Three Anti-War things

I’m very interested in how the response to Cindy Sheehan plays out. I think anyone interested in anti-war politics should avoid the discussion, or contest the terms at all costs. Here’s why: the why doesn’t matter. Cindy Sheehan mattered for her intervention, for the creation of a new discourse around the war that coincided with an increasingly difficult war-thing (more on this later), making it politically acceptable as a ‘patriot’ to reject the war in Iraq. However, discussing her resignation catapults her back into the question, instead of letting it ride after her rhetorical task was (mostly successfully) completed. Talking about her resignation makes a news story/political question out of the ‘anti-war movement’s’ acceptance of… people? It makes feelings in general an issue, which always privileges reactionary responses, because change necessarily implies upsetting people. Cindy Sheehan screwed up big with a resignation letter.

Also: the Iraq war doesn’t exist. There is an occupation, but no war to fight. There’s no enemy, only an ongoing police action suppressing a conflict between any number of other people. Who are we fighting? ‘The insurgency’ is an incoherent concept; the link to the war on terror is discredited, though popular. Referring to a ‘war’ makes it seem like there’s something to win, which makes it more difficult to in. Occupations continue, falter, suppress, but don’t win. Continuing to call whatever the US is doing in Iraq a ‘war’ elides the differences between ‘terrorists’ in Iraq and ‘terrorists’ of the war on terror, and suggests that continued occupation can produce something useful.

Last: supporting the Democratic party on the war is antithetical to a sustainable anti-war strategy. The rhetoric of ‘benchmark’ implies that responsibility for not-violence lies with the Iraqis, and that the US policy lies between two choices: withdraw or occupation. IT also ignores any question of accountability: there are a vast number of other policies concerning the war in Iraq that have nothing to do with withdraw which are necessary to create democratic accountability, at the core of the pro war effort in the first place. Indictments, investigations, prosecutions, etc. may need to be at the forefront of a real anti-war strategy, in terms of sustainable prevention.

Duncan

Drawing lines...

I think I have an edit to the post I made about childhood earlier (Metaphor and Secret Complicities, 5/8/07). There is a distinction between the meaning of childhood and the powers brought to bear on it. Childhood means any number of things about becoming a person, but the discourse about desire I write about has more to do with a line-drawing project that identifies ideal situations for childhood. This is why discourses about kids growing up too fast is so incoherent: kids will never be any more grown up, they just develop in relationship to a new social reality. The contest over media content for children is as much a contest about time and conservation as it is about any particular social values. Childhood, and the meaning read or forced into it, are a function of a broader social system, indicative of time and social value, and the line between childhood and adulthood is a point of articulation for power.

I’ve always had vague problems with a theory of ideology that discusses ‘frames’ and their implications, and I think I’d like to hash them out soon.. now.. The first problem I have is with the stability of the terms: frames are very stable, unyielding, only broken or ignored, rather than something contestable or redeploy-able. Also, as a spatial metaphor, it leaves something to be desired: what lies on the outside of the frame? It seems to presume a wall, or reality that lies outside the frame; perhaps analogous to a lens or filter metaphor, a question of distortion (or at least a distorted space divided out from non-distortion). Frames as an inside/out explaination of reality forgets that frames lie (no pun) within frames, within frames, but all of the same size, the same function of discourse.

Duncan

Cancer again and growing up

Never let anyone tell you that you are living anything other than your own life. I’m still trying to adjust to the feeling of being alone, of negotiating the relationship to distant or just any number of absent other people. I think there is a fine line between growing up and maturing. I think that growing up involves finding a way to actively engage and expand while being relatively alone in the world, while maturing moreso involves the acceptance of conventions and complacencies of adulthood as laid out before you. I’ve been struck by how easy it is to slip into being mature: I always thought it to be a shock to the system, a conscious decision to start acting like an adult. Maturing is a surprisingly self-determined experience. How the hell did I become well adjusted or capable of talking to people I don’t know? Seriously. I remember writing about how much I valued my awkwardness, now I just get along. I have things, possessions that I’m attached to, people I know I want to know for life. I feel like I’m making the decisions that lead me into age-appropriate maturity, becoming responsible for myself in such a way that makes me an adult.

I liked writing about cancer because it explains how I feel about evolution (and growing up). If evolution is a result of random mutations and developments, there’s no reason to believe my body is making the right choices about developing or healing itself. Cancer is the body rebelling against itself, setting off questioning of internal consistency and shows how even our basic biology can betray us. I think that’s how I feel about the decisions I make about growing up/maturing: growing up is more cancerous, more self-critical and questioning, that subjects the negotiation of age and distance to some questioning, because its easy to betray yourself into complacency.

