Education Post #2 - The ecology of education

Nature is the vessel into which we fill all things apolitical: gender, sex, self and sordid details of existence, written off to the intrinsic. Nature exists as a projected space prior to contact by our conscious mind – the things true without ‘tainting’ by humanity. Wilderness is one manifestation of this phenomenon – the place without human influence, untouched, with empirical features identifiable prior to human influence. However, the use of the term ‘nature’ in psychological, social ways shows that human involvement doesn’t void nature, nature can influence humanity. Nature, rather, refers to the repeatable, the things seen in all people (or at least enough people) to cordon off agency and transformation. More than anything, the natural refers to the stable, the self-sustaining elements of existence. ‘Natural’ things have the status of a scientific truth, they will be the same thing to all people, make the same type of appearance, the same type of appeal, remain forever outside any sense of agency or change. Science requires some notion of the natural to remain science.

Scientific truth is not truth: it is a carefully crafted appeal to a valorized and contingent emotional response that assigns value to ideas that resonate with a postulated group of people who make similar appeals. Truth echoes: it resonates with any number of people, it is meant to have universal status, truth must remain the same for all, all must remain the same for truth. People submit themselves to science because it seems so natural, prior to our selves, foundational to understanding other forms of knowledge and self. However, science remains a social phenomenon. In order for a postulate to become a theory, or a theory to become a truth, it must be confirmed by a community of scientists, who repeat experiments to elevate an isolated phenomenon to a truth. Science isolates particular qualities of an event to make them into a truth: the a-human, the non-emotional, the constants. Essentially, everything about the world that can be bracketed out from human influence, that stands un-mediated and changed by thought (or so we think). The natural.

Scientific truth is a form of language that turns everyone into the teachers to whom we look when writing: we postulate notions of agency, appropriateness and disposition onto other people in order to articulate a truth. No more than a language, but a compelling one. So, who are we talking to? Science echoes in a cultural reality that is relatively limited, a presumption on the part of the speaker. People know things in extremely personal ways – its hard to understand the motivations of people we don’t have intimate awareness of. Then, positing a scientific truth relies on assumed forms of human agency which arise out of our personal contexts, a particular masquerading as a universal. To change the status of the scientific, and the natural, we must open ourselves to forms of humanity previously unknown.

This explains how certain practices, while present in human society, can become deemed unnatural: the closed spaces of social systems, which create communities reaffirming each other, repeatedly. Isolation begets particular truths, affirmed as universals, building fervor for attacks on groups outside isolation. The status of a truth, its violence, slides on a scale according to the power of that isolation. Access to the means of control transforms a particular truth into a weapon, the blackmail of capitalism makes it a death sentence for some. Communities can be constituted in time too – an ancient occurrence becomes a current truth because of the communal nature of history, implying repetition in its own right: cardstacked community.

This makes truth multiple. First, truth emerges because it is produced within a community, but that community has holes and so can also homogenized community. Truth develops because of its resonance for a particular group of people, but claiming a truth also produces resonance by bringing people into line: it articulates a presumed relationship between people, a productive act. Truths reveal something about a community in that they result from a social process. They also conceal community in the projection of certain ideas onto other people, attempting to bring them in line. Common sense is the ideological shorthand of a community – the truths revealed in their empirical application in particular situations, rather than verbalized. Like religion, truths can be the cry of the privileged, as religion the cry of the oppressed. Rather, this relationship is definitional: the ideas of an era are the ideas of the ruling class, articulated as naturalized truth, defining as their underside the truths of the subordinated groups as irrational (religious).

For this reason, truth and nature are untenable. First, because of the inherent instability of our world. Things move faster, people destroy ‘nature’ faster than ever before. Second, because of continual and trenchant critiques of scientific truth (I am certainly not the first, nor last, some other angry vegan doubtless will rear their rhetorical head at it).

The question I think should be raised is the role of fiction in education. Why study the un-true? I think that it depends on the treatment of nonfiction text. I think that the format of English classes reveal something about how reading texts function as a disciplinary/ideological tool – they teach a way of reading, a strategy. Literary analysis serves to deconstruct texts written as evidence of a particular time period – a historical document with prior meaning held in a structured form. The role of the student is to interpret and understand through particular filters the meaning predisposed in a text. Particular analytical tools are validated, and they construct an authoritative meaning. Students employ established tropes and filters to uncover meaning. Reading fiction is about reading as a practice, an established discipline of creating knowledge about the world using literature as an artifact of that world. For fiction, truth is posited explicitly in a way of reading, a practice. Education, then, primarily consists of ways of orienting ourselves to texts and ideas, becoming a particular type of subject in relation to ideas, as much as the specific content of an idea.

