Why I will not support Israel or a 'two state solution'

My opposition to Israel comes from a systemic denial of the political and human value of vast swaths of people affected by the creation of a 'Jewish state' in 1945. From that point, and as particularly shown today, the goal of Israeli policy has been to mold solutions towards political problems around the denial of the voice and significance of Palestinian people. This backs the creation of the inhuman border fence surrounding a large part of the West Bank (soon to be extended to compeletely encircle the West Bank), and the obsession with demography reigning in Israeli politics. Each of these things concerns one idea: that the voice of the Jewish people in Palestine/Israel must remain dominant versus that of the Palestinians/Muslims. Ultimately, I do not oppose a Jewish presence in and around 'Israel,' however, that presence should be mediated and moderated by those who are subject to the politics of Zionism.

Because of this, I think a 'two state solution' makes little to no sense. Any Palestinian state would be at the mercy of a fully industrialized and well connected nation dominating its trade and borders. It would also be under the heavy influence of Israel in other political realms, as demonstrated by the recent elections. This 'solution' would be a way of excluding the Palestinians from representation in the most significant political force bearing on their lives: the military and economy of Israel. I would support a fully integrated and 'complete' Israel that would allow full representation for each of its citizens (both formal citizens now, and those functionally subject to its rule in the occupied territories). This would allow some degree of democratic check on the systemic violence towards Palestinians, and those still just beyond the borders of their traditional homes in surrounding countries.

Duncan

iPod... IN SPACE

The iPod also has the capacity to re-interpret space. The technology allows the user to pass the time while walking in between two places much like a car would. The earbuds limit out sonic environmental inputs to the wearer, which influences their visual inputs by limiting them to those which the user already decided on- it limits the interrupting value sound can have. It focuses and shapes perception in much the same way a car does- now you can move from the class point to the iPod point (which, still, isn't as much a dot as an eclipse or oval- the movement is there but limited) to the destination point.

On a slightly related note...

Does anyone think people use the word "blogosphere" to keep others from blogging? It made me hesitant.

Revolution at the gates

I read an article today in the New York Times website that was writing on the social protests and minor revolts occurring in France. The crux of the article was a decicive derision for this form of social action- that protest has become petty and fickle, inauthentic. It was strange because of the place and indeterminate function it played: why would an institution like the New York Times be asking for real old school protest to bring down governments? The placement struck me as odd also because of the pettiness of the charge. It looked like they were just trying to pick fights with French people for whatever reason.

So, I read some Foucault.

In “Useless to Revolt?” he posits revolutionary forces in relation to politics. Revolution represents the limit that defines government and normal politics as the point at which no demand or threat of sovereignty can overcome a political demand for change. When someone steps in front a tank or a battalion of police officers, they demonstrate the basic limits of a government founded in the protection and regulation of life. The response to this by the politics of sovereignty is to define the specifics of revolution in an attempt to include it in its power. Essentially, to make revolution or radical protest intelligible to sovereignty. That’s why Mao instituted state run revolution: to define revolutionary actions as strengthening the state and so usurp their force as a limit. Another strategy is to diminish the limit function. To demonstrate the action as less than revolutionary – to relate the demands that require death to a specific state action, and so usurp their power. This then, is the function of the article: to regulate the limit-function ‘revolution’ has to state power.

“Can vegans smoke?”

I’m a vegan, but I sometimes smoke. More than a few people find this strange. Particular demands – not killing animals for human purposes – are more than their content, but an association with other types of demands to form a coherent whole. That’s why my vegan-ness gets associated with other types of demands for equality or social justice, etc. These other imperatives act in their particular context, but also in their relation to other analogus demands. This relates because it demonstrates how even the sometimes insignificant demands of whoever these people are become so threatening. Demand for not screwing young adults out of a job also presumes a demand that society provide for young people, a smattering of care-ethics, and a rejection of the demands of capital. All these things intersect in the protesters demands, and so they become a threat.

