The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room
Thursday Lecture Series featuring Dylan Rodríguez (UC Riverside):
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.
