Inertia

I feel like it’s really hard for me to develop thoughts right now, so I decided to write about this. I believe personal inertia builds on itself. If people don’t have the opportunities to place demands on themselves, the capacity to do so slips away. Maybe I really feel the old school slogans: exercise your mind like you would any other muscle… Either way, in my own life, missing opportunities to put effort into my work builds on itself. I have no best explanation for why this is true. Perhaps in the same way that writing about politics is political, (see previous entries…) thinking about organizing thoughts plays an important role in making them happen. Essentially, there is no organic or authentic space from which ideas flow, rather they have to be organized and uncovered through conscious action. Once I reach a situation that doesn’t require the application of mental energy, I stop seeking to apply my experiences to some context or purpose- they have the feel of a flow that washes over me, rather than an experience that involves my will. Perhaps this relates to the basic conflicts of living- the individual subject’s conflict with being defined by and interacting with broader social forces, as mediated by language. My experience with intellectual thought gives a place for me to express my will in relationship to those broader social forces- to choose to confront them or analyze them to find my place in them. Either way, failure to understand my relationship to the world through some sort of conscious effort leaves me feeling demoralized and lethargic.

Duncan

Our News Habit

Habits define people. The notion of a person’s identity forms in their regular practices: word choice, dress, gestures, etc. These habits, as the content of our identity, also act as the content of our political choices. Habits reflect the fundamental political choices people make. Particularly in a society defined by discipline and regulation of life in the image of sovereignty and the police, what we do regularly with our time demonstrates the basic political commitments we have. For example: the development of social health in daily bathing; participation in basic gender role playing with our regular choices of dress; delineation of worthy and unworthy life in our eating habits. Our daily commitments/practices form the nucleus of any truly powerful political project that strikes at the heart of challenges like environmental change, police violence, militarism, etc. Each of these issues is defined by the subconscious reactions we have as part of a daily routine while living. So, changing our habits can change the world. Food, transportation, or clothing can be great leverage in a political struggle.

This shows the fundamental absurdity of news media. Watching the news in a globalized media structure forms a habit. That habit is only to continue watching, or to tune in again to another news show. The belief in the need to stay informed about world events has only an impact on how much or when news is watched. Information about Indonesian earthquakes and Iraqi hostage situations do demonstrate the breadth of mal-treatment globalization/consumerism subjects the world to. However, at no level do these news stories do anything to alter people’s daily habits. They become accessories to a well entertained subject who interacts with people through common referents in pop-culture rather than interpersonal connection.

Duncan

Simulation

A movie I watched today explained the role of media in the creation of simulated reality. I watched 3 short documentaries about resistance in Chiapas, Mexico that dealt with the creation of autonomous spaces/politics. Each dealt with a different project involved in resistance: education, water use, collective food production. All three were structured with members of the communities speaking to the camera about their experience in an interview style setting, interspersed with images of their projects. The format only featured the words of the community members, and never featured the documenters asking questions or showed images documenting the film making process. The un-reflexive eye of the camera translates movies/images into a simulation of people and places. By ‘writing out’ the process of authoring and presenting images as political subjects of documentation in film, the subjects become naturalized as objects of study. The eventual object of study (people in film, or other observation) gets considered as a natural subject, but in fact is under the gaze of an external observer that alters their mode of dealing with the world. The elision of the role of observer/documenter in social situations perhaps creates the ‘simulated’ world we live, where we pretend to be neutral social critics or pretend to be dealing with transparent social situations. Strangely, the myth of total knowledge prevents its content from ever being realized. Blah.

Duncan

5/27- Drawing Blanks

There are days, times, and moments that leave you drained of words. Today would be one of those days- but now the words thoughts emotions come too fast to project into a serviceable writing. I feel futile and just god damn.

Duncan

5/26- Evergreen

What the fuck is wrong with this place?

Evergreen’s impact on you is an unidentifiable malaise that sneaks around your spirit. One day, you just wake up and realize you don’t feel like the person you once were, but who knows why? Something about accumulating aborted almost amazing conversations about almost good ideas begins to claw at your sense of ‘self,’ leaving you confused to your purpose or motivation. Maybe the self directed study format leads people to develop personal islands of perspective/humor/music/culture, but the result keeps conversation short and connections difficult to grasp. Conversation consists of collections of tiny judgments, awkward or deliberate silences and confused political interactions. Everyone has a well developed sense of right, wrong, and the orchestration of politics, but no one seems to have a good grasp on why they feel the way they do. The juxtaposition of progressive politics and general political ignorance deadens conversation and common intellectual space to connect to people with. It’s something you want to like so much, but can’t bring yourself to because of a lack of rhyme or reason.

Duncan

Poetics

Poetics

Someone helped form an answer to a question I had for a long time yesterday. He was both articulate and interesting, so here’s what I may have resolved. The question is: ‘Why poetry?’ as in ‘why poetry to express ideas, versus other forms like essay, narrative, etc.?’ Basicly, it gets to the question on the role of art. The answer I like revolves around two ideas: grammar and audience.

Poetry’s relationship to grammar gives it emotional and expressive power. Grammatical constructions of more formal discourses constrain ideas by constraining writing to particular forms and structures. Free association that sometimes better reflects development of thought gets short changed under formal or linear standards of writing. So, freedom from formal grammar allows space for direct development of emotions as much as theoretical constructs or abstract description. It provides a direct way of conveying emotion that doesn’t rely solely on description, metaphor, etc. Alternately, poetry develops its own grammar, in rhyme structure, etc. to develop clarity of expression better suited to the form. Either way, the forms of grammar applied to poetry aren’t imposed by ‘external’ demands/standards.

