Method and process

Today I spent only about 2 hours working at the Inside Books Project, packaging and mailing books requested by inmates in Texas prisons. On its face, the project has little systemic value in changing the process of incarceration and criminal justice even in Texas, but being there revealed much more than a human benefit. The process of reading letters sent to the project, then flipping through stacks of donated books, the dregs of a freer literary world and hoping for a reasonable fit to their requests. Too often there’s nothing to send that works. I put that next to the importance books have in my life and feel some sort of shame in being confronted by that. The point I would like to make comes next. The project on its own may have little systemic significance, but the process of carrying it out puts in sharp relief the intersecting realities of an unjust prison system with an overabundant consumerism beyond the walls. The process reveals something that has value that could not be accessed any other way.

This explains what debate does for me. Independently, the game has mostly esoteric and isolated impacts. Good debaters gain notoriety among themselves, gain skills that have the most application only to themselves, then move on. Debaters speak about the world in a way that suits debate but few other activities. Resolutions are arbitrary but simultaneously vague questions of policy in only loose relation to governmental practice. Essentially, debate doesn’t get much further than the walls of the academy as an intrinsically valuable activity. However, the process of talking, researching, thinking about the world through debate brings ideas into focus in context, and provides guide posts to learn about the world in a way I would not have accessed any other way.

Duncan

Choices, Changes

Te defining element of privilege and oppression is the availability of choices. The social claustrophobia I wrote about before explains this. Confinement to a limited social space – by economic contract or the exertion of majority rule – prevents the self directed expression of human creativity, and also puts the brakes on any necessary escape routes from interpersonal violence. Even having the option to develop other pursuits is a luxury that improves a shitty work experience. The ability to opt in to social movements like the anti-globalization struggle in Chiapas makes the participation of intellectuals in these movements qualitatively different from the participation of those participating for survival. The material differences in their struggle creates differences in the types of demands they are able to make as part of the movement.

This constructs a topology for struggle. The map should locate sites of struggle where options have been limited already by the material conditions of oppression. Who does globalization leave with no choices for maintaining their existence? Where do populations such as these live? The topology of struggle has to find these points to find space for change.

Duncan

News in my car

A faith based bumpersticker: “Proud Catholic” What drives people to attempt to produce political messages on the back of their car? The message has to be generally directed at everyone by its nature, so what about everyone in general (beyond the walls of a car) requires you to be identified as a Catholic, Democrat, Republican, Spurs fan or generally angry person through a bumper sticker? The vagueness and brevity make them irrelevant but also demonstrate their real purpose: an attempt to reassure the driver of themselves by using the bubble walls of a car to define the ‘in’ of their world with the ‘out’ to be reformed, yelled at or otherwise.

An ‘audio-postcard:’ on NPR about dyes in Afghanistan. The transformation of news into narrative and self contained capsules of information that produce intensities of emotion- this one giving comfort in the unstoppable continuity of tradition in a war racked country- the feeling that the human spirit makes it above and through, and the war will turn out for the best.

Sodium: similarly on NPR. News from a medical convention addressing sodium/salt consumption in America. Generally produced two comments on a political imaginary that actually gives very little ground to creativity. First, “people just want to eat sodium, they like the taste” from a representative of restaurants/food sellers. Second, “maybe we can get policymakers to act on this…” from a member of the medical association. Both of these find real politics somewhere else, moving with glacially unstoppable ways, where the only chance to impact politics is with convincing someone else to do something, rather than altering your own practices.

Duncan

Unnatural Law...

Legal remedies are poorly suited for rectifying social injustice because of its focus on individual agents. This fragments and hinders its use as a tool in this case because of its inadequacies in identifying social problems, and then in providing proactive solutions.

By focusing on individuals as the subjects of social wrongs or rights, legal systems only find determinate judgments on willful harms. It obscures the possibility of passing judgment on social norms or broad developments in a social reality. The idea of a ‘deliberate’ act implies that there is a norm of action, something subconsciously carried out, and a separate mode of thinking that becomes deliberate. Only focusing on the ‘deliberate’ mode means the subconscious or unspoken gets obscured as a subject of analysis. Also, the standard of deliberateness that requires knowledge of a harm being inflicted gets away from the main point of the social harm itself, which should be the focus as much as the means by which it emerges. Even if a harm is not deliberate, struggle should occur to overcome it regardless.

Second, focusing on individuals makes rectifying injustice difficult. The formulation of problems of course impacts their solutions, and so all of the problems identified above remain relevant. The formulation of judgment on an individual linked to the idea of ‘deliberateness’ also narrows focus down to individual acts. In a situation of systemic abuse, this makes restitution difficult, as individual instances of abuse attain their full meaning only in concert with many other acts. Also, it poorly describes the ways that problems emerge: over time, and with building force. Achieving restitution only comes for an individual act, rather than a social reality and its impact.

