Yesterday was the nineteenth anniversary of the Los Angeles riots set off by a Simi Valley jury's not guilty verdict against the police officers who were videotaped beating Rodney King a little over a year earlier. I recommend Judith Butler's article "endangered/endangering: schematic racism and white paranoia" on the "racially saturated field of visibility" with which the cops' defense was able to surround the video, and thus to use it as evidence of King's violent black criminality, crucial in exonerating the four police officers before the all-white jury. We on the left take the evidentiary power of the image and of videorecording for granted, but words and images can be made to mean any number of things based on what social forces are organized to determine their meanings and what discursive frames govern their interpretation. if any recent moment illustrates the need for a continuing engagement with the politics of interpretation it's that now famous quote in the Ron Suskind piece on "the reality based community" by a high ranking republican in the Bush administration. Liberals at the time largely took the quote as evidence of either the right's stupidity or its disingenuousness, some proudly claiming "reality-based community" as a badge of courage. I took the statement as a warning that even if leftists and liberals shun postmodernity and it's skepticism of truths and grand narratives, the right does not, finds its revelations about mediated meanings and discursive significatory aporias politically useful. Speaking truth to power is all well and good, but when notions of truth are so profoundly compromised that a president forced to show his papers to be authenticated by racist billionaires can then be commanded to surrender his educational records in order to explain how someone who evinces a supposed stupidity which is unreadable outside of Donald Trump's racist optics could have gotten into Columbia and Harvard Law, we need cultural studies to help us explain the historical circulation of racialized truths and the historical production of racialized authenticatory discourses of black lives by privileged white figures.

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Similarly subject to a racially saturated field of visibility are the images that circulate of immigrant workers, to whom I now turn because tomorrow is May 1, international workers' day, born of the battle for the eight hour day by anarchist working class militants in the u.s. labor movements of the 1880s. Contemporary immigrants are routinely cast as contagion, as terrorist, as part of a nefarious plot to hispanicize white america. Pointing out that this is racist isn't enough. Neither, really, is a nuanced account of the shifting racial formations that obtain in a moment wherein capital and capitalists cross borders freely while labor alone is disciplined and radicalized by state production of difference. This post began with an argument for cultural studies' political importance, but cultural studies is only useful to the extent that and when it articulates with on-the-ground, militant, deep social movement organization. Writing a book or article, giving a talk, even to some extent organizing a conference - these can all be important contributions, but they are also all too easily reinscribed and recuperated into the university's economies of prestige, devaluation, debt, and enclosure. those of us who work in universities need to engage more deeply with movements both inside of and beyond the university. we particularly need to challenge the logics of value that pretend that the only work universities do is teaching and research, that we are more important than all of the other people with whom we share an employer.

it's entirely possible that this post is all over the place. against the teleology of topicality!