The second facet concerns the audience. Poetry as a form gains meaning by the emotions it conveys and the impact on the reader, as much as it does in the mind of the author. Attention to pauses, timing and layout stems from concern for how the reader/audience receives as work. Intent of the author is tied to the reception of the audience, developing new forms of expression and demands of interpersonal dialogue. The subset of this question concerns sound. Poetry has a determinate relationship to sound that other forms of expression don’t. As performance or art, the poet gives time and effort to developing a mature sense of sound. Sound gives the work a more material link to the human body and the physical world, achieving a certain depth of connection that cannot be found in purely cerebral or abstract modes.

These things are limitations in some instances. As deeply interpersonal art, poetry is strained to express more complex political demands that extend beyond an immediate author/reader context. Many political questions involve questions of societal practice that adapt poorly to a form that demands primarily personal investment. It parallels photography in being constrained from articulating logos or complex rational argument, even while being a supplement that binds argument in a material foundation.

On that note, I have been writing silly poems.

Duncan

Fight or flight

I believe the most important and effective way to create change is enactment- making ethical choices that literally become the change sought. Environmentalism should consist of making environmentally responsible choices and educating/assisting others to do so also. Similar to animal rights, etc. Activism as a policy of attempting to create uniformity of action or legislative change fundamentally misses the point. Repsonsibility in this frame comes to mean something beyond simple guilt and innocent in a more juridical sense. Responsibility refers to not just complicity or participation in a ‘bad act,’ but also access to means that stop that act. A person with direct access to the levers of power in a situation that may produce an unethical act has a different level of responsibility than a taxpayer who contributes to making the lever of power. These differing levels of responsibility create differing levels of condemnation that should be given to each.

However, there exist situations where direct action has almost no application. For instance, the taxes example. All efforts should be taken to avoid excessive contributions to the federal government and the ensuing war machine. Even then, there exists a relatively limited scope of actions available (for most people) that eliminates their taxed contributions to war/empire. In these instances petition, protest and any other means should be applied. Only seeking to restructure how money gets distributed through development of new social norms either through legislation or ‘moral legislation’ aimed at the entire social body.

Duncan

Politics of trust

I have noticed a bizarre trend in media discourse reflecting a fundamental distrust of ‘politics.’ This is evident in two places, the reporting of politics, and the reporting on how politics gets talked about.

The first, the reporting of politics developed as a demand to maintain ‘objectivity’ in reporting. I don’t quite grasp the nuances of its origins, but neutrality and objectivity have gained enormous importance in how people evaluate news reporting. Various accusations of a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ bias coming from all manner of people demonstrates this point readily. The spirit of individualism emerges along the fringes of this discussion as a rejection of media sources’ supposed attempts at deception and manipulation of an otherwise rational and capable populace. It also reflects a vague strain of minority rights protection rhetoric, with emphasis on equal weight being given to both sides of an issue, no matter the level of support (see reporting on global warming for an example) The response from media sources is an attempt to show ‘both sides’ of a debate. This begins with a presumption that no issue has one side or an immediately obvious solution. Equal representation as a principle then demands each get a ‘fair share’ of the possible air time/print space.

The second part- articles about how people talk about politics. These are articles that report on political strategy either major party uses, or op-ed pieces with recommendations on how to develop political strategy. These often adopt an abstracted or even diminutive voice in their writing- hinting at an impression that they write and think above and beyond the actual politics being discussed. They pretend that politics happens somewhere other than the pages of newspapers or news reporting; somewhere a bit less enlightened and aware. And so, articles describing the slim chances of a Democratic takeover in November ’06 because of their supposed lack of a ‘positive message’ in their campaigning can still make claims of neutrality or even Democratic bias. This trend deals with issues written about here before, such as the presumption of legislative politics as the exclusive/authentic political space. This creates the impression that political parties/politicians define messages and the reception of those messages in a relative vacuum.

Both of these things signify newsmedia (probably more newspapers and the internet as much as anywhere else) as an (ideally) democratic/deliberative space. They assume a status ‘prior’ or formative to politics that assigns unique burdens to how reporting gets done. Ultimately, both of these elements assume all political issues have indeterminate solutions that will be decided by and for the people in the reading public. News has a purpose as deliberation in an indecisive world, as the underpinning and observer to politics, which on some level is seen as dirty or inappropriate to discuss.

Duncan

Combating history

By its nature our political present assumes a particular past that develops the themes codes and principles that guide our rationality. As with any representation of ‘reality,’ the representation of the past develops with gaps, mis-steps or mis-representations. The gaps don’t represent non-events but rather events not appropriated into a cultural/political narrative. A combative theory of history finds power by undermining a dominant narrative in two ways.

The first way uses events otherwise excluded or elided by a history; i.e. the history of Native American culture hiding around the idea of the steady progress of the United States in assuming its position in the world as a superpower. Contesting the surrounding terms of historical development contextualizes the implicit violence of any hegemonic political system, undermining otherwise peaceful facades. Contextualizing the rise of a political power in this way demonstrates the possible similar costs to maintaining its hegemony in the face of other challenges. Connecting the gaps in history functions to develop alternative political rationales that serves as ‘weapons’ in a political ‘war’ against violence.