However, schools still, on some level, claim to teach truths. The status of truth plays a role in the establishment of discipline and self-regulation on the part of students. An absolute truth, locked in a text or teacher has a relationship to a particular moment of modernizing education for large groups of students, who required a basic level education to participate in an industrialized workforce. The scale of the task of educating millions required self-regulation by the students, a certain level of silence to create efficiency, and so the status of truth had to remain universal, singular and distant. The model of schooling followed the model of capital. Industry now relies ever more heavily on the creation of affect and fictions in the mind of consumers, about relationships and about mutual concern. This means that education for the workforce becomes an ever more social process – social events constitute the primary learning space for service economies – which rely on how to relate to people. Education surrounds schooling, expands into the space of social life. Education describes as well as prescribes the skills for later life. If I grow up to resell cars, or to create advertisements, my education comes through my knowledge of social processes that did not come exclusively from school. IN this sense, education describes – what was educational simply arose out of a situation without necessarily being labeled such. In other ways, education prescribes, disciplining and shaping students as readers or writers. These factors remain constantly in tension, causing them to overlap, detach, or interfere. A changing workplace transforms the types of skills necessary to become successful (read: wealthy), creating ‘demand’ for particular courseloads (in whatever form: capital P-political ‘so American can keep up in a modern economy…’, or through demand for certain courseload). Or, at the same time, positing demands on education institutions can create certain skills proactively to transform the types of jobs skills students have, shaping the economy. The interrelationship between economy, education and the demands they place on each other means that we have to ask questions about how education continues to change. The pivot point around which it moves involves the status of knowledge, the qualities of knowledge we value, and how people view themselves in relation to that knowledge.

This raises one point that should be made, which is the ways educational reform already coincides with practices of power. There are certain elements of political discourse already de-centering the text and reading in new ways – politicians talk about maneuverings of politics as political, we get insight into the way campaigns are run, behind the mask, and media is beginning to train us in the processes of media criticism. Cultural products, like the Simpsons, consist of more than a media text, but of different strategies of reading texts. Certain forms of alternative educational forms already seek to make education a practice, de-centering a curricular canon, entering situations beyond the institution. The goal of deconstructing and reconstructing education must take these into account, and, because of the interest of institutional power in their development, leave education more than merely dissolved. On some level, undermining the naturalness of knowledge needs to do more than just transform it into aesthetics. Instead of saying ‘no’ to the idea of truths, there should be an effort to say “yes, why…” when employing them. The supposedly apolitical must be turned into discourse to let them be challenged.

I should point out here the different levels of educational reality – the explicit and the implicit at least – there are highfalutin Bill Gates led expressions of how education should occur and there is the functional reality in places that disappear from the maps of policy makers. Elisions of inner-city schools or rural poor schools mean that fragmentation is one characteristic of subjectivity in schools – more often than not how you learn has to do with who you learn with in a community, particularly in school systems segregated with increasing ferocity.

The changing social and economic environment, a product of political demands developed by social movements, like multiculturalism, and economic and ethnographic changes occurring as a result of technology and economics requires a different type of reading and writing in students. The final question, then, is: how are students made to feel free in education, and why are certain freedoms rewarded, while others condemned? In a world where nature is decaying, by means of multicultural educations requiring sensitivities to body types, backgrounds and nationalities or by simple necessity of through the inclusion of more and more ‘foreign’ bodies into the education system, what skills, and ways of relating to truth must be created?

Duncan

Exceptionalism and Revolution

After reading about revolution and revolt, I think I’ve decided that US citizens have a relatively weak set of rhetorical resources to draw on in constructing arguments for revolution. The primary obstacle is the narrow sense of what freedom or liberation really means for most people living in the US: opportunity (whatever that means). The Revolutionary War was a bourgeois affair, at least in its goals if not primary constituency. The creation of economic opportunity and nominal, narrow equality for all founded the American dream. We even lack an effective term to refer to people who live in the US, owing to the presumption of equality: ‘US citizens’ implies a sense of opportunity and security in rights of its own, and the term ‘American’ smacks of nativism (not everyone who lives here was born here, notably) but also could be used for people of other nations. The term US citizen does imply particular inalienable rights which may be put to use as motivation, but that use remains constrained by the particular formulation of those rights, primarily an individualistic bent, concerned with individualistic opportunity (ex: the use of the term in anti-affirmative action battles, equating equality with a particular type of blindness to identity). In many ways, no great American promise has gone unfulfilled because of the type of promise made with the Declaration of Independence: a claim to government non-intervention in a variety of affairs, rather than the (explicit) promotion of any social system or equality.