Duncan

Closed doors

I think I’m socially claustrophobic. Nothing scares me more than the feeling of being trapped in social demands. Something about moving, the opportunity to overcome and blow past the past gives me comfort. For the last few years, I’ve felt like my life was accelerating. I was reaching physical and intellectual spaces that brought me farther and farther from home, at faster speeds. During this time, I became attached to the feeling of movement, of ever expanding boundaries of experience and self. Something about ever moving away from a settled social reality gives me hope in myself- that if I kept going then I would be able to find the essence that defines me, absent my immediate surroundings- finding the stability at the center of everything else by moving through existence as far away from home as possible. I could assemble myself from the remainder of different lives subtracted from each other, and discover some security in that. Deciding what to carry with me when moving somewhere becomes a roleplaying game to becoming alive as me. The ultimate end comes when I find myself melting into my surroundings, becoming just one more element in what has come before. Being totalized by my surroundings is the feeling of claustrophobia I want to escape.

Duncan

Past and Present

"'Gulag,' a Show at Ellis Island, Depicts a Penal System Gone Awry"
By Edward Rothstein

Much of how a culture deals with its present depends on how it represents the past. Governments and establishments who can shape the interpretation of past actions have a potent card up their sleeve. Many of those who deal in history act as though they are sitting in a politically untouchable position, unassailable by any notion of bias because they deal in 'fact', in reporting things that concretely 'have happened'. Ultimately though, these dealers have the choice as to which facts they will represent in their various versions of history, in what light they will be portrayed, and how much analysis they are subjected to.

Museums, those institutions of history, have similar afflictions. Even in art museums, a curator must decide exactly their idea of legitimate artwork, and on which population focus may fall. Museums of human tragedy or injustice, are of a new breed, and it is over this specific new breed that the New York Times shines its light.

Its approach to this is only slightly more weird than the initial question of inclusion/exclusion facing the exhibiting body itself. The newspaperman seems a bit uncomfortable with a non-exclusive version of social injustice, in which people everywhere do the same kinds of bad things.

While purporting to be about "'Gulag,' a Show at Ellis Island", the article wraps up with a much broader conclusion. The author has discovered the exhibit's link to the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience and proceeds in a cursory comparison of the sites.

That coalition now has 14 sites, which range from a 19th-century workhouse in Britain to a slave house in Senegal, from the Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York. Not to be left out, the National Park Service has its own displays about "civic engagement" and points out that three of its sites are "accredited members of the coalition": the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y.; the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, N.Y.; and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta.

We then proceed to the kicker.

No doubt noble sentiments are at work in this roster, but as a result, all specificity and judgment disappears; conscience consumes everything and contains nothing. To make a grand rhetorical gesture, encompassing all human injustice when one particular example seems inconveniently egregious, has become a museum ritual, a political tic.

In what appears to be his own 'grand rhetorical gesture', Ed Rothstein, has dismissed the notion that oppressions are linked and oppressors, comparable. He gives his example, "a final multimedia display in which the Holocaust was calculatedly eclipsed by invocations of every contemporary example of racial and social injustice the museum could formulate." He accuses The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center as doing the same thing, ending "with a potpourri of international injustices".

Back at Gulag central, he sees the same approach, essentially pulling the 'moral relativism' card.

Actually, it cheapens injustice, leaving everyone equally guilty and equally innocent. Are 19th-century English workhouses and New York tenements comparable in any way to the gulag? Is the plight of women before receiving the vote similar to the starving of Kolyma prisoners, who scrambled in the ice to eat prehistoric amphibians?

Mr. Ed Rothstein, I believe what you mean is that their injustices are greater than ours. Ye olde, East vs West. He goes on...

Harvard University's National Resource Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies is developing curriculum packets for this exhibition. (After July 4, it will go to Boston University, and then to Independence, Calif.; Atlanta; Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; and Washington.) The educational material I was sent is careful and informed, but here and there are whiffs of this homogenized conscience:


"Are there lessons to be learned from a study of the gulag that might apply to prison systems in countries like the United States?" the curriculum proposes asking students. "For example, should prisoners in this country be forced to work jobs such as picking up trash on the highway?"

No, Mr. Rothstein, there are not.

McGruff

I sat outside Kerbey Lane looking at a poster about McGruff the Crime Dog. ‘Take a bite out of crime.’ ‘Crime bites.’

There’s a difference between seeking to eliminate a harm to people through a law that makes a particular act a crime, and seeking to eliminate ‘crime.’ The difference lies in how populations get defined and acted on by the police. The line changes from laws that seek to protect a population, and the police becoming the population. Take Mao’s China: the people Mao ruled through took his word as eternal law, just as some people here take written law as eternal law. Transgression was not an indicator of a possible transgression of a higher law, it was absolute transgression punishable by death, or other over-harsh penalty. Under this framework laws create their own set of social values to be protected. The appeal of eliminating crime draws on fear of general social disorder rather than any specific crimes. The idea that crime should be eliminated assumes a pervasive sense of disorder at the margins that threatens the smooth operation of society. ‘Crime’ is a very vague term, so it appeals to a very base (in the ‘fundamental/foundational’ sense of the term) fear of chaos. The appeal creates a value of social order- either one under Mao, or under the protection of McGruff the Crime Dog.