The second way comes in forms like Loose Change- seeking to reinterpret or unmask particular events as a way of achieving a specific end. This tool has inherent limits in that these particular events take on meaning primarily as a re-interpretation of past historical narratives, but also that they relate only to specific people at the specific time of happening. Even still, history of specific events plays an important role in shaping politics, and time spent addressing the use of the past also invests for change in the future.


Duncan

The new head of the king

Ad space pt.1...
Ad space pt. 2...

OK, so the two links lead to the New York Times – an article published on Thursday the 18th, and the “Media and Advertising” section on the website. Both of these demonstrate the vaguely cannibalistic nature of news reporting, which creates media as media spectacle. The entertainment frame has become so prevalent, we become entertained by talking about it. Second, it makes a point about the structure of capitalism and neoliberalism. The race of advertising TV networks to attract advertisers demonstrates how all aspects of social relationships reduce to an economic cost/benefit choice under capitalism. In television, this relationship comes from the technological structure of channel flipping or switching off. In capitalism, it comes from the globalization of the labor force through telecommunications and transportation technology. The option to ‘switch off’ to other locales or countries allows labor to be viewed in terms of differential costs and benefits between separate labor forces. The opportunity to invest jobs into particular countries or people is determined by the level of investment in infrastructure, labor laws, environmental regulations, job skills, training, etc. the country or person makes. Just as the individual shows networks produce become ‘capital’ to invest in future gains of advertising, education and other job related choices become ‘capital’ invested in the development of the human company. This model of subjectivity founds the expansion of neoliberal capitalism and arguments to the ‘optimization’ of production in specialized contexts.

The relationship of capital investment between countries explains a shift in the rhetoric founding the policies of sovereign states. The manifest destiny assumed by US territorial expansion or the enlightenment burden of the social contract have been replaced by the overarching imperative to achieve economic ‘growth.’ This imperative was formed by the globalizing demands of WTO style markets, which require countries to compete with each other as sources of investment, either in monetary or population terms.

The new ‘head of the king’ supposedly removed by the ceding of government enterprise to private organizations grows from the body of Soviet-style socialist management opposed by the US in the Cold War. Ronald Reagan’s subtle linkage of government centralized managerialism to the ‘evil empire’ demonstrates how the transfer of administration of populations/the self to private or individual hands becomes such a powerful instrument in the redefinition of the human as capital. Last- this schema requires an understanding of the subject as a fundamentally self interested party driven by economic imperatives to achieve greatest wealth for themselves or the people around them. The outline of this subject is found in a Hobbesian worldview of anarchic competition. The treatment administered by institutions under a disciplinary model of personal regulation becomes self-administered and optimized in the neoliberal model. The various resistances and hiccups in the macro administration resolve themselves in the ceding of these controls to individuals subjected to the market. The overarching self interests assumed by the human capital model determine how and why individuals choose to subject themselves to good hygine, discipline, prudence, etc. The ‘head of the king’ represented as ‘big government’ of course never disappears but merely gets transferred to a system defined not by transgression and punishment, but by differential access to economic or personal benefits. Access to these benefits serves as the subjective and personalized means of social control in a society supposedly moving beyond government.

Duncan

Utopia and dystopia

Utopia is a political charge leveled based on questions of means rather than scope. Any self contained political rationality contains understandings about the limits to politics. This includes questions of how and when politics occurs as much as what types of plans for action can be undertaken. And so, the leftist guerilla or the postmodern academic receive the label of utopian theorists for their choices in locating politics either at the level of discourse or the construction of a revolutionary vanguard. Each sees the means for change in ‘alternative’ mechanisms aside from sovereign legislative administration. This also concerns the question of ‘pragmatism’ which establishes a similar standard of authentic/realistic political change based on a theory of political reality that understands human interactions as essentially free but mediated by imposition of law. The charge of utopianism also assumes a ‘legislative’ politics that seeks to establish social uniformity as its end. However, if the goal instead only seeks individual or sectional change, the utopian scope diminishes. It also presents the question of what would a non-utopian demand look like; that didn’t leverage what seem to be ‘unreasonable’ demands. The impoverished view of social and political relationships assumed in these models should be evaluated as urgently as the charges of utopianism denied.

Duncan

Self Referential

Washington Post
USA Today (this may not be a news source in reality
Salon.com
NYTimes

A few articles about Tony Snow’s first news conference demonstrates the echoing absurdity of news-as-entertainment. Essentially, the conference produced news about news being created in response to news. The struggle to keep on air with vaguely stimulating events eventually progresses to cannibalize itself as newsworthy. Many of the articles even seemed to recognize the news media’s role as players in a game: “It was the pinnacle of a boffo debut by Snow. Reporters leaving the 40-minute session would discover that, like his predecessors, Snow had imparted no useful information to them. But he had done it in a far more entertaining manner. (Washington Post article)” Also: “Members of the press corps were thankful for warm blood. As they packed up their notebooks, they were visibly giddy, offering approbations like, "That was A-1" and "It's going to be fun." (Salon.com article)” Entertainment news also develops a self perpetuating cycle of innocuous irrelevance. The profit motive requires easy treatment of sources to ensure further production from them, but also a hands off attitude to judgment of the ‘content’ produced to avoid alienating viewers/watchers. And so, articles can recognize a vaguely racist remark (‘tar baby’ got a mention in all) but actually refuse to condem or do anything in response to it. They also all acknowledge (at least) indirectly the Press Secretary’s role as a front for dishonesty by recognizing Snow’s teary eyed moment as a stepping down from the pedestal/mantle the office has as the only direct daily contact between the president’s office and the media. Without some sort of argument as to why this charade matters to the way news gets reported, for good or ill, there is no reason for any reader to want to remember the story or the event itself. The sum total of these factors comes as news that disappears in the consciousness of its readers because of the crushing irrelevance of it all, both in personal and global terms.