Duncan

Apology For Whoring This Space Out

"The remaining nine tracks on this 15-minute release are mostly collages, with only hints of instrumentation added throughout. "Meditation Outtakes" plucks all occurrences of the word "meditation" from a speech and lays them end-to-end, demonstrating the way meaning changes with minute changes in inflection. "Of the Word God" uses the same technique with "god," sourcing this time from a woman preacher's sermon. You can follow the story she presents through the emphasis on this single word, beginning quietly and moving steadily toward a histrionic scream. Even though they consist mostly of voices removed from their original context and carefully edited, these odds and ends actually demonstrate rather well one of the things that makes the Books so distinctive: their ear for the musicality of the spoken word."

-Pitchfork Review of The Books' "Music For A French Elevator"

Space co-operation

The repetition of space plays a critical role in the founding of human relationships. Sharing time and experience founds our understanding of co-existence, the familitarity you feel to someone else who feels alive. Entering the same spaces (physically, in education- and always politically) provides a shared vocabulary for understanding other people, and the realization of common bonds you feel with other humans for the sake of their humanity. This explains why people identify with people who have lived in the same town, place, etc, identify with each other, even if they never knew each other when they lived there. It’s a feeling that you can find a common sense of humanity, grounded in something tangible.

The tragedy I feel for the world I see in the suburbs is the tragedy of isolation- the closing of common space and the demarcation of experience. Cars and technology by making information and movement more accessible simultaneously make understanding in immobility and regularity more difficult. It requires a re-orientation of space. Instead of traveling from point A to point B along a line of experience, space exists as a series of dots or bubbles. You wake up in the morning in the house bubble, move into the car bubble which, thanks to your power garage, allows you to never see the space beyond the house. Then, suddenly, you can emerge in the ‘work’ or ‘school’ dot, without having left the car dot. Geographically, the spaces are distant, but the time and experience between them makes them near and discrete. My senior year in high school, I had an assignment to describe in detain the steps it took to get from my school to my house. The difficulty I had surprised me, but perhaps it shouldn’t have. A car excludes the need to ever experience the places between two points. The other tragedy of loss of commonality is the loss of empathy.

There is a reason luxury living requires space- it’s not space for its own sake, but space for the sake of avoiding the face and spaces where suffering occurs. Without regular visibility and shared space of poverty, the people involved become walled out, and in the process, loose their meaning as humans. Luxury is also ignorance of your luxury- the ability to erase the flip-side to expense and excess. That’s why airlines put up a curtain between first class and coach, and why country clubs construct walls around themselves. People with domestic servants convince themselves of their own benevolence, and the gratitude their servants have. Those that work in houses become invisible by necessity – a guilty conscience destroys the feeling of service and luxury.

The importance of a degree of shared space and experience explains why children play so well together. The relative brevity of experience means their lives are structures primarily towards each other- or at least by percentage, more towards their fellow kids. Older people mix with more uncertainty, because the complexity of their experience makes development or discovery of commonality more difficult. Adults also like to live in suburbs for some reason. It’s like a puzzle piece: a pattern appears with greater ease if you use simple pieces; more complex pieces mesh or co-exist with more difficulty.

Duncan

Justice to poetry?

Poetry is form. Meaning cannot be reduced to words or their use in language, but must include form in order to complete the formula. Poetry rests on the idea that expression comes also from indeterminacy and interpretation. The significance of an idea cannot be encapsulated into authorial intent or any other authoritative structure, but instead lingers in interpretation and re-transmission. The ‘use value’ of a word intrinsically requires at least two people to become marginally intelligible- but even determination of the use value between two people involves a third to make-intelligible to. So, poetry: poetry involves non-linguistic meaning – the double usages, pauses, breaks and gaps that fill language and because they exist just beyond the grasp of words and specific intelligibility, at best reveal themselves when words assemble as form along with content.

Duncan

The Dotted Line

There's Nothing more to add. Go here.

Nothing today

Nothing today. Illness, NDT, tired.

Structured space

The repetition of space plays a critical role in the founding of human relationships. Sharing time and experience founds our understanding of co-existence, the familitarity you feel to someone else who feels alive. Entering the same spaces (physically, in education- and always politically) provides a shared vocabulary for understanding other people, and the realization of common bonds you feel with other humans for the sake of their humanity. The tragedy I feel for the world I see in the suburbs is the tragedy of isolation- the closing of common space and the demarcation of experience. Cars and technology by making information and movement more accessible simultaneously make understanding in immobility and regularity more difficult. The other tragedy of loss of commonality is the loss of empathy. There is a reason luxury living requires space- it’s not space for its own sake, but space for the sake of avoiding the face and spaces where suffering occurs. Without regular visibility and shared space of poverty, the people involved become walled out, and in the process, loose their meaning as humans.