Of course, the idea is that the appeals also are directed at people who aren’t criminals, who deal with ‘those types’ likely to commit crimes through prevention measures. In constructing this, it is presupposed that: criminals can be identified through some sort of objective standards, and that someone objective does the analysis deciding what is a crime. Both of these ideas seem dubious, and perhaps draw on cultural stereotypes that transform these calls into racist/classist tools of control.

Duncan

Public and/or private property

So, the idea of public property reveals something about the way political protection operates ‘on the ground’ of real life. ‘Public’ assumes a determinate body of people, amalgamated as a political group. ‘Property’ is a relationship between a citizen and objects which they have exclusive domain and freedom of action over. Since a group of people cannot uniformly exert control over property, the term ‘public’ gets stretched and shifted. If a tension in use arrises (like, if you need to knock down a fence, but other members of the ‘public’ wish it to remain), the competing claims can be resolved by force/law. So, laws resolve the indeterminate relationship each person in the ‘public’ has with their ‘property’ by defining the specific type of relationship that must be maintained with that property. As soon as anyone breaks those laws, they no longer qualify as part of the ‘public’ that owns that ‘property,’ and become excluded from the space of protected property owners.

Related: I had a conversation tonight with a man who has been homeless for 25 years. He told Zack and I about his life with drug addiction, nomadism, and prison. Several times he referred to his efforts to get back and become ‘a real human.’ This demonstrates the way that respected human life becomes twisted to only refer to citizens (who don’t damage public property..) and not to the fact of existing as a human. He only gains respect or validation as someone without 2 felony convictions, with a home.

Duncan

A few poems

for tonight:

'Pick up lines'
Conversation peices
fall like Humpty Dumpty

written about before:

'Documentary'
Self congratulation
idle adulation
builders of dreams
hide behind screens

more previously discussed:

'Television'
Irrational stares
from flickering lights
hollowed out monuments
to emptied out nights


Lastly:

'Mouth'
The foreskin of humanity
some need circumscision

Duncan

Conversation Peices

I’ve always wondered why I don’t feel comfortable in group gatherings. Tonight I visited a place full of people who at least were nominally interesting, but as always I didn’t feel right projecting myself into conversations that could be started in the time/context available. I think the physical relations that bracket encounters in groups (the reason for gathering sometimes stands in the way, or other people, generally the lack of shared space in a standing room only place) prevent me from effectively relaying what I do with a majority of my time. Being caught up in debate, or books, or any number of other things I get caught up in can’t be described under those conditions. Debate is a complex investment of time and academic effort that requires experiencing to understand. The compromised image of the activity that comes out in casual discussion doesn’t capture my passion or any of what I think is interesting about the activity or my time in it. Similarly with books. Literature doesn’t reduce to a discussion piece. I believe it can and should be a jumping off point for developing ideas about lots of things, but it doesn’t translate well into conversation held in a forced/constrained environment. The incongruent investments of time or emotional effort between conversation and the experiences that define my life keep me from feeling at ease in group or party conversation.

Duncan

Autonomy

I have another post about the experience watching movies again. They all raised questions about autonomy- how to achieve it and why, primarily. I think there are a few unexamined issues with the idea of ‘autonomy.’

The term ‘autonomy’ implies a certain scale of action. Analytically, we are all ‘autonomous’ as a planet, or sometimes as nations, but ‘autonomy’ as a political project seems to require a change in scale to smaller groups. Dominant political organizations have tendend towards the management of large populations, as organized through nation states or ever expanding capital flows. These systems often allow for manipulation or abuse through centralization of power, backed by expansive populations/capital accumulated in these wide ranging power systems.

The other question I had was: autonomous from who? Populations form different bonds with different people. In the example of the Zapatistas, they have received media or political support from a variety of elite activist types in America and Europe. They also received ‘security’ from Ya Basta!, an Italian anarchist group (black-bloc style) in one of Marcos’ marches to Mexico City. This question should be considered because of the reversibility of the idea of ‘autonomy.’ ‘Energy independence’ is one example that comes to mind as a potentially dangerous offshoot of this idea of ‘autonomy.’ Also, there seems to be a Regan-ish analogy of individualism/self-sufficiency as a potential corollary to this idea. So, it is important to further develop what types of relationships should be severed as part of the project of ‘autonomy.’

In my mind, autonomy reduces to democracy and direct control over the material conditions of a person’s existence. This answers the question of scale- only an arrangement that allows for direct democratic control over food, water and infrastructure resources should be considered autonomous. Direct democracy linked with the exigencies of food and survival produces its own limits on scale; and control over material conditions of survival allows for a limited but powerful redefinition of relationships of power.

Duncan

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