A change in venue

Certain types of demands suit certain types of institutions. Demands for social justice or restructuring of environmental practices (for instance) don’t operate effectively within policy making/bureaucratic structures because they cannot be reduced to the types of changes necessary. These institutions serve as regulators and administrators of populations, and work at their best when developing specific managerial changes for the regulation of those populations. Hierarchical institutions that mirror this structure in private industry or NGO work indicate the way this model structures a majority of visable agitation and political organization. The question “Yes, but what do you want to DO?” doesn’t necessarily reflect an ontological demand stemming from enlightenment principles, but rather reflects an attempt to correspond with this form of administration. This particular form of social administration developed as a result of capital and the need for development of populations as a resource. The most effective social agitation under this model presents a threat to the easy functioning of a population as a resource by threatening modes of production by walkout, blockade or strike. It provides a clear mode of attack and means to the end desired, if the end also corresponds with the responses provided. This operates under a strictly transactional model that requires the cost of agitation to outweigh the cost of change.

The reduction to an administrative goal also hurts a movement. It reduces the end point to a proposition voted up or down. Anyone can pass judgment on what they believe the demands ask. If at any point they believe that the costs outweigh the benefits of acquiescing, the movement moves closer to failure. The ease of rejection in the face of the difficulties in conquering administrative hierarchies makes a convincing argument for a change in venue.

Duncan

Television as a constant selling point

The need for a constant selling point defines much of what I see in the media ecology of television. The structure of advertising and profit taking rewards the maximization of viewership at all/any times. The option to either change the channel or turn off makes the hold on profit tenuous. The profit structure of printed media on the other hand requires only one selling point, at the point of purchase. This produces two distinct features of television as an ecology.

The first concerns content/context. All information must be delivered with the highest emotional intensity for the viewer possible. With the option to turn off at any moment, every moment becomes critical to the end goal of profit. Even a brief lapse in content delivery could expose the network to a loss. And so, every piece of content gets delivered in the context of high-entertainment value, through some form of emotional stimulation. The delineation between this and printed media comes at the selling point and the necessary steps to be taken in maximizing it. With profit created only at the point of purchase, high stimulation of interest front loads to before the delivery of content, rather than concurrently with it. This means advertisements and stimulating graphics appear as covers on the book, or reviews beforehand- there is never need for ads on the inside of the book. The actual content gets more or less left to its own to prove itself as an object of independent merit, instead of having to function also as ad space for itself.

Second, in news media delivery. In a similar fashion, news media must constantly sell itself to viewers. News dedicated channels must sustain constant viewership to stay afloat just as any other channel would. In this fashion, they cater towards constant updates and recency as a selling point. This produces the fragmentation effect found in television news, where individual developments within a narrative of events get separated out to form their own news story. Events are opportunities to capitalize on, no matter how significant. The focus on recency subordinates focus on coherence or significance in the reporting of news. This makes events fragmented by nature of their importance as self contained news developments rather than as steps along a narrative told after the fact. Print media (or even movie style media) offers a more coherent picture because the focus is on an overall product that warrants purchase at a single time, rather than on a constant repetition of profit-events.

Duncan

Article Collage

"Of course they don't have to wonder for long; clearly the problem is that the people are just no damn good."
-SMBIVA

"In other words: We're not obnoxiously evangelistic, just obnoxiously self-involved. So even if Bush doesn't reflect the real America, and is replaced by someone who does, we'll still be in trouble. At least, we'll be in trouble if much of the problem is indeed, as Sweig argues, the longstanding "near inability of the United States to see its power from the perspective of the powerless." Changing that will require not a leader worthy of the people, but a leader willing to lead the people."
-NYTimes

The Material Basis of Language

The fundamental conflict that creates a need for language consists of the conflict between individual will and perceptions with the will of prevailing power. Language mediates this conflict as the go between that tries to resolve these conflicts in favor of one or the other. The individual can successfully leverage a description of the world as a tool that alters prevailing power structures through linguistic force, or fails to find the appropriate language to initiate change, and so remains minoritarian. ‘Language’ in this instance also concerns the method and means by which an idea gets leveraged- the number of people and medium used define language as much as specific content. This accounts for how power assumes particular media forms as well as particular messages- language subordinates to power in creating meaning. Language comes from the need to bridge the gaps between individual interpretation and multiple understanding of the world. Therein lies a problem, because language by its nature cannot describe reality. Inevitable, words assume a symbolic role whose true function gets revealed only in usage. So, language makes it possible to hide certain things, to reveal them selectively. This is the origin of power: the ability to create meanings for words that reveal very particular parts of reality. Example: homeland as representative of unity, strength rather than fragmentation and struggle. ‘Psychotic’ as different, deviant, dirty. Reclaiming these words means unmasking the way that the supposed transparencies of every day use blot or limit understanding of the supposed referent. Then, the question becomes, which meanings become acceptable and why? Of course, this has to do with traditional usage, and relationships to other words. The ‘psychotic’ person became the deviant when arranged in relation to concerns of population control and the social body as a whole. But then, these concerns and linguistic structures have no inherent meaning that would instill other words with value absent their relationship to them. This co-productivity indicates a gap created by the smooth functioning of the tautological nature of language. This gap can be filled by economics, or even geographical determinism in the world of Jarrod Diamond. Eventually though, the value and currency of certain words has material grounding, in the way that accepting particular meanings, and so political systems, provides material values that serve people in a way they believe is good.