This is vague. Look for a replacement.

Also, I realized that I wrote about this already: Cause Celebre

Can I go home?
or will the car break down?
Somewhere in between.

o River!
Where will you take me?
Breach me on some log.
stone and stone and stone.

flicker fate in the reflection
shattered but of one body
will the boat turn me over again
chance

o River!
Will I go under?
Swim amongst your mossy depths
stone and stone and stone

glance across the surface
never daring, sure of mind
will we coast past
never speaking

Of couse it all depends on how you look at it....

What place does poetry take in the postmodern age?

Poetry? What is poetry in the first place? The arrangement of words into a specific form intended to represent some concept through lyricism, form or maybe content. It lacks specific guidelines or form – it’s art of some kind. The question, then should concern the relationship art has to the world- whether it reflexively addresses its politics, or unidirectionally asserts its content or lack thereof. Art will always be political in some form: it will reflect the author, their own upbringing, also the means of display (location, currency used for payment, etc all reflect political norms). If art always has its politics, does it then have a responsibility to politics (to assert political ideas, rhetoric, etc)? The choice lies somewhere between art that negates itself as art, that deconstructs all of the relationships that brought it to be, and art that de-politicizes itself and unproblematicly ignores them.

Art that is constantly and consciously political denies art itself. By always asserting political questions, and thinking in terms of politics (which inevitably require definition through relationships to other people), no room gets left for the author, for the irreducible human creative something that makes art and innovation from the status quo possible. By constantly referring back to surroundings, it would only reproduce a negative-image of those surroundings in the piece itself, instead of asserting something new.

Art that is uncompromisingly just art goes to the opposite extreme by reducing political meaning to the meaning intended by the author. By this view, the famous picture of Che Guevara would be nothing more than a newspaper photo, taken for profit or whatever. This ignores the symbolic role it has played in (sometimes useless) political movements, as a symbol that means more than “there’s Che…” Meaning is fluid, because power is fluid, and the truths that define the moment in which an artist composed a piece shift along with power relations and our collective knowledge of the world.

So, the role in postmodernism lies in between these two points (or, maybe above them, beside them, or just somewhere nearby and influenced by both). If those damned cartoons taught us anything, it has to do with the meaning and role of art. Meaning derives from how an image becomes translated into media- art cannot remain just speech or expression, it has a responsibility to the appropriations and permutations it spawns. The role then, should concern creation and creativity- embracing the muse and that weird something inside us that produces ideas, but to reflexively understand its political functions as an image and simulation of the original thought process.

At what point does an art form become needlessly pretentious and trite?

At the point where someone considers it so. However, this by no means indicts that art form as a practice- if you think it’s important, then damn it, keep doing it.





Fuck my brain hurts and I'm probably wrong anyways.


Duncan

Lonely strings

Cut/ Rewind
Do it over again.
Over
Over

Thin Strings, Lonely
Shake, Nervous

Paper peeled away
slow

More quickly now
They see you


Sit wait, until they come in
Tell them about your life good sir
How the tangles and tears of life have got you down

They have their own, they say,
Complex,

They have their own strings to play,
sever

Leave, you say, too loud.
vision shakes

pillars build groundling towers, piles,
settling

Go home pilgrim.

Maybe its the Beach Pt 2: Outside, Objectively Speaking

BANG








BANG




BANG



BANG

BANG
BANG
BANG

Political Words

What place does poetry take in the postmodern age? At what point does an art form become needlessly pretentious and trite? Can poetry be used to describe a system or systems? Has it been stripped to personal expression? Is there protest music anymore?

'Vegan' isn't in the MS Word dictionary...

