Cause Celebre

The practice of policy debate involves the deployment of arguments through specific authors: arguments construct themselves along the lines of entire policy positions and thesis, making names and concepts both linked and routine. Names invoke entire arguments in a constellation of academic concepts (Foucault, Zizek, Khalilzhad) transforming the author into a cult/celebrity figure among debaters. The ‘idea’ and consensus understanding of an author’s argument within the empty signifier of their name/person become important to the same degree as substance. The celebrity reinforces with the deployment of argument within apocalyptic and macro-political terms- the name and person link to the larger-then-my-life terms in which debate occurs. In my experience, this effaces the reality of the institutional and personal position of the author, making understanding of the political context of writing difficult to understand.

Similarly, celebrity in a movie star sense appears through the repetition of photography and filmmaking, where the context of the red carpet or dramatized fiction changes the image of a person into an empty signifier onto which exceptional-ness becomes projected. A photograph suggests something about a person, and repeated photographs hint at a person’s nature. Photographs freeze time around a particular moment- repeatedly capturing someone in the moments of glamour or idol worship freezes our understanding of someone in those terms. We don’t see the typically human moments, the routine or mundane features of existence that commonly ground us. Something about the lens of a camera positions someone as an object in need of attention, both for the viewer and subject, and so by its nature, constructs celebrity.

Consumption pt1

What terrifies people about being a mass consumer? Why do images of scale and industrialized consumption repel and offend?

Environmentalists and social advocates mix images of mass (the recurring image of the urban sidewalk with its pulsing masses of people, or the sci-fi cityscapes of dystopic futuramas warning us from the path of authoritarian governance, or the endless piles of accumulated junk [http://www.chrisjordan.com/]) to ward us towards some social change; we personalize or customize the accessories to our lives to make them seem more 'ours' than before. Advertisements refer to a floating 'you' to fend off the impression of impersonal address and to illicit more direct responses from listeners. Personally, I respond very strongly to some theories of gender or patriarchy that reduce questions of opression to specific modes of thought held by a mass of people; a cerebral explanation that transforms actors into mass consumers of ideology or rhetoric.

These thoughts repel because people do not think of themselves as someone else's other, someone worth merely a passing glance or casual relation. People often find their lives quite significant, and to suddenly find yourself on the outside looking on to yourself as something small, peripheral to understanding illicits fear. "Mass consumption" singifies the ultimate irrelevance one can come to represent in the eyes of another, but also the inability to assert yourself as yourself, losing touch with the social reality (objects, ideas, people) that create a person as a subject. If that reality becomes only one entity in a sprawling matrix of indistinguishable places/people/ideas/things, it also becomes lost along with what it means to be yourself. All reality and individuality is relational, and if those relationships can't be distinguished, we loose a sense of what it means to be, to know yourself.

Towards Death

" In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searchesthrough documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it al the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies."


Stolen from Don DeLillo's White Noise

Sexual Purpose

Yesterday I resolved several things

In a rough paraphrase of Foucault: the operations of power remain effective only to the degree their functioning remains hidden. He spoke to why political theory continually fails to behead the king, I would like to speak to why we can't get our hands out of our pants (or the pants of others)

For a while now, I've had a partial post about gender, performance, etc sitting on blogger unfinshed, because I've been unable to find the terms to explain just what I'm talking about. The point is: the belief our sexual identities are produced through a single sexual act (intercourse [insertion] or the lack of it) makes it impossible for us as a 'liberated' people to be truely free in our sex.

The idea that 'sexual acts' refers back to one specific form of contact (genital/intercourse) effaces the significant pleasures and pains that involved with other types of contact. Certain touches, caresses etc outside of the bedroom weild sexual power whether we know it or not. Dirty jokes or talk, hugs etc are sexually significant, and construct the types of relationships we have with people in a profound way; they shape our thoughts and actions in ways other types of contact wouldn't. They also construct our gender roles- the teller of a joke assumes a particular position, the listener of joke reacts in a particular way in order to create an effect on the perception of the speaker. Reducing 'sex' and 'gender' to a relationship of intercourse ignores the significance of the more regular processes determining our gender and sex roles.

When this happens, we loose several things. The first thing is a sense of pleasure. Sex means more than intercourse, and we should contribute the same devotion, time and exertion to these things. This makes each part of the relationship more fulfilling and rewarding in its own right. Understanding sexual relationships as something more than genital/intercourse removes pressure to awkwardly push 'forward' into a particular type of act that raises the physical and long term stakes of a relationship.