Duncan

Home is where...

The physical places of a home at best can only serve as meager placeholders for physical relationships. A collection of locations merely show where and sometimes when events happened- events between and for people, created by humans. They act like snapshots that relay a general sense of situated-ness, but leave out the motivation and cohesion of time developed relationships. Coming home to an empty city means not coming home at all.

This poses its own question of when a home becomes such. Determining that a city is ‘empty’ requires knowing when it is ‘full’ – somehow we know when we began to think of a place as our home, and what conditions were met to form that idea. For me, that time came when most of every day was filled with interactions with other people. When talking, living and being with other people occupied more time than that spent alone. Alone meant more than ‘solitariness,’ it meant the level of self-interest others retained in their interactions with you. At times, I was able to deal with others, but only on terms that benefited them in an abstract way- as a member of a class, an organization, etc. These instances never produced a feeling of home because I was interchangeable, the only motivation for my being there was an exchange towards another end. Only when I find a self contained or interpersonally motivated exchange can I find my home.

Duncan

Meridian, MS

If you ever have the chance, spend some time in Meridian, Mississippi. As we drove through on our way back home to Texas, we passed a State Farm billboard advertising Hurricane emergency relief efforts and insurance. This stood next to a downtown bombed out by the interstate highway system, an information economy, and the backhanded blow of suburbanizing American culture. It was a city left behind to another era, faded and charred. Some emptied out office buildings and community centers hinted at hope once held now crushed under accumulating rusted autoparts and an empty railway yard. Acres of emptied out strip malls and parking lots gave testimony to this. In a city where the only discounters and wholesalers can fill lots you can spend a night at 35 dollars, living in the postscript on the American dream The ultimate cruelty is the impotence to respond to slow motion devastation. All we did was turn back and keep on driving.

These Guys Are Brilliant

Nowadays, though, the parties are just "brands". They're both imperialist, globalist, statist, elitist, and corporatist -- just as Coke and Pepsi are both mostly sugar and carbonated water. With the parties, as with soft drinks, brand loyalty certainly exists, but it's based on third-order differences -- a touch of the soft pedal on gay marriage, say, or a tepid, timorous hint that it might be nice if women could decide whether to have babies or not.

Having nothing else on which to base their decisions, people make their brand choices based on these trace flavors, and having made them, there's no reason to vary the diet. Nobody drinks Coke by preference in the morning and Pepsi in the afternoon.

Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Manufactured Content

Briefly: A Chomsky Style take on some quality NYT reporting

Marcos Back in Public Eye in Mexico

First: Quotes. Only directly quoted sources not subordinated to describing ‘accusations’ against the government come from conservative/pro-globalization sources. None of them substantiate or warrant the article’s description of the ‘loose’ left coalition’s political position. We get accusations, ad space for conservative party, then a quote from Subcommander Marcos insinuating his political impotency.

Second: Rhetorical focus on the agent/action. The article only gives personal descriptions of Marcos, and a vague outline of the endpoint to the political movement he participates in. This functions to diminish the questions of social justice and the actual forces at work (the peasant and native uprisings in Chiapas, the Zapatista movement [which, btw, doesn’t even get named], globalization protests in other places which ally with the Zapatistas, NAFTA, etc). Instead, we see a small man involved in petty political acts that look like media sensationalism when viewed as isolated events.

Third: Unsubstantiated claims about the Zapatista movement and Marcos. Beginning with: characterization of “his flagging campaign for a socialist movement,” with no qualification of why it flags, or what that actually means for its goals. Continues with: “Times have changed since then. The corrupt and authoritarian party that ruled Mexico from the 1930's through the 1990's is out of power. Mexico has a functioning democracy. Armed revolutionaries are no longer in fashion.” Seriously. Any basic speech communication student knows that as a argumentative strategy, begging the question doesn’t get you that far. Insofar as the article acts as a subtle (or not so) refutation of Subcommander Marco’s politics, the argument that “times have changed” begs the question to the question Marcos poses as to ‘what exactly has changed?’ under democracy. As a logical fallacy, it even holds up poorly without a substantiation of this claim. The government can hardly be called functioning- the PRI still controls both houses of congress and so no substantial changes in institutional structure have come through under Fox. Even so, this only responds to not even half of the Zapatista’s movement, which came as much as a backlash on globalization and NAFTA- which still would be ‘in fashion’ under the NYT’s interpretation. “Since the riot, his supporters' protests have been modest. Most Mexicans appear to be more focused on the presidential race and the bickering between candidates from the three main parties.” This is seriously inane. How do you measure ‘focus’ of a nation? Most ‘focus’ is a function of media attention, which comes from people like the Times anyways.

