Fighting Words

2009-01-17T09:19:00.000-08:00

Swirling Questions, lingering doubts.

The charachter of power - or opression - needs to shape how we respond to politics. Even the nature of the entity we direct ourselves against needs to be in question - do we concern ourselves with 'power,' or rather 'violence' or rather 'oppression'? Each implies a system of organization, each a strategy for change. Oppression contains within it a model of ideal life, a proper wholy lived life, a subject that has no objective basis. At the same time we posit this free person within the oppressed, we decry that naturalization of opressive tendancies that mask themselves as the 'only way' 'human nature' or 'inevitable.' A false consciousness neccesarily drives the purpetuation of social crimes, and a similarly arbitrary consciousness animates our thoughts on liberation.

No doubt we encounter wrongs, but the nature of those wrongs eludes us. At the same time, the struggle to define those wrongs itself is striated with power. The process of identifying wrongs and focusing change is the cornerstone of politics - how we know problems shapes how we change. The terribly academic process of deconstruction is neccesary to match the strategies of power that construct their own schema for thinking about change, but at the same time, it invests authority in those people who already have the time for abstract thought. It puts the burden of defining change in the hands of folks with relative privilege.

There's always a point at which our understanding of opression, and what needs to change, disappears into an individual. No subject of power remains so coherent as to unequivocobly demand a single response; our understanding of change neccesarily requires the addition of judgement that arrises out of ourselves. The void stares back. At this point, some notion of universal values, or the master-narrative of the political interjects and asserts a basis for change. "Ah, but it is capital, all along!"

When the master-narrative re-emerges, we then face the structures of power, and our means of confronting them. The development of scale in political systems occurs to take advantage of divisions of labor, so that the thinkers don't have to do their own violence, and so those committing violence don't have to think.

The Taste of Drifting Failure

2008-12-07T21:53:00.000-08:00

Ennui. The word came to my tongue less than fully formed, a bit mushy, but it stayed around. I rolled it through my mouth for a day before I shaped it into something solid, but it suits me, considering the circumstances.

I used to go searching for words, in bulk, but now I feel a visceral backlash when I read almost anything, like I would expect from food that spoiled. At the same time I feel spiritually starved, missing the satisfaction to stand up straight again.

Everything I say and read feels stale - brittle, an unkind remnant of something that once sated. At the same time, it slops together in a great stew, where I can no longer seem to distinguish the flavors and arguments within it. It used to be the ideas came through, sharp and deliberate, now I bumble through tongue tied, congested, dulled.

I wonder now to attribute my flightiness to this - I find myself equally repelled by all conditions of thought, and search endlessly between them because each one seems to miss something I can't place. Each new role I imagine for myself seems to suggest some reckoning, only now I see the list of jobs grown long as a realization itself.

The tastes lie on the edge of becoming describable. My drift towards fiction and allegory signals my pursuit into the barely unknown, where I imagine the solutions to lie. Ennui, the only word I make out now drifted from this nearly space. I spit it out, pick through it crudely with my fork, and hope it provides clues for when this fog on my senses will lift.

Family, Home.

2008-11-26T20:56:00.000-08:00

I always feel something inexplicable snap. It may be just leaving the city, but going to meet my family, something changes. My internal monologue shifts, and I suddenly race to justify myself to myself, anticipating some future. The result is almost always silence. I've come to expect a kind of quiet reflection when I visit my family, my parents in particular. Meeting them provides a kind of baseline, a way to judge where I've been and where I'm going.

Part of the silence comes from my several selves, each with their own ineffable and inexplicable mythologies. I exist in several different places, and even more moods, and I have trouble merging. I even wonder if it would do me any good. Inevitably, things come together - when I changed schools I needed to explain my college and debate self to my Austin life to defend the move, and to take stock of how far I had come. Part of my self-aware maturity (see previous post) involves introducing my several selves to each other, of bringing them together to shake hands. I miss the sense of growth, of dynamism that comes from reinvention. At each juncture that offers me the opportunity to explain one life to another, I'm tempted to lie, to avoid committing one living, growing self into the voice of my old, permanent roots. And really, that's what family means: your anchor, the unchanging foundations which make a compelling claim on your identity, no matter how you change.

Being around my family, my habits change. I become meticulous and clean, washing myself and dishes regularly, following up everything with practiced good manners. I acquire a kind of deliberateness that I lack when caught in the moments of my other spheres of life. My body reacts in strange, contradicted ways. Without fail, I go to bed early, and not merely out of boredom. Somehow, I become tired, as if all the stored tension from my day-to-day is released and floods my body. I can never tie down if I'm hungry or not, going from an empty stomach to a bloated hugeness without warning. I feel myself suddenly susceptible to illness, a variety of bodily discomforts spring up to greet me.