The second thing is a sense of violence. Reducing sex to an act obscures the regular violence created by more casual acts of sexuality. The forced hug of a teacher, the pointed glance of a stranger, the unwanted comment 'flattering' a passerby all should be considered as sexually violent acts, even if they don't directly address genitalia or intercourse.

A third is an understanding of nuance and conflict in gender. The fact that a man has sex with men doesn't determine the types of relationships that man has with women, other men or any other gender form. It does not unify or cement their approach to people occupying other gender roles. Making sex a question of intercourse makes us ignorant to the nuance of any gender role, the conflict that lies in most people, 'gay' or 'straight' in how they relate to people.

Last, we will remain tied to processes of domination and repression we keep pretending to dispose of. The 'liberated' sexual body we find in the image of the pill-wielding, post sexual-revolution woman will always be tied to a process of control. Control in the subtle violations and gendering processes we find in the workplace or the street, domination in the discourse of inadaquacy played out on the bodies of 'women.' If control over that one act (intercourse) remains sufficient to be 'liberated,' we will always loose sight of what it means to be sexually fulfilled.

A Plebian Take

Let me begin by saying that my presence on this blog will enjoy a slightly different tone. I do not pretend to understand as much about philosophy or political rhetoric as my friend over there, but, as I will soon show, my observations are to be no less astute. O Loyal Reader, prepare to be taken on a path down the political misadventures of those around me at school, the vast machine of the political hegemony, and of course, myself.

Unless it happens to be an extraordinarily catchy slogan, nothing frustrates me more than the blithe personal political expression hereafter known as bumper sticker politics. There are two different types of adherants to this concept that will be discussed here today. Why this may be will be the matter of later posts.

Be warned, this may just be my own youthful disenfranchisement speaking.

A. The True Believer.

I buy the party line. I don't dig any deeper because any news source past the New York Times is disreputable. Al Franken represents the far left of the spectrum, O'Reilly, the far right. Fascism is something we destroyed with Hitler. White Power means the KKK. Feminism may just be something about a bicycle, but I'm sure glad we have it. SUVs piss me off, I mean they really piss me off. I'm a democrat for life, but I'd vote for Nixon again.


B. The Free Thinker

Nothing is real. Can you trust your perceptions? I may sound crazy but you may not get it. Nothing is everything is nothing. We are all connected so maybe we are just one big organism. I've just been thinking.


Bonus EXTRA!!

C. The Cynical Radical College Student

Yeah, I spend a lot of time volunteering. I'm torn though whether to brag about how much I do it or how easy it is to just sit there and talk to people. Fuck my parents' politics. Fair Trade. Labor. Feminism. Evergreen, Evergreen, Evergreen, Evergreen. Fuck.

Hostile Learning

Today I had a perfectly interesting argument interrupted. The individual (who remains nameless, I don’t actually know them) requested that we tone down a ‘hostile learning environment’ that apparently had been established in the midst of argument. He proved two very important points that I often consider when reading politics as he asked us (the class) to respect the opinions of others.

1. Form reflects substance. In asking to ‘tone down’ the situation, he was asking us to disavow and remove from discussion certain personal experiences that can (and should) influence how we understand politics. This discussion/argument was about gender and the social contexts where ‘women’ should be allowed to work in. The experiences of various members of the class with the military, raising children and work wield great influence over how they construct theories of gender norms and patriarchy. The form of their argument in an emphatic personal appeal reflects the substance of their argument – their personal experience. The form of the interrupter’s appeal demonstrates substance in its own right. By setting himself away from the other speakers, He calls into existence a normative ‘neutral’ sphere of consensus where we can all agree to disagree. This sphere takes shape in a very particular political terrain created in the opposition of ‘opinion’ and ‘rhetoric’ to an empirical, consensus reality in which we would actually live in. This consensus space in my experience resembles strongly the status quo, which we all too often forget, is intensely political in its own right.
2. Neutrality is a myth. A ‘hostile learning environment’ is inevitable. Even in the appeal that called it into being, hostility was evident. To a certain degree, the comment met its mark in getting several people to ‘tone down;’ but in this he expressed passive hostility towards their expression. The tolerant and open space for discussion only remains tolerant within certain bounds. Any “vigorously sustained difference” (Badiou’s terms) can be relegated to obscurity as ‘rhetoric,’ ‘demagogy’ or ‘extremism’ as soon at it interrupts the boundaries established. Though it appears as tolerant, the ‘non-hostile’ environment reflects constraints on the form and content of argument.
Whether he intended to or not, he proved a point. The institutions we accept as normal or neutral often implicitly demand conformity and adherence to specific political codes, often in the process excluding out-groups like women, and ethnic or gender minorities.