Last: descriptions of events. Here’s the best example

For 24 hours the farmers, who call themselves the Front of Peoples for the Defense of Land, battled the police with machetes and homemade firebombs. They set up barricades of burning tires, blocked a major highway and threatened to blow up a gasoline tanker truck.
The police prevailed in the end. When the tear gas cleared on Friday morning, a 14-year-old was dead from a gunshot wound, more than a dozen police officers bore machete wounds — one lost a hand — and at least four protesters had been beaten badly enough to be hospitalized.

This refers to the ‘riot’ that brought the Subcommander back into the limelight. It gives no description of how the violence began, which would determine the proper response to Marcos’ ‘accusations’ and similarly dodges questions of police brutality. The agency focus lies on the ‘farmers’ and not the police, which would make it seem that the police acted solely in self defense, when at the end of the day, they have the guns and the funds, and the likely scenario would not have them in a solely defensive position.

Duncan

Writing rate delayed due to transit.

Gonna have to wait until Thursday-ish.

Tables and Chairs, Papers and Prayers

Ever since I came to Athens I have failed to arrive fully. My dorm functions like a hotel room- a place I come in an out of, but don’t settle in to. Despite this, I spend a good deal of time there, at least being alive. I realized tables define my sense of place and living somewhere, and my dorm doesn’t have one. The tables I use never become ‘mine’ – I only use them as part of a transaction, giving work or money to use them.

I think a table represents everything about living somewhere that I enjoy. They offer common space for talking, reading and interacting with someone. They can be a literal projection of a conversation, where ideas and people collide. They create an experience of interaction by orienting people towards each other and giving them common ground and space to work through. Tables make a destination, and make particular forms of interactions happen by way of structuring space. They suit the way I enjoy dealing with people: in conversation, with a comfortable distance that commits at least attention and time to each other. Other things can go on at the same time, but to some degree, they always subordinate themselves to the people also at the table.

Television has the opposite effect. TV only has chairs that view a screen connected to a central broadcasting point. That point connects to other places by way of video and sound. It has the opposite impact on conversation by orienting all the viewers towards the events in a unidirectional gaze. At best, it’s a one way conversation, and even then, the talker speaks in such a way to drown out other people. Whether through camera shifts or volume, TV makes sure it has your attention. The power to control conversation lies in its hands: producers and advertisers spend vast amounts of time and money to constructing a medium that wills control over how and when people speak.

And so, the seduction of ‘place’ on television. The connections formed through cabling and electronics create only superficial conversations where the physical orientation of the conversationists subordinates all other activities fully to the superiority of television’s methods. These physical factors slowly pervade and destroy the experience of sitting and talking over a table.

Duncan

Will write for prizes

featureless Finns
wont for revenge
words, wandering 'tween
twin flesh flaps
no lips no lust
listlessly itchy trigger
but can they grin?

Tobacco and Television

Appologies for the delay. Life and Finals intervened to writing.

I stopped smoking as a principle not because of the on face medical risks, but rather because of the way those risks get played as a social norm. Essentially, good advertising constructed a coherent social norm around a product utterly worthless or even harmful to humanity. The risks, dangers and practices associated with smoking became associated with a norm ‘rebellion’ or ‘individualism’ through very little more than effective ad schemes. First of all, that is a bit creepy, but second of all, it reveals something about the functioning of rebellion and social criticism. Even if it’s true that smoking cigarettes serves to criticize/resist certain cultural values (good health and wellbeing) it works to support other values in different ways. In this case, the normalization and co-option of teenage rebellion and the like- the act gets ritualized and rationalized as part of the normal functioning of society. Two ways- first, as something to normalize against. ‘Resistance’ provides one half of the practices referenced by normalization, and as long as that resistance remains coherent, it will operate as part of that normalization. The body’s disease must be classified for it to be cured. The Beach Boys were doing nothing more than selling the teenage years. Second, as part of capital. True, smoking is subversive/different to a certain degree, but that subversion occurs under the ultimate control of capital, where that resistance becomes a new target market for Phillip-Morris.

This relates to the Daily Show. The Daily Show is the answer I get from people when I tell them they shouldn’t watch TV. It offers a small dose of satire or left-y social commentary in an otherwise very conservative environment. However, very rarely does the Daily Show (or similar shows- South Park, Kolber Report, Simpsons, etc..) ask for any real change in what the viewers do. The very act of watching is sufficiently radical. This is because satire and social criticism operate as a subset of the ‘entertainment’ culture of television. Watchers consume criticism of the news just like they consume any other news. The show itself is the endpoint to the transaction, because it merely occupies your time as a distraction from ‘real’ life. Television’s form transforms users time into a unit of exchange. The option to flip channels or turn off means that images and news must be highly entertaining to maintain viewership. The competition for advertisement revenue TV’s structure creates requires this. The Daily Show (and similar broadcasts) aim to position their target audience in relation to politics/the world at-large to sustain viewership. Laughing at normal news assumes that the ones laughing aren’t participating in the normal news format, and makes the laughers appear above it all and simply smarter than everyone else. They ‘get it’ more than other people do. This creation of a community is directly analogous to TV news’ creation of a national or global community, linked by shared events. By creating the idea of these communities, TV channels make their money: having people exchange their time for participation in a communal experience.

All of the comments about capitalism and normalization apply roughly to this form also. Broader economies of power and distribution of wealth determine how these forms of ‘subversion’ impact the world, and often it means the impact becomes negligible or non-existent.