Another constraint comes from a marred history of rebellions. The Civil War reflects very poorly on US revolutionaries. Drawing on the uniquely US American heritage of revolution pins social movements with right wing anti-government groups (McVeigh), or a bizarre agglomeration of Alex Jones-ish libertarians (From Freedom to Fascism), or just gun-nuts. Liberation is justifiable on such narrow and vague grounds in the declaration, positioning radical social groups in a poor position to leverage it in social movements.

Peter already said good things about how drawing on other country’s models for rebellion tempts posturing and pandering.

I think that the idea of US exceptionism plays a role in the pigeonholing of revolutionary or radical groups. The American democratic promise is a peculiar one: the constitution is a short one (relatively speaking), and the Declaration of Independence is vague. Ultimately, the terms freedom, representation, liberty, rights remain open to reclamation by a variety of social groups, for good or ill (ex: Senaca Falls Declaration, MLK ‘I Have a Dream, but again, the Confederacy). I think America remains relatively conservative in its revolutionary fervor because of the sense of exceptionality. The democratic promise, because of its vagueness, gets judged in terms of the relationship between the US and other countries in general- a relationship that favors the US strongly for its history as the democratic ‘savior’ versus fascists, communists and terrorists alike.

Duncan

Gender-image

I think gender is a product of media ecology as much as any specific linguistic strategy. Images, as transportable immutable objects of representation operate as vivid, visceral valorizations of ideal gender by the fact of their movement. Much about gender norms operating in a binary have the features of an image in themselves: utter stability (ahem: like a posed picture), requiring repeatability (unchanging in each viewing). Additionally, the image as an object of reproduction, and movement between places regularizes gender in a way previously unavailable, a particular sense of not only vertical (for a particular person or place) stability, but also horizontal stability in multiple places, across space. That authorizes gender regulations in a state/administrative context, providing a common referent for political consent mobilized around gender. Reproducibility of images, and their increasing prevalence provides the script, or perhaps the stage, across with the mobilization by performance of gender occurs.

Duncan

What lies out of grasp when we reach for the stars?

I think the question of education begins with the fact that all ethical decisions are about perceived consequences for any given decision maker, but that perceived consequences (self interest?) are defined by the situation and culture from which they arise. I think there is a particular material and social reality that constructs the perceived self-interest of students that allows them to ignore the social violence surrounding education while pursuing a degree.

When I went to the Washington State prison last week to talk about debate and immigration, one of the most striking things about the way the inmates spoke about the world was their focus on individual responsibility- they nearly adopted the pose of liberal-individualism, of every man [sic] for themselves on a playing field that, if not level, was at least every man’s responsibility to overcome their level. From my perspective, a white man (free, in many senses), for whatever reason standing at the front of a room filled with impoverished and imprisoned black men, I could only feel baffled. In retrospect, I think that this ethos – of personal agency, is something created by social institutions of evaluation. In opposition to some discourses of social institutions evaluating people on a level playing field, I think that the institutions create the view of the field for people. Prison is a world of harsh and brutal judgments and of unquiet desperation. An institution that exacts extreme physical violence upon the body of its participants also exacts a kind of force onto the mind, drawing it towards thinking about agency and responsibility.

It should be no surprise that I think of schools and prisons in one breath. Schools are built, run and maintained by the same groups that build run and maintain prison systems. Schooling has its own form of judgment, its own form of evaluation and transformation of bodies and minds. I think the parallel exists, through on a drastically different scale. School and education imposes its own system for evaluation – in more ways than may be thought. Clearly, the school system uses evaluations – grades, and other systems – to create self discipline and encourage the development of a self (and only self) help ethos. Also, the idea of liberal individualism as the true definition of equality underpins efforts at multicultural and pluralistic education and ultimately conflates them: because pluralism ensures all voices are heard, this creates a sense of equal opportunity, and then formally equal opportunity (with no guarantees for inclusion) can then become its own mode of pluralism. I feel that a systems of evaluation not only encourage this mode of self-reliance, self-centricism, and self-creation, but also abstraction and theorization.