A postmodern sense of fate

People often give me strange looks when I tell them I feel a sense of fate. However, I believe the feeling that life operates on terms other than random occurrence and chaos brings comfort in times where there would otherwise be none. The point I have trouble reconciling revolves around the slippery slope of predestiny: how do I resolve any feeling of fate with the gut impulse that we do have control and should have control to realize responsibility to others around us. For me, ‘fate’ helps me explain the indeterminacy and contingency of politics. The idea that events happen for a reason provides a response to the radical and lonely Calvinism that would have us believe that events are more random, people more sovereign and isolated, and life more unstoppable. ‘Fate’ de-ciphers my life and the lives of other people in such a way that makes them more politically salient. Take an act of god (any of recent note are acceptable): Hurricane Katrina. A category 4/5 storm hits a major city and largely decimates entire populations of people, primarily of color and poor. An act of a cruel and inhuman god should be seen instead through the lens of a series of events established through specific practices that can and should have a response: hollowing out of inner cities, global warming, systemic poverty. Determinacy only exists so far as we allow it to exist. The façade of randomness shields the specific practices employed to make the event possible.

The gut feeling of fate opens up a way to talk about my life in a meta- level. There are no specific physics nor merely a vacuum here, no specific content fills this space. However, asking the question “why would this happen?” serves a function in causing me to think through the events I’ve experienced and the potential roles they play; re-enforcing lessons about life that, while not necessarily otherworldly, significantly shape my life.

Media Colonization

This article from the Boston Globe demonstrates to me some of the new priniciples of media colonization and the true operation of 'imperialism' in the postmodern world of today.

"... kidnapping of Jill Carroll in Baghdad is a reminder of... the importance of foreign correspondents in explaining distant places to Americans. Iraqi gangs, which seize foreigners because they are easy targets, harm their country by restricting the flow of information to the rest of the world."

Three things of note:
- rhetoric concerning the 'free flow of information' roughly akin to that of free market economists in reference to economic flows and capital. Information represents a commodity to be bought and sold, not just known or unknown. The article/editorial provides no explanation of the function of this information in helping or harming the country of Iraq, and in this sense seems to presume the universal right of intervention by other, presumably US actors. How else would the flow of information from Iraq to "the rest of the world" be beneficial, except to perfect or allow intervention for the sake of those being spoken of?

- The representation of the world to Americans by reporters. This idea chooses to forget or downplay significant factors that structure news reporting, particularly in a 'war zone' (perhaps Iraq resembles more closely a 'police action zone' or 'crime scene'). The reality of 'embed journalism' and the high centralization of major news outlets in the US mediates the nobility and moral clarity of reporting, particularly in Iraq. Even beyond this, certain cultural assumptions and norms determine how Americans perceive violence in Iraq, even 'human i interest' violence. The question should be asked: "what does the potential news report that would be given look like?" Is it one more in the long line of stories presenting the daily numbers: how many dead, what sect, where; the tyranny imposed by visual/soundbite cues of TV? Or is it a human interest story: isolated and atomized accounts of various suffering feeding a pornographic need to view death?

- The dangerousness of Iraq. This idea contrasts the reporting of deaths in Iraq as announced by George Bush. 30k dead since the invasion puts the crime/death rate at about 2 per 1000, or lower than almost all major American cities in relative peacetime. It seems concern for the personal impact of violence and chaos becomes important only in reference to the media's noble cause in liberating the information of Iraq into the global marketplace.

Out.

A statement of purpose

Politics
Education
Philosophy

Here I hope to begin a series of writings that lend themselves to two purposes. The first is personal: to provide coherence and some sense of application to the myriad information overloads and mental-political assaults that are sometimes experienced in college. In an already too confessional world, this is not an attempt to merely 'express myself' or to neccesarily initate some political change, but to project my inner thoughts onto an imagined audience and in doing so, subject those thoughts to scrutiny both of my own creation and of the world at large.

The second is interpersonal: to help produce an environment between myself and other readers that allows for a (re)understanding of politics through writing. Hopefully, there can be a process of 'conciousness raising' both for myself and the other writers that contribute here. My hope is that an outlet or focus to argument can focus and heighten my own reading of politics, and the reading of politics for other people.


However, end of the day- politics is fucking fun. Lets rumble.

working?