Part II The Press

Several Articles:
NYTimes,
Elusive
Black People
Strength

USA Today/LA Daily News
USA Today Anthem
USAT Summary of Rallies

CounterPunch

Soo... Where to start. Here we have several articles in two widely read publications. All approach the idea with skepticism, headlines doubtful. Lets go through them one by one.

Shall we?

OK.

The first article, entitled News Analysis; After Immigration Protests, Goal Remains Elusive, is kinda fucked up. (I really want to use the word caveat right here, but im not going to.) In an article about elusive goals, they ask nothing of a single participant or organizer, deciding to focus more on politicians or "research groups".

This isn't to say they didn't collect some killer quotes:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said: "The protest, I don't think, changes votes on the floor of the Senate. I think what changes votes is coming down, sitting down, talking about it, as opposed to students' staying out of school. I happen to think that students' staying out of school is counterproductive."

"What buttons were pressed?" Roberto Suro, the director of the [Pew HIspanic Center], asked, wondering aloud about what Americans saw when they looked at the protesters. "Was it that there are so many people here outside of government control or was it the hard-working family types? I think that's really imponderable."

After the March rally, Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said he was deeply offended by marchers' waving the Mexican flag.
"I want to be sensitive to human concerns, why they're here and how they're here. But when they act out like that, they lose me," Mr. Lott said.
He suggested a risk of deportation and said, "We had them all in a bunch, you know what I mean?"

Jesus guys, Trent Lott? Is this a joke? I don't even see the qualifier "avowed racist".


The piece itself is pretty screwy. Some choice phrases (I soooo wish I was taking these out of context):

The protesters have discovered that there is a thin and potentially dangerous line between promoting national pride and pushing opponents' buttons. They used tactics — flying the Mexican flag, recording "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish — that have left even some supporters feeling a bit queasy.

Among their biggest allies are employers, large and small, who want assurances that they will continue to have that labor pool.

With Republicans so divided, reaching consensus will be difficult.

I'm not so surprised that this is being said in the New York Times as I am that this masquerades as News Analysis. They are either stupid or complicit.

Duncan You've Heard This But I'm Going To Write It Out

I'm going to take a page out of Duncan's book and start trying to write everyday. I have gone too long without any expectation of output and my mind is suffering for it. It might not be entirely coherent at first, but bear with me, I'll try to get better.

First, the immigration rallies.

Two things have been sticking out to me in the days following May Day. The make-up of the Olympia rally and the press coverage of those held nation-wide.

The Olympia Rally was composed of two radically different demographics of people, Anarcho-Punk What What on one side and Hispanic-Latin American Immigrants on the other. All other Empirically Assumed differences in class and privilege aside, the most noticeable was the language barrier.

Chants were begun in Spanish, one being Si, Se Puede! and the other being unintelligible to my ear. These were then tenuously translated into English, offering a chance to support the cause of the other, albeit in the language of the oppressor. This caused the rally to split on these lines, English and Spanish.

No matter which language in which we chanted, something like half of those assembled were left out. Parading quite literally under the guise of solidarity, we came up against a telling schism. If a white progressive population is going to do this, we need to take a few more steps in their direction. What solidarity asks of our party is different from what it asks of others. As white people we have a responsibility to be aware of others in our community and ask them what there wants and needs are and how we can help them achieve their own goals.

Explicit identification is not necessary nor is it possible. One leader of the Olympia Labor Coalition took it upon himself to state when speaking to the crowd, " We are all immigrants!". Yes. Irrelevant. Yes. Our immigrant status as white people is different in a few ways. While the laws on the books might have been racist towards whites many years ago, towards the Irish and Eastern Europeans and others, we have nothing now to hold as the same. This is true especially in light of the racist system of immigration laws we have today, with most, if not all, focus on brown people. Applying this label to us as white people is disingenuous and hurtful to the idea of solidarity.

I got the picture that the demonstration the other day was a first encounter between these two populations. Hopefully it won't be the last or the most representative.

Oh and there was a pretty racist article in The NYTimes the other day about the protests. Yeah, the one that quoted Trent Lott.

In The Olympian

"Teenagers used to be able to play pool, shoot hoops and play video games — all for free — at The Olympia Center’s Teen Lobby. But the city closed it this year because too few kids were using the program, which cost $32,000 a year."

"The city made “fairly significant cuts,” said Collin Murphy, recreation manager at Olympia Parks, Arts and Recreation Department, which ran the Teen Lobby.

The lobby program was cut primarily because turnout didn’t justify the cost of the program, Murphy said.

“There were days when there were one, two kids in the lobby,” he said. “On a busy day, there were probably 12. The kids weren’t taking advantage of it.""


From " Your Politics Are Boring As Fuck"
"Perhaps, after years of struggling to educate them about their victimhood, you have come to blame them for their condition."





Said NYTimes Article

Picturing Reality

Translating everything into photos imposes a strange way of mediating the world. It creates a time delay to experiencing the past. Makes everything that you are currently living into an experience best and fully enjoyed in the future. It reflects a perspective on the world that accumulates and catalogues experiences like a stamp collection, rather than experiencing something for its own goodness or ends. Photography as a substitute for memory treats every moment as unique, but then tries to capture them for memories again in the future.