Duncan

Cancer? Keep writing

I’ve been thinking for a while about the strange hold cancers have on medicine and charity. More than anything, the concept of ‘racing for the cure’ or supporting research for a cure (and it always concerns a cure…) for cancer remains above questioning, truly apolitical. I suppose I’m merely interested in thinking about why.

Victim status: People with cancer are treated as if they are under assault, or subject to random violence. They assume victim status. However this relationships seems peculiar to me: cancer employs the body, the person, against itself; it does not strike so much as transform the self. The erasure of the body points towards the real problems of anti-cancer discourse, which is who is affected, and why.

I think cancer is a peculiarly industrial disease. A variety of industrial developments make debilitating cancer more likely: in this sense, cancer as a problem privileges a particular population on an international-developmental sense. Dying from cancer also means living long enough and not dying from a variety of faster moving environmental hazards, such as starvation. In a finer scale, cancers and similar diseases concentrate in areas around industrial chemical use and production, associated with economic and racial discriminations. Focusing on more than a ‘cure’ reveals the contours of production as a determining factor in the impact of cancer, perhaps politicizing it.

I think the corporeal impact of cancer determines the impact of appeals to stop it. The body itself rebels, rather than being subject to invasion or attack, dodging questions of action or exposure in correspondence to illness. Diseases like AIDS, a cold, etc. have a relationship to certain practices of self-care, boundary defense or preservation that focus discussion on prevention. Cancer’s causes lie outside individual human agency, in a particular realm of the democratic imaginary already a-political in many senses (economics: the naturalness of the market, the overwhelming power of industrial capital), making the cure equally apolitical.

Duncan

why I need to write more

I’ve found as of late that the things I write haunt me. When I read back on what I’ve written in the past and find it foreign to how I see myself writing or thinking now. This doesn’t always take the form of a progression or sense of maturity, but also a sense of being ambushed with the ideas I’ve had before… and otherwise lost to my present self. This is one of the things I like about writing – the expansion and transformation of time in relationship to manifestations of self in the past. Words and thoughts I write shift meaning and sometimes disappear when I write, and committing them to mild permanency widens the space for self questioning. Meanings begin in one place and begin again in others, in ways I may not expect or understand. I feel a more substantial intervention to structured thought when I write, a self-speculation and wariness of thoughts that doesn’t come necessarily in conversation.

I also think writing responds to the connections I feel between myself and politics as someone who reads often. Written language cannot contain its audience – the text may be copied or re-read any number of times without correspondence with the original author. It addresses anyone, generally, potentially across any number of spatial boundaries. For that, reading involves myself in political situations outside the immediate proximity of my physical experiences, and I feel like isolating communication in verbal expressions leaves significant portions of my political experience under theorized and unaddressed for the most part.

Duncan

Death and Meaning

My concept of purpose and meaning has a stubborn relationship with my death. What I look for in determining purpose and value in my life seems to constantly refer to what outlasts myself, what persists in social or physical meanings, rather than in any transitory moments of fulfillment. There is a weird persistence to the things that matter, because they are often quite mediated. A quality of writing is its permanence: a quality of self-knowledge is your sense of having a history, which requires writing as a means of constructing itself. We write meaning into past events – literally (no pun) in history books, much of history education concerns reading history books and constructing meaning from them. The field of history as academics involves the verification and solidification of events into appropriately textual events. Also, because we acquire so little information about the world first hand, meaning as an everyday experience is embodied by the movement of images, texts and gestures in the form of durable symbols. Knowledge has at least a semi-permanent status as a newspaper or other text, and I figure meaning for myself as a product of this semi-permanence: I don’t feel a gesture or act acquires meaning until it circulates, and in some sense, outlives the act. The accumulation of acts into a life, the assumed meaning it has similarly outlives itself, becomes social, becomes more than something flickering out with breath, embodied or signaling in ways I may not know or intend, but in some way persisting.