I believe that the idea of activism has flaws. As many people understand it, activism can be done as one activity alongside several others- a subset of someone’s life. Typically, activism orients towards some form of social legislation (not in a juridical sense necessarily but rather in a sense of trying to create a uniformity of practice in other people through whatever means), aligning the activist as the subject, and the general population of people as the object of change. Rather, I believe activism shouldn’t exist, and that potential for social change should source from personal practice, and willingness to integrate change as a mode of living- an enactment or performance of change. For example, veganism: I find the treatment and slaughter of animals for food or clothing unethical, and so I abstain from using animal products in any way. Instead of protesting for social change through leafleting, wandering around naked a la PETA, I would prefer to enact the changes I would like to see. There are three benefits.

First, as a question of effectiveness, this mode of politics works best. By enacting the types of changes you find necessary, it removes questions of hypocrisy, and makes the values associated with any political act more salient. This does not mean an abdication of the public space: enactment of change can contest unethical or violent practices, particularly if they concern the constitution of the social body- i.e. gender norms. In a military metaphor, it’s the use of low-level guerilla warfare versus an overt military conflict.

Second, it avoids questions of viability or organized opposition. Enactment of social change can become autonomously organized through the very change itself: friends of mine established a weekly vegan-cooking group to expose themselves to good food and support the practice of veganism. By enacting change, questions of viability resolve themselves, which avoids contention over feasibility: “I could never be vegan because…”

Third, it alters the scale under which social change occurs. By orienting struggle for change in your person, that change directly impacts the relationships you enter into, and avoids the ‘legislative’ activities described above. Overt and large-scale change diverts energy into navigating legislative forums of the media and government, which, as means for change also end up altering the ends. Legislation in government requires sacrifices to other interests, which may not otherwise be in a location to impact a struggle. Global change also be unnecessary if local spaces autonomously organize anyways.

Anecdotal Evidence

The New York Times comes through again. Listed today in #1 and #2 positions as 'most emailed in the last 24 hours"

#1: Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
#2: Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?

The first article is about 2 (internet) pages long and details the extreme rates of incarceration and unemployment faced by black and inner city males. In its own right, the article has flaws, not the least of which being an implicit scapegoating practice: the bulk of the writing focuses on individual practices of black men rather than a social space. For example: people don't choose to get arrested and end up in jail for 15 years- this event usually involves (at least) police, judges, lawyers, etc., and the focus on just the convict elides the responsibility/impact racist cops and judicial systems have. But this isn't really my point.

The second article is about 5 (internet) pages long, and details possible causes and solutions concerning the advancement of women in law firms. It does a reasonably good job in pointing out gendered systemic and structural barriers that at one point were considered neutral, though it does a poor job in considering questions of gender binaries or the fludity of gender norms. However, the question of race or class goes unanswered and ignored throughout- save for one passing mention: "Forget about skin color or gender or whatever, if you want to run a great business, you need great, talented people..." (which in its own right is flawed: the comment presumes equal access for education/skills advancement, and that the problem is only one of hiring practices).

So, here's my point.

"That's why when they play new music I just don't be feelin it/racism still alive, they just be concealin it" - Kanye West

Racism shows in things like media focus, where a class specific and race 'neutral' article gets greater coverage and time than critical questions of continuing racial opression. This situation demonstrates the structural biases that define racism today.

Duncan

Self-centered psychology

I know a few people who have chosen psychology as their career and education path- whenever I discover this for the first time, several questions come to mind. Psychosis, whatever that may be, represents a deeply personal and unique state of mind, and the treatment of it, from my perspective, requires an equally personal commitment. My personal experience I think parallels the experience of a few other people. The idea that my person, perspective and way of knowing the world would require treatment struck an unfavorable nerve. Admitting this to yourself becomes a precondition to ‘treatment,’ and it comes also with the admission that whatever standards of happiness you have come to know don’t suit those around you, or the ends to which they would like to see you employed. Ultimately, this is the issue of psychology: the presumption that other people know the proper use for a body, and that body can be accurately judged as deviant for ‘rehabilitation.’ And so, the questions:

Have you ever been diagnosed as having mental illness? If no, what makes you so confident as to believe you can understand someone else’s experience to ‘help’ them? Depression in particular is an important case. Despair, absolute reckless abandon, can’t be described or recognized except by those who already know it. Thinking that you can speak to what really matters to a person without feeling their situation is damned foolish and arrogant.