Time plays an interesting role in photography as a practice. In some senses, photographs develop a sense of a time and place, but also interrupt the event, displacing it. What makes an experience in the world different from a dream of the world is the experience of bringing people into conflict with a variety of indescribable, and to some degree unstoppable, forces. Resulting from this is life, experiencing, the feeling of living. The interaction between one and the many, thought and bodies constructs experience. Photography deconstructs those forces and that moment by freezing them and examining them under the magnifying glass of time. By making sense of things through the lens of the future (or past, depends on your perspective) the cataloging of experience takes on new force. By demonstrating and fully investigating every part of the world through a photograph, it is nothing more than a thought, a self-contained dream of reality frozen in its own economy of emotion.

Photography also messes with your head, by tying your self-image to an externally verifiable referent. Your outwardly projected notion of self comes from a buildup of history and memory; sticks and stones make your ‘bones’ by subjecting you to trials and errors of life. Imaging technology ties that self-construction to something found external to memory. In developing images, a new type of person develops: one subjected to manipulations of publication, subject to the development of a referent (you, nominally) beyond immediate control. Self image develops in the hands and time of people to which you have no direct access, the images return like a one hour photo: something new where there once was nothing, an image where a tree once was.

Duncan

Biology of Knowledge

Two articles concerning a biological and physiological basis for depression or mental illness of various kinds.

A Question of Resilience
Spring babies 'face suicide risk'

I have three thoughts

First, this represents part of the transition in a regime of truth concerning mental illness. Initially, mental illness and treatment concerning deviancy focused on the patients mind and ‘soul.’ The psychologist dealt with the psyche, the immaterial foundation for problems of deviancy, attempting to condition it to fit or accept a norm of practice. The further step of locating illness in the body or genes corresponds with a further perfection of this method. There is now a biological psyche that requires treating the whole body down to genes as the subject of control. This accelerates government’s expansion into biological determinism in a quasi-postmodern sense: each person’s genome or exact background becomes the foundation for finding their exact role in government. The point is, this form of knowledge (biological determinism) represents only one schema for understanding humanity, and stems from a continuing governmental project aimed at the management and optimization of populations.

Second, it addresses the wrong end of things. In particular, the New York Times article demonstrates that these genetic factors only come in to play in situations of extreme stress or violence. Gene therapy or timed insemination (which logically follow these types of studies) can only solve one end of the creation of a ‘problem:’ the symptom. Creating solutions on this model fail to get to the real issue, first of all. Second, they establish a higher threshold for treatment that initiates another cycle of exclusion. Gene therapy and the like is expensive, and the eventual distribution of this treatment will reflect status quo economic relations with particular sections receiving ‘better’ treatment. A more effective and socially responsible solution would stem from dealing with social dislocation and poverty.

Last, you must be very careful with these approaches. These articles, and the studies they describe, deal with huge interpersonal and societal issues, and must be prefaced explicitly with a warning against immediately dismissing relevant responses in favor of newer ones. Saying that someone’s depression or alcoholism comes from a genetic factor creates a potential for abuse or dismissal of very real problems. Writers and scientists carry a heavy burden in shaping people’s responses to social issues, and they must come to terms with the potential responses their writings can generate.

Duncan

Invisable Cities...

The day without immigrants asks an important question, but not the only one. ‘Immigrants’ represent only the imported bodies that capitalism exports work out to. The process of centralization of wealth encourages the export of menial labor at menial wages to social locations (separated by either ethnic, gendered, or physical differences). The primary role of investment, of capital separated from labor in a globalized labor pool creates the means for export of jobs to lower wage and underinvested areas (or populations).

So, the real issue: what about a day without outsourcing? A day without export economies in the global south, China, Mexico? What about a day without any ethnic underclass, immigrant or not?

The backlash against immigration primarily stems from this condition- the condition of a labor poor systemically alienated from their labor, and capital. Racism undergirds each of these arguments in a special way. For instance, the argument that high levels of illegal immigrants lowers average wages for Americans ends up as nothing more than an effort to maintain a centralization of capital in the hands of a few, who just happen to be primarily white Americans. The question of mobility determines how wages and power distribute across the globe. Limiting movement by labor creates isolates low wage areas in particular places across the globe, ensuring regular supplies of cheaper input costs. These situations often build on global development that prioritized the development of a global ‘core’ in Europe or America, the end result being freedom of movement only for particular sections of global society. This development model comes from the origins of modern capitalism in England/Europe, where the accumulation of capital and money provided a unique force for organization of technology and populations for full utilization of natural resources. As I wrote before, capital provides an ‘original movement’ to social organization to draw people into line with discipline and technological development. As these movements began in Europe (largely), they enabled faster and more violent ‘development’ of technology for that particular section of the globe. The subsequent distribution of power and wealth persists to today.

Visibility and spatial relationships also play a critical role. The protests for immigration reform play an important role in developing the face of the economic other. Asserting an equal role for all people, immigrant or not, forces confrontation of the underside of capital. The common spaces and shared experience maintained by a myth of socially-progressing uniform life elides the experience of immigrants and economic others; makes their face less visible to those given advantages by a particular distribution of power. Common space creates the feeling of common humanity, it makes people real (I wrote about this once, look for ‘Space Co-operation’ 3-27 and ‘Cause Celebre’ 1-31), and the use of borders to demarcate, differentiate (or at least hide) those who end up being nothing much more than input costs/resources to capitalism is the only way to create an acceptable situation for exploitation. Some sense of deserving or justice must be maintained, and borders/immigration law serves this purpose.

I can only justify this post as a May-day celebration. Please someone get Karl Marx out of my head.