Evaluation makes us theorists of ourselves. Evaluation always implies a hierarchy of judgment. The evaluation removes an act from its immediate context and orients it towards a goal: it becomes a process of accumulation of time and self that becomes deposited into a particular system of judgment. The mental process of writing and learning for evaluation places the writer into the mind of the evaluator constantly questioning each act, creating a theory of which action benefits you (the student) the most. You become a theorist of yourself: developing schemas, tools, mechanisms for self control and self advancement in the service of a goal developed by someone else. This develops a habit of a particular type of self theorization (as plotting, as strategy, of manipulation), through the ultimate evaluation system of school: the diploma, the ticket to the world beyond, the main ingredient to the formula for success in society. In the process of theorizing ourselves, we become separate from the lives we lead while theorizing. The foregrounding reality for theorizing, the habits of daily life, remain outside of consideration when in sight of the fetish object (grade/diploma). We develop a habit of deferring self-criticism and reflexivity for the ends of making the grade. So, I think the question is – who are we using as stepstools when we choose to reach for the stars? A dominant theme in my own education was the use of that education for some good, through a position of power or authority obtained by education. It makes self into strategy, and makes practice into a form of abstraction that separates school from politics, education from existence. This manifests itself in a variety of places where people talk about the implicit divisions in education that revolve around the difference between school and the real world not school. The place where we educate ourselves is a real place. People live there, they eat, they move, they rely. The prevalence of fetish objects and systems of evaluation that only question ideas and the ability to strategically negotiate a social reality established by someone else force that place out of the question in most situations in school.

Why do we have fetish objects? There is a logic of institutional inertia that habituates people to identify with the communication and meaning making symbols of institutions. A community that shares in common a system for valuing individuals and labor projects the value/symbol system onto social relationships as means of common currency between disparate individuals, and that symbol system acts as a socialization agent, that projects desire onto the discrete symbol systems developed in that particular context. They condition the soul (Foucault) but also the ego – self realization becomes explained by means of an institutional language. I think this creates the contradictions and injunctions against social activism for students. Because the institutional logic of school relies on differentiating strategies, within a school community, personal achievement not only becomes highlighted, but also more accessible in a personal sense. Fulfillment happens on a neat scale of 1-100, handy units of evaluation that structure self worth and provide documentary evidence for achievement. The negotiation between self and others gets painted in the starkest terms possible. Students may not even believe that their schoolwork matters – but enculturation into a community that shares and (on some level) values the means of evaluation in grades and discipline, which encourages prioritizing school work over social work. I’ve felt re-prioritization occur, moving between social spaces around campus. Coming back from the prison, or from the anti-abortion protests into an environment of school work, the things I know I valued at one point (grades, debate) just come to feel petty, incredibly small and even… flimsy as I attempted to manipulate them.

I think reforming school is a spatial project (in many ways – where we see boundries, and when we choose to cross the visible ones) as well as a structural project (re-orienting the subject of value, the position of a valuing authority). However, it must also be noted the project is an intensely economic one. Another source of inertia comes from the fact banks, governments and philanthropists only make available loans, scholarships and other incentives primarily to students of certain types of education – in a formal institutional college setting. Negotiating a way out of a ethical system that encourages self interest requires a transcendence of economic constructs as well as ethical, symbolic constructs.

Final note (metaphor): Today I attended an economic justice event that focused on securing worker’s rights in poultry plants around the south. The word of the day was ‘accountability.’ I considered what this word implied, and what it required from people as consumers and citizens. Formal accountability requires a level of sustained attention and focus not available to most people. At the very least, they believe themselves to be pressed for time, attention and money, and in most cases they are right. Accountability in this case involved addressing only the specific agents engaging in illegal labor practices, while drawing attention away from the way that most consumers encounter the processes in question, which is primarily through branding and brand image. One of the most successful workers rights campaigns has been the Coalition of Imolkee Workers, which targeted the brands Taco Bell and McDonalds, rather than the low level producers who specifically employed the workers advocating change. They used an analysis of the way consumers experience exploitive systems to leverage change. I think that changing education must begin with this same process: targeting how students experience and encounter exploitation, violence and oppression.

Duncan

Vanguardismo

Recently on Stop Me Before I Vote Again, Michael J Smith posted a March Email post by Mike Flugennock, a loyal fan of the Stop Me blog. It seemed to be a heartfelt lament that here in the empire state we lack the vanguard seen in Bush’s trip down south, to periphery-land. He compared organizing strategies and anti empire strategies between regions of Aztlan.

Now as glorious as all of the fire and smoke confrontations are on a screen beamed to you by CNN of all orgs, flare ups is a more apt photo. I can’t necessarily attest to the numerical use value of these flare-ups but I can give you some of what I’ve seen in the vanguard of Olympia. It is indeed a frustrating time for twenty-year-old anarchists, separated from the movements we identify with by the flicker of another memory hole.

This ain’t Orwell’s hole, just the opposite. The one where instead of dumping the states excess information we get access to the world’s trimmings. Bit by bit visions of bricks and burning cars are flicked at us through the other end of the hole. The whole of the periphery and outright police repression. (A caveat, having lived in Oly long enough to have done my second year and seen instances of police repression, the heavy hands of the state clapping at gnats, this is very real even here in Empireland.)

