Series 2 // Session 3
“Policies & Procedures”
Background Materials:
The Distance from Here by Ban Abidi (film excerpt)
“My body doesn’t exist” Paul B. Preciado (essay)
“Policy and Planning” from The Undercommons by Fred Moten & Stefano Harney (essay)
“Gestures in Transit” by Vivien Tauchmann (performance)
"it doesn't feel like a time to write" by Danez Smith (poem)
Saudade Dos Aviões Da Panair (Conversando No Bar) by Milton Nascimento & esperanza spalding (song)
For more than six millennia, patriarchal imperialism has plagued the world with its attendant maladies: war, conquest, enslavement, degradation, and environmental devastation. Over the past six centuries, these forces have become turbocharged by racist and capitalist techniques and technologies of power, plunging our planet into what can only be described as a terminal social and ecological death spiral.
We live in the age of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide, marked by the deathly double fracture at the heart of patriarchal imperialism and racial capitalism. On the one hand, a racial fracture divides the “superior races” who dominate and devastate from the “inferior races” of the dominated and devastated. On the other hand, an environmental fracture separates the “civilized” realms of human culture from the “environment,” where a nature deemed raw and untapped clings to existence.
These fractures are maintained by systems of repression—policing, bordering, and the violence they enact—to perpetuate the privileges of the powerful. Against this grim reality, the Against Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) research group has convened to imagine and organize radical resistance.
The second iteration of the AGAPE research group will focus on understanding and resisting the mechanisms that uphold Empire’s violent structures. Through monthly virtual seminars and collaborative studios, participants will examine the tools of repression—“guns and bombs,” “smoke and mirrors,” “policies and procedures,” “prisons and fortresses,” and “carrots and sticks”—that sustain Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide. Building on the first iteration’s emphasis on recognizing the horrors of Empire, the second phase shifts toward preparing to confront it.
Each session will focus on a distinct category of violence, providing an in-depth analysis of its function within the imperial system:
Session 3 “Policies and Procedures” – Institutional Violence
Empire uses institutional violence to surveil, administer, and control lives, often through bureaucratic means that appear neutral. Policies and procedures identify and suppress potential rebels, policing livelihoods in insidious ways. Drawing on Kris Manjapra’s Colonialism in Global Perspective and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, this session will examine how these systems operate and how we might elude their control.