Duncan

Metaphor, secret complitities

Random notes on rhetoric and metaphor

First – hybridity. The metaphor of a hybrid seems to be appearing in several places – cars primary among them. I won’t pretend to know the origins of the term – if it appeared in biological discourse first, or any such thing, but the implications for the metaphor seem to derive primarily from this context. There are other potential metaphors available for describing the system of car propulsion that uses electricity and gas – a duality metaphor, a supplementary metaphor, any other number of metaphors that highlight difference and contrasts within the system itself. The hybridity metaphor accomplishes what these cannot: it erases the similarities between hybrid cars and non-hybrid cars by constructing a coherent, unified organism. Hybridity in the biological/scientific context implies seamless unity, a 3^rd organism more than the sum of parts for its completeness. ‘Hybrid cars’ become untethered from the problematic dimensions of their production by appearing to seamlessly integrate different technologies into an entirely new type of vehicle. This perhaps accounts for the self assurance with which hybrid car drivers approach the still troubling process of driving, and the political cover ‘hybridity’ draws for some car manufacturers and vehicles – a ‘hybrid’ SUV for example.

Second – valorization, almost a repressive hypothesis. I’ve written about sex before, about the lines we draw around sex/not sex, but I may have left out of that discussion the question of depth and penetration (no pun) ascribed to sex. For whatever reason, people believe sex to be particularly important vis-à-vis other activities, a valorized (or demonized) practice that implies a special type of access to a person’s humanity that cannot be found in other activities. Sex implies intimacy, or at least exception, in contrast with other activities. In certain discourses, this authorizes the injunction to regulation and control of sex – particularly in conjunction with traditional quasi Christian morality, but also the sex-industry on the whole which commodifies sex by emphasizing its importance in relationships and constructing its centrality to a fulfilled existence. The treatment of childhood is an analogue for this process in the treatment of childhood in many discourses. The valorization of childhood authorizes its control. For reasons unknown, we suffer from an illusion of the liberated, exceptionally important childhood. This involves an idealization of childhood – an illusion of being free from obligations and responsibilities, a free state in comparison with adulthood, combined with a developmental exceptionality that capititalizes on medical and psychiatric discourses to create childhood as a uniquely significant part of someone’s life. These converge around the need to closely regulate a child’s life – for safety (psychiatric or otherwise), but also for quality (in the mind of parents, primarily involving their participation in social/cultural/etc. activities).

Duncan

Education post #4 - History

In my experience, American history is taught with a focus on people and a stoic, immobile history. The myth of progress influences the tone of history, making it a calmer, almost intrinsically educative narrative from which to read and learn. If we are always progressing, all the decisions of the past must be good ones, making American history a morality tale with lessons for our lives today. Telling the story in terms of well-developed characters makes it easier to identify with, personal and potentially open to further change by people like those depicted. The second feature of American history teaching is the focus on people, partially a result of a representative democracy system that evaluates political choices primarily in terms of people and leaders. The most frequent decisions produced by political discourse involve those concerning the competence and character traits of individual people, elected as leaders. This pattern appears in discourse surrounding history, which looks at individual people as the movers and shakers of the political past. It sustains a myth of liberal individualism by identifying the locus of change in individual people, erasing from history the development of economic and cultural trends that lay the foundation for political possibility.

The degree to which this practice may have benefits is a function of the degree to which historical events are a product of the choices of specific people. Abu Ghraib, and Japanese Internment are both events which occurred as a result of the overwhelming influence of specific people. In a certain sense, teaching history through individual agents empowers pressure groups and protest on the people who do have their hands on the levers of power, who are susceptible to pressure. The human element of political tragedy makes them open to being read as contingent. However, the underside of this is the rhetoric of evil that suggests that catastrophic atrocities occurred as the result of a corrupt psyche or pure evil of one person. In many ways, the people committing terrible acts are just making what seems to be the right decision at the time, trying to get by. Who and what we see in historical events matters to the meaning and potential for events in the future.

Duncan

Education Post #3 - Media Literacy

The New York Times ran an article today (4/30) about a commercial for Viagra which pitches the pill by depicting everyday scenes for the target audience, with actors speaking in gibberish. The implication being that certain features of identity don’t require language. On television, this also means that messages and meaning don’t require language. It explicitly engages the transformation of identity into a series of visual markers, which create a social truth – a new form of authorization and consent building. Gender over the Internet shows this too, making it possible to bend and break norms in new ways, to use a verbal strategy of establishing yourself as one gender, while visually appearing as another. Internet gender draws out the contradictions of two facets of knowledge: that produced textually (written/spoken, through language, that which can be transcribed), and the experiential verifications of visual culture (which would disprove the production of reality through the text). The upshot being, that there are qualities of knowledge that extend beyond anything created by texts that distinguish it from information, or whatever name is applied to manifestations of truth through screen culture.