Some of us at various points cannot resist but to scurry round our end of the hole and gnaw at these trimmings of the great global mass rising up. Some of us run round empty our pockets of local American change to trade in for a OAXACA RESISTE banner, stapling a bit of color on to our black backpacks and hoodies. Global solidarity is nice and awesome and necessary and all, but could we not have some of that shop local ethic back?

The twenty-year-old anarquistos of el norte wish for some hardcore luchando. Change, we ain’t got none, too busy declaring our ability to live outside mom and dad’s system. We can eat all the dumpstered food we want, be as vegan as we need to be, but when it comes down to some good old grassroots, we say nay, we really want the meat. We want that fire and smoke flavor. We wanna grab those guns and see our prey instantly done for. Bloody or not (depends on who you talk to), tearing it down or up or whatever takes precedence over building another in the backrooms and breakrooms of the nation.

I wish not to try and claim moral authority here, see? I struggle at this moment too. Where is the line between good useful foment and halfway ferment, old enough to foul and smell and intoxicate but too young for wine?

Communication in place

Today I visited a prison to talk about politics in what someone there called the ‘free world.’

I live in that ‘free world.’ But I don’t feel freed by ideas any more. I was asked what the relationship between what we talk about in debates and how we act: whether anyone enacts the policies we defend in debates. I had to say no. Since ‘leaving’ debate for the end of the semester, I wanted to involve myself in politics which I could act on, or with or towards. From then, I have become aware of the relationships between physical location, spatial isolation or influence, and culture (including the cultural distinctions that qualify truths as truths).

I feel enclaved at UGA. Not that I live anywhere ‘unreal’ – I don’t believe we can or should try to divide out real life from unreal life, through lines drawn on or around our political spaces. However, I do think that UGA fosters a politics of vague humanitarianism which stems from the spatial and cultural makeup of the place which I live. I know some brilliant exceptions to this trend. But I also know the trend of poor motivation and attendance for student activism that extends beyond saving babies, stopping ‘curing’ cancer with bake-sales, or dance-marathoning.

Culture is a function of negotiating the social/economic decisions faced to a certain group every day, and the reality of many people’s lives at UGA means that they never face decisions of substantial (explicitly) political consequence. Few people recognize themselves as political agents because the nature of the situation they encounter every day is circumscribed by their physical location as well as their economic privilege. A provided paid education and living situation lowers the profile of economic injustice as a political problem, which inculcates a culture of identification with traditional symbols of power. It relegates the question of how people daily provide for themselves to a lower priority.

UGA, in spatial isolation, makes speaking truth to certain forms of political power very difficult. National news media typically has to be trucked in from Atlanta, political demonstrations or image confrontations with political practices are limited to the environment of Athens itself, or the people who live here. Writing politics from Athens is a profoundly smaller affair than it may be from other places. The physical connections between here and there politically focus activism onto fungible politics: raising money which can be sent anywhere and retain value, de-emphasizing direct action and the strategic use of media as anything more than a sympathy tool. This intersects with globalizing media systems, which construct messages around a supposedly universal audience, centering the controlling discourse on a different place, and creating messages that striate across other messages, transforming them across the filter of television.

The problem isn’t of space but of signal decay across space, and the blockages in communication that develop around a place. Signal decay can emerge quickly or be amplified depending on the means of transmission. Also, which messages control the media central to people’s lives will, naturally, have a bigger impact on people’s live than those outside of control of that medium. The most dangerous and important messages are those able to hijack the lines of transmission than those which are simply more radical. I think that the study of the movement of messages across space – the places where communication creates eddies and concentrations of messages around a place – how thy accumulate, and what those places have in common.

Duncan

Left success -or- how did I become so long winded

I think that the degree to which ‘the left’ has been rhetorically successful since September 11^th has been seriously under-thought. I’ve read a lot about the rise of the right wing media, the use of polarizing rhetoric (us v. them…), but not enough about the effectiveness of rhetoric about Bush’s rhetoric. Recently, we’ve seen people like Nancy Pelosi tell Bush to ‘calm down,’ we’ve had Stephen Colbert lambaste the prez for a good half hour in his presence, and a significant outcry on the part of the international community against Bush personally. So, the question remains of how has rhetoric about the Bush administration’s rhetoric been effective, created certain discussions or avoided others.

