Bryant Watch: Throw Him a Fish

Critiquing Levi Bryant is like shooting fish in a barrel, a very large barrel with an unbounded supply of fish. One could become addicted and so be lost to an endless, and ultimately fruitless, Sisyphean task. Still, I can't resist his most recent post, McKenzie Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction? (4 Aug 2012).

While the whole post clocks in at well over 2000 words I've decided to limit my observations to the final sentence, more or less. Here it is: "I guess this post will get Homeland Security after me." In case you didn't believe it the first time, here it is again: "I guess this post will get Homeland Security after me."

What the Fuck!%&@!!#!

As you know the United States Department of Homeland Security was formed in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and is charged "with the primary responsibilities of protecting the United States of America and U.S. Territories (including Protectorates) from and responding to terrorist attacks, man-made accidents, and natural disasters."

So Levi Bryant, Official Jester to the Court of Philosopher Queens–no sexist he, philosopher kings are so old school–is telling us that there is something in that post that merits the attention of the government agency charged with protecting the United States from terrorist attack. If Bryant has any serious intention to commit an act or acts of terrorism it would be self-destructively stupid to 1) post it on the internet in a public blog, and 2) to double-dog dare DHS to come get him. On the other hand, if he has no such intention, then his statement is pure self-pleasuring bluster, bombast, and bloviation.

You be the judge.

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Addendum, August 11 2012: Sister Megan Rice is one of three people arrested for breaking into the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation in Tennessee and splattering blood around. I'll bet she and the others managed to do this without benefit of advice and counsel from Levi Bryant and his Ontological Anti-Capitalist Hit Squad. Here's how The New York Times opens the story:

She has been arrested 40 or 50 times for acts of civil disobedience and once served six months in prison. In the Nevada desert, she and other peace activists knelt down to block a truck rumbling across the government’s nuclear test site, prompting the authorities to take her into custody.

She gained so much attention that the Energy Department, which maintains the nation’s nuclear arsenal, helped pay for an oral history in which she described her upbringing and the development of her antinuclear views. 

Now, Sister Megan Rice, 82, a Roman Catholic nun of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, and two male accomplices have carried out what nuclear experts call the biggest security breach in the history of the nation’s atomic complex, making their way to the inner sanctum of the site where the United States keeps crucial nuclear bomb parts and fuel.