Truths are social values, not only produced in concert in social systems, but they also require an economy of social values that prioritize truth as the most significant feature of an act, idea or experience. While perhaps an incomplete or faulty description of many political economies that supposedly operate under the regime of truth, these economies to some degree reflect the social production of knowledge. There are transformations of experience that change in whatever manner the economies of value for truth itself. If you accept the idea that truths exist as an empirical reality as well as a claim to that empirical reality (and I certainly support not accepting that idea), then TV alters the economy of value structuring the empirical reality of truth by changing the types of claims internal to creating claims to truth. Basically, television and new forms of media create truth by employing the facets of knowledge described above – the visual, the non-textual, that which cannot necessarily be written down. Necessary changes result from this process, which can be seen in the kinds of things labeled real on television The realest things are often orchestrated, but demonstrate an awareness of their orchestration and connections in a particular way. Popular TV news stages anchors against giant banks of screens and people, moving images in a sea, a sense of connection and purposeful management of the wash of potential images. Reality TV shows have a more subtle economy than many people perhaps think. Viewers of reality TV recognize its falsity, and seek to negotiate it as resistant readers to the absurdity, passing ‘their’ judgment on the text and people involved. Reality is the negotiated settlement on uneven terms between the viewer and the text, a management of images that constructs how people act.

These notions of truth in television converge around the process of dividing out perspective and bias, of creating knowledge of the world through an abstracted rationality, the transformation of ideas with histories to information that has potentially neutral content, concepts, references to the world, the essential (as in basic, skeletal) facts of a thing, all for the sake of knowing that information. Information is knowledge transformed into text and verified by its text – something that has value in any application or reader, regardless of experience or context of reading. Information is fungible and transmittable: it reduces to text, and appears through media forms which convey ideas in a regular way. Information consists of signs and symbols.

But the reading of these signs contains more than those signs. The interpretation of a text involves reading through a media form, as well as the interpretation of signs themselves. Assigning importance to certain information also prioritizes the use of whatever media form through which that information occurs. Media serves as a filter to certain messages, prioritizing certain concepts (gender, see Viagra ex). Using information also allows the user to accustom themselves to a media form as well – learning to manipulate ideas in particular ways, a way of treating them with a particular regard. The manipulation of ideas occurs as the result of media, but also how use of ideas is evaluated. Treating ideas as information, something on the front/back of flashcards, things to list on a test, erases the agent knowing, and affirms ideas as information: something with value for its own sake. Distribution of a test to hundreds of people, universalizing an evaluation, suggests that individual experience doesn’t matter as much as the ability to articulate ideas in a mutually interpretable way. The units of the system – flashcards, bubbled in blank marks erase context for ideas, make them into mere information with value as a self-interested means to advancement. The implications of prioritizing certain ideas comes from the prioritization and increased saliency of certain media forms, as well as the specific ideological implications of the content. Form and content generate meaning

This has implications for the treatment of literacy. The ability to read particular media forms – books, written words, etc. – implies an ability to interpret the world in a particular way. It prioritizes particular ideas and particular idea forms. Illiteracy can be a result of the ability to interpret particular signs without the broader skills of reading a wide variety of texts. It refers not to incompetence in interpreting all signs, but merely one kind of text, prioritized over others. Because of this, we should queqstion the economy of attention that arises in (written-media) literate people versus (written-media) illiterate people, and the implications to prioritizing written-media literacy in education. Textual illiteracy highlights in an indirect way, the influence of television or radio, which serves as an ideological filter with those media forms controlled by insulated ownership, with specific economic and political interests. Textual illiteracy has temporal implications, with written media requiring sustained focus on a particular screen or page more often than other forms, which prioritize movement and the ability to see multiple screens at once, or in quick succession. Speed influences literacy in other ways. Social pressures encourage fast moving entertainment – either through the reduction/fragmentation of leisure time, or a work environment that thrives on repetition encourages, in supplement media that repeats certain gestures regularly in new ways. Textual illiteracy creates particular types of communities. Literacy in visual and audible forms of communication highlight relationships that operate through these mediums. The ecology of these senses exists in local communities or families primarily. A culture of embodied voices prioritizes locality, physical relationships (perhaps through blood but definitely physical proximity). This gives arguments employing family metaphors particularly persuasive, and gives particular saliency to claims about family values or familial relationships.

Duncan