Black and white but still agree on the value of gradients – the primary critique of a black-white, yes-no, with us or against us standpoint fails to question whether black really is black or white really is white. Instead, the basic function of the US in international politics goes unquestioned – we still know who the really bad guys are, we just are willing to cut a deal or work with certain people who may be gray. The US remains committed, even absent Bush, to a certain form of military and political hegemony that centers on the power to make judgments about terrorist states.

The most successful part of ‘liberal rhetoric’ I think has been the use of internet democracy to strengthen the structure of the Democratic party, and the mild left in general. The idea of a conservatively dominated ‘MSM’ (Mainstream media, wow what a phrase), and a ‘false centrism’ argument coming from the Pelosi-left that Bush only claims to represent the American people motivates a particular form of participation in representative government. The control of the discourse of democracy is a political talking point (see my ‘behind the scenes’ post). The mantle of ‘actual representative to Americans’ seems to have been a consistent feature of political discourse, but this acquires a certain expression in a media age. (Moveon.org and 527s have a really interesting discourse about themselves- they create democracy about democratic participation- ‘reclaiming our media’ in a way that sees themselves as un-mediated. The people who contribute ideas, money, etc personally to these campaigns participate in a democracy, but in a way that divides them out from the people receiving the messages that 527s produce. Democracy about democracy…) The internet revived the image of participatory representative government in a big way through groups like moveon.org, the emergence of the liberal ‘blogosphere,’ and the success of campaigns from Howard Dean to ‘Obamania.’ The orientation of all these different forms of politics remains decisively towards center stage Washington D.C.. The means for political organizing and mobilization is the computer, over the internet. The basic questions of access to technology could of course be raised over this – the digital divide, etc. now reach to the dominant form of political organizing as an exclusionary barrier to other forms of participation in civic/political life.

This creates a polarization of discourse about civic participation as well as a polarization of discourse within representative government structures. The phrase ‘vote or die’ brings it to an extreme, but emphasis on the nature of the threat of Bush/Whatever-right-wing creates a faster and deeper marginalization of non-government oriented politics. Essentially, I think ‘liberal’ rhetoric has done a good job of centering the GOP as totally dominant, or at least in a fairly good position of monopolizing discourse. This makes radicals out of reformists, but also moves pragmatist politics beyond polling into the margin by stigmatizing a lack of engagement with a particular form of civic democracy.

I think another interesting point has been the discourse surrounding polarization and media bias, which necessarily has become a function of how Bush’s rhetoric and policy gets treated. The media is correctly identified as a shill, but only in terms of its agreement with a Bush war frame, sparking corresponding calls for debate and balance. Naturally: balance between what? Where does the fulcrum lie, and what would suggest balance in the first place? Certain ideas form the fulcrum, like “should the US invade Iran” with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ presented as the balancers. Similarly, the discussion about media discussions becomes about the Bush policy of the moment, writing out other questions about power and privilege that could be offered about the media, which would see the “Bush yes/no” debate as radically un-balanced. I also think there are places where this strategy allows for co-option. Honestly, I don’t think media debates make a damn bit of sense as a political tool, and raising the issue points towards a flawed mode of thinking about the productive elements of media representations, which largely occur at the level of image-production. Also, debate on the media isn’t good when the topic at hand involves certain questions of political power, where presenting both (what would a 4, 5, 6 way debate look like?) sides legitimizes both arguer’s positions as legitimate options, when sometimes you just need to call a policy dumb and move on. It doesn’t provide any role for the viewer that makes sense either, except as a consuming and voting public – what would the viewer do with a balanced debate about war against Iran? They know both sides, but… so? The only role is to pass judgment through voting on Bush, or on other political figures. It gives a sense of a consensus on what to debate, and who should resolve the debate that elides other political questions.

More or less, I think people are convinced that there should be a distancing from Bush. This has been an exceedingly successful rhetorical strategy for the left – calling out Bush on questions of competence and effectiveness in governance. There are a host of problems with this strategy which should seem obvious – when would it be right to invade somewhere anyways? What would an effectively run ‘war on terror’ look like, is it even possible to do this right?

Duncan

Agents acting..

I keep encountering the politics of agency in the articles I have read for class. So, about agency -

First, how do people come to know themselves as agents; literally who is the subject at the center of agency? How can we tell where we are? What do the things we center our identities on say about what we expect from ourselves interacting with the world? So, if I think that my life goals for employment constitute something about my identity, that may say that I treat my current life with a sense of managerial distance, seeing the steps I’m taking in college now as the foreground to a more real or significant future for myself. If I think that the books I read constitute my identity, I may believe in myself as a subject of other people – stuck in a web of meaning created before me, able to receive the things I read but not necessarily write and give. The objects that we associate with identity become so as a result of a specific political history, and those objects imply something about ourselves and the role we see ourselves occupying in the world.