Who are you doing this for? The viewing and treatment of suffering bodies serves as much to help the one ‘treating’ as it does the one treated. It offers redemption and casts the psychologist in a role of savior or moral authority. Self centered actions cannot calm the nerves of psychosis.

Continuing with feminism: Forced Marriage

Legally codified marriage implies a distrust of love. It establishes a nexus between ‘love’ and monogamy that elevates a particular form of relationship to an ideal, but at the same time implies a distrust of monogamy as the universal condition for that love. Presented as a question: If the commitment to a person created by love is great enough, why is a legal backing necessary? When granting that ‘monogamy = love,’ what does marriage have to do with love? Love in this form should be sufficient to maintain the bonds of monogamy even absent legal/economic benefits. Considered this way, marriage represents little more than a recourse to authority, a threat of force or economic harm to keep your partner bound. It implies either that (a) love doesn’t equate with monogamy in all cases (but at the same time, should- a constructed norm for some purpose [more on this later]) or that (b) one or both of the partners can’t be expected to maintain this relationship on their own. Unpacked as this, other questions can be raised.

What interests do institutions have in creating THIS TYPE of (monogamous, lasting) relationship? Foucault said something about this- the reproductive/healthy unit of a family/marriage operates as a tool to maintain the overall health of a population in a sovereign relationship. However, even this does not address the specificity of marriage as a contract- again, why just 2 people? How did this become a norm?

Second, since marriage unpacks to either a relationship of force or economic benefits- is it worth fighting for?

Maternal Ethics

Any attempt to define maternal ethics is ultimately tautological. In order to avoid the naturalistic fallacy that equates that which is ethical with that which is natural/extant, these arguments refer to a prior and intrinsic feature of womanhood able to distinguish the subjugation and violence of the status quo with ethical action. This nature must remain external to discourse and societal influences in order to be able to distinguish the violence of a society from non-violence or an ideal situation. The impossibility of isolating this nature from discursive constructions reveals its tautology. Situational influences determine the being of mother, who then determines the societal situation that creates her. The affirmation and actions of motherhood determines the situation in which a person becomes referred to as mother. Ultimately: the nature of motherhood is good because of the situation of caring in which she resides, and that situation itself is good/extant because of the mothering influences which create it. The absence of origin or source of motherhood demonstrates this fact- ‘motherhood’ as a term can only be found in its usage/social situation.

The deferential characteristics of motherhood relegate other social actors to the scene. This view of ‘modesty’ or ‘denial of self’ presumes static actors whom the mother interacts with. Modesty as a principle should not assume that other unstoppable forces come to bear on people. Willingness to defer interests of the self to others presumes either a situation of unequal force that remains largely acceptable to the mother, or that simply that the mother is powerless in general to assert her will to other people. Humility blurs with acquiescence.

Anti-Imperialism

Speaking of shadow boxing and faded demons...

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney03012006.html

The question of 'imperial conquest' presents several problems in my mind:

First- You're missing the point. The right to humanitarian intervention does not spring fully completed from the mind of George Bush or John Bolton, nor does lambasting them solve the problem at hand. Intervention rests on a discursive facade that places life as the central question of sovereign politics and that uses human suffering as the fundamental 'stuff' of its rule. This strategy suffers from a similar flaw in the immediate sense. Just as intervention may end up eliminating people with the guns but not eliminating the global poverty/oil politics that produced such a catastrophe, this 'anti-imperial' intervention against Bush only caps the tailpipe of the engine that drives global violence. There are equally important questions to be asked about personal practices involved with both the genocide and the intervention, and putting it on Bush or 'the paper of record' scapegoats them at the cost of personal reflectionl

Second- indefensible. Litterally, this forces people into defense of the government of Sudan which is funding a god damn genocide with oil money. Slice it any way you please but there are a whole lot of people being driven away from their homes and lives in Darfur and that isn't something that should be written off, ignored, passed over or anything similar. These figures don't immediately ally themselves with 'imperialism' (in fact, a war funded by western oil money undertaken by an ally in the war on terror would seem to be just the oposite: an indict of 'imperialism' [whatever that is]) and should not be ignored.

Duncan