Publication 3-24 (commonly known as the Counterinsurgency Field Manual) thus invites counter-textual, radical (real-time) archival interpretations that apprehend the changing methods, tactics, and geographies of U.S. counterinsurgency logics as extra-state iterations of “domestic” warfare.
The lecture concludes with a speculative lingering in the conceptual and strategic activities of alter-being, a spreading, autonomous totality of anti-Civilizational projects that confound the political logic of counterinsurgency with wildness, experimentation, and an activated, creative-destructive obsolescence of Civilization’s unpermanent, flimsy regimes, including but not limited to state power and the nation-state, the telos of human/Civilizational progress and growth, modern scales and definitions of institutionality and infrastructure, and other governing orders that police the radical imaginary.
Speaker
Dylan Rodríguez is a parent, teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a job at the University of California, Riverside since 2001. He is Distinguished Professor in the recently created Department of Black Study as well as the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. Dylan served as Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies from 2009-2016, Chair of the UCR Academic Senate from 2016-2020, and has worked as the Co-Director of the UCR Center for Ideas and Society since 2021. As the Co-Director of the Center, he created the Decolonizing Humanism(?) Initiative programming stream, which features scholars, artists, and intellectuals based in revolutionary, anti-colonial, and liberationist movements from all over the world. Dylan was elected President of the American Studies Association by his peers in 2020, the same year in which he was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars, a national award program that intends to “recognize the role that Freedom Scholars play in cultivating and nurturing movements for justice and freedom.”
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