Codes about property create models of agency, in terms of the relationship between objects in ourselves (THAT is (different from in a relationship of ownership) (MY)MINE). Also, property defines the limits of agency – what we can or should have control over. In many ways, it is possible to see ourselves in objects or places – blackberry/cell phone fetishes create us in ways we may not know, we still talk about being in a different place in common parlance – the relations of property intervene to delimit where we find ourselves and how.

The ability to describe something as taking an action creates that subject as unified, and in a traditional sense, a subject-agent. This seems fairly straight forward, but in many ways the ascription of verb action onto otherwise disparate groups plays an important role in arguments about danger, risk and the future. The action, as a unity or discrete occurrence implies a coherence about a (then classified and amalgamated) agent. Qualities of power and authority then develop around the supposed agent based on the quality (effectiveness, impact) of the action taken. The slipperiness between the total subject defined and the complexities of the action described makes the use of verb/noun relationships powerful. The ability to identify a particular agent with a class of people lies at the basis of representation as a practice of state/sovereign politics. In reality, how much does George Bush, or the bureaucratic machine ‘represent’ the US, as opposed to the narrow interests of an institution, and a class of people who participate in that institution. There is substantial evidence to suggest that the regularized process of established bureaucracies identify more with the interests of institutions than they do the interests of people served by the machine. The same slipperiness shows up in the idea of ‘public property’ which, apparently the public does not own, in that they have no actual control over its maintenance or the ability to destroy it (port protests – try to vandalize a park, it’s public property, as soon as you put paint to pavement you de-publicize). Language about agency has the power to elide the gaps between practice and description.

Fears about ‘other’ populations emerge to the degree that those populations can be described as agents other than I, and the degree to which they can be seen as unruly. IN some senses, ascribing agency to an object or identity constructs a maverick sensibility that requires a high-violence focused response. It creates a morality that externalizes responsibility by locating power in the body of another, drawing in traditional discourses of morality with it. Morality is about choices, but very rarely about creating them, only making them once presented. In many ways, the focus on agency created in the constitution of subjects makes a moral claim about the signified body possible, a potentially violent judgment when that body potentially threatens a previously centered ‘secured’ body.

Duncan

Power/photos

Why should anyone believe human rights claims? What are the qualities we look to in other people to establish our common humanity that create human rights claims?

I think there are consistent themes in the way human rights photos in particular work to create a sense of commonality (when successful). Most of the meaning created in them comes from the relationship of people to their surrounding as much as the physical conditions of the people in them. The image of ‘Tank Man’ provides one example - http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=191&Itemid=115&bandwidth=high because it shows one person in relationship to a much greater force than he. He doesn’t seem to be in any obvious pain, but the environment, clearly laid out as a battle of small versus little, gives a reference point for a feeling of commonality – the human figure versus something much larger than it. It lays out an empowering model for politics (defined roughly as the mediation of relationships between the interests of an individual with a group) which sees the person (any person in the grainy outlook of the photo) as someone able to stop or transform the forces which oppose them.

I think this picture http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=845&Itemid=146&bandwidth=high is analogous, with an even clearer division marking off dis/empowerd, as well as a sense of chaos surrounding the photo (black smoke, movement of other people). The best thing about the photo is its liminality. Not only does the woman stand on a barrier between herself and the anonymous police force, but the momentum implied by the police coming down the hill puts her at a liminal temporal point – the ‘dam’ she holds back seems to be near bursting. The surrounding chaos, represented by the black smoke and movement around the photo draws out even further the clarity of her relationship to the people she resists. (The Iwo Jima Flag photo http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~mah/methods/iwo-jima-flag.jpg also has echoes here – the sense of creating order in a ‘war zone of sorts). So, both of these photos give a sense of being ordered, with an active agent with which a viewer can identify.

A second sort of photo also concerns agency. A good example of these – the photo of a Vietnamese man being shot in the street http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=165&Itemid=115&bandwidth=high or, the photo of Lynndie England holding a man on a leash at Abu Ghraib – these photos have a sense of abjectness to them that suggests a clear sense of power for the viewer. They show a relationship where one person clearly has power over another, and the subjugated person has no recourse to respond.

To the degree that viewers identify with the subjects in a photo, the lines of power delineated in these photos emphasizes a form of power with which a few people identify – the represented bodies picture an abject subject, and a subject empowered. The power of the empowered subject is exercised by a relatively narrow section of humanity, and so there is empathy for the abject subject.

Perhaps photographs create meaning and action be contrasts. They don’t shrink the world perse but draw together certain points to construct meaning by contrasting particular otherwise distant parts to create judgment.

Duncan

Visions of public

How does a visual metaphor for understanding politics create knowledge about our agency and relationships to other people in politics? I think this can be seen in a couple of places – problems like Abu Ghraib being ‘brought to light,’ the projection of dialogue onto face-to-face interviews, and the use of the language of ‘transparency’ as a model for government accountability.

It says something about the type of ideal community for a political democracy. Perhaps linked to the idyllic local American community, our democracy seems to desire proximity – a ‘line of sight’ that offers not just visibility of institutions and individuals, but a quick referentiality that only local place can provide. There seems to be an undercurrent of direct, face-to-face dialogue in this metaphor that asks for a degree of time and equality generally inaccessible to most people.

Assumes that we really see who we see – that images don’t deceive and that we should believe our eyes unproblematically. Once something is ‘in the light,’ or ‘transparent,’ is there any reason to believe what we see is true? Not only can appearances deceive, but the meaning of visual acts can be changed, interpreted towards particular ends, etc. Meaning has to be created around the things we see, and so creating that meaning still remains something to be contested.

This metaphor obscures (oops) the means by which communication occurs. People primarily see the world through screens, not their eyes. A squared off telescope which points in directions we may never know – visualization is attached to a variety of tools which are controlled by a few people. There is a filter by which some things come to light – what we see should not obscure how. Just saying, writing, or doing an act outside of the private realm no longer makes that act truly public. A public must see a public act, and that requires, usually, a camera pointing at that act. Even when cameras exist and record, there is no guarantee that act then becomes a part of public discourse in a meaningful way. Systems of legitimization define how we ‘see’ political events in the public – visualization on the Internet receive some form of pop-culture truth status, but this knowledge means different things than something like the ‘newspaper of record’ s treatment of a story, and the truth status assigned to it. Visualization of events happens in a particular light, often with the effect of disqualifying certain see-ers. Until the light of particular truth claims gets shown on something, other forms of truth, contestations of a reality receive no treatment as valuable political insights. So, we must ask: to whom does something appear, and why does their viewing matter?

It says something about the nature of accountability. The mere appearance before a Kangaroo court of public opinion creates the illusion of accountability. Visualization – seeing, knowing an event - often doesn’t create accountability in a meaningful way because of the structure of public discourse operating as distraction and (dis)illusion, and the manipulation of meaning around a picture, or a ‘known’ event. There exists a false threshold between blindness/seeing within which we believe that visualization allows for an effective (democratic?) check on public figures, in all their spectatorial glory.

Duncan

Communication and Choices

I have found that the degree to which I routinely see myself as a writer (distinct from by not ‘versus’ a reader, which I do at the same time) determines how effectively I communicate. When I’ve been writing here, with agency over the content and direction I write, I feel more invested and competent in other forms of communication as well. It has something to do with habits, I’m sure. I need to keep writing here to feel invested elsewhere.

Debate has a complex relationship to the activities of reading and writing. In many ways, the structure of the activity is designed to analyze debaters as accountable writers. Speaker points are assigned to each speaker/writer/agent, and every speech must contain particular arguments or argument structures to be ‘persuasive’ (in quotes, because persuasion in debate has as much to do with getting a judge to think they should be persuaded as it does with just persuasion). At the same time, the process of preparation and argument construction, which for a debater, makes up the bulk of the time invested in debate, almost exclusively concerns reading texts with very little agency. Arguments can be made based on their relationship to published texts, which the debater finds and assembles into an argument. At the same time, this process dismisses a large portion of what goes on during reading elsewhere – the reader/debater ignores, intentionally, arguments which fit poorly into the form of debate, or contradict the argument desired from a text. So, part of debate concerns being a proficient writer, but that writing exists symbolically subordinated to the debater’s status as a reader.

I think the relationship between reading, writing and agency concerns the material and perceptible impact of choice on politics/self concept. Subjects able to invoke a sense of agency over speech, politics, etc. in their self-concept have a different relationship to themselves and the world, even if they do not act on that agency. Choices can be understood, felt and incorporated into political thought, even when people don’t take the choices available to them. The presenece and experience of choice matters.

The experience of agency over language sustains the contradictions and ‘double binds’ of gender roles for women. The experience of being the whore/prude, pollution/purity have less to do with the specific manifestations of those gender roles as they do with the means by which they are labeled, through a system of language controlled and established by men. The history of language and labels, created by a particular group which comes to benefit from the use of that language, sustains the contradictions by means of necessity. The use of the labels emerges in particular situations where their uses benefit those who define. The nature of language use and application intersects this power to sustain contradictions in gender relationships.

Duncan