I sometimes wonder if they feel a sense of betrayal. "Look at all we've done for you yet you never call..." I expect the recriminations, but they never quite come. Maybe this is one step towards an answer to those pointed, unasked, nagging questions.

A revival?

2008-11-15T21:56:00.001-08:00

I knew I had grown up when I began to justify my prejudices as the dispositions of someone with the inherent right to be disposed; when I began to think of myself as a creature of habit, reflecting dimly on my past lives and weaving them into a tapestry I call my ‘formative years.’ I suddenly am someone with a ‘voice,’ someone able to write in ‘I’ sentences. I began to recognize which social situations I worked well in, and which I didn’t, and so scrupulously avoided those that made me ill at ease, and built relationships around those that worked. For the first time, I remember having feelings I no longer feel myself. It’s the art of management, holding carefully to the assurances built on my self analysis.

Maturity includes a regular fascination with the petty, and a self-satisfaction at having accomplished the mundane. my sudden responsibility for coping with forces unseen, larger than myself forces me to consider them as tiny battles, each with a single-serving victory. I begin to delight in making sensible decisions, ones that I could tell my parents and have them give reassuring, approving smiles. If art is the appreciation of the intrinsic, and politics the appreciation of ends and means, my maturity is the collapse of both into each other – the unerring satisfaction in being made into an ends-means, the fascination with life as it has been laid out.

The people that impress me most were those who did the most self-work, who don’t seem to remake them selves with every sentence, but rather read from a script they write and re-write in their tortured privacy. They sought answers and found conclusions, or at least ground firm enough to stand on so that they could launch their next self. I struggle for a point to think from.

I began to think about myself as myself when I left for college, found myself in a world that seemed to function without me, grating up against the easygoing indiscreetness I fostered in the years before. For the first time, I had time to kill, to spend exclusively on thinking about me, and I look back on it now as an awakening, when I found myself, or at least the self I know now. of course, all of this remains shrouded in damp mystery – no matter how much I think and rethink myself, my recollections of my past recollections are irritated by an uncertainty about the way things were, my constant forgetfulness that drives me to write in the first place.

Re-reading what has been written here, I recognize conclusions I still find dear, others since discarded. But many of the foundations remain in place, the trails remained blazed in my mind. I see myself being laid out, and I wonder what went before. Entering a new phase of myself, I wonder what I will remember, years from now. The words I wrote reflected enough of myself back to recognize the impending changes to the point of being able to resist them.

These words, stretching back almost 3 years, armored me to the changes that nearly molded me into the person I am not today, and I have unending appreciation for the path they set me on. For that reason, I want to revive this space.

Why Johnny Can Dissent

2007-10-27T17:09:00.001-07:00

Advertising is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The production of a hipper, more subversive mousetrap-as-commodity doesn’t necessarily signal the downfall of collective, subversive action, nor does it mark the death of dissent as we know it.

Subversiveness through consumption relies on a myth of our past, produced through a nostalgia industry, that internalizes a particular view of the essence of American identity. The commodification of subversion should be seen as part of a cultural environment that similarly commodifies the past as nostalgia and cultural identity. We accept a variety of identity founding myths in the consumption of places like Celebration, Florida (merely an extension of the similarly powerful myth of authentic home-life at the center of most suburban development), as well as in the consumption of tourism, the visual commodification of particular cultures, which we imagine as frozen in time, unaffected by our gaze. Where we believe ourselves to be coming from produces our imagination about where we need to go. There is a movement of puritanical right-wing morality in this country; the catch is that they are just as duped as the lefty-quasi rebels reading Burroughs. Both strategies sustain each other, and should be understood as part of the same media environment

However, the strategy of rebellion eventually produces its own destruction. The effective advertisement of dissent does actually make people want to dissent. Particularly with the development of pastiche techniques as dissent (I wrote about this in the post about Chuck Taylor’s), it encourages consumers to be subversive readers of cultural artifacts: they recognize weaknesses and points of appropriation of images, becoming a strategy of deconstruction. This ultimately manifests in something like the ‘fair trade’ movement, which undermines the commodity fetish structure by explicitly politicizing the means of production in the act of consumption.

This is not to say that the undermining of capital through advertising is necessarily inevitable. The language of dissent in advertising comes steeped in highly-individualistic terms, and collective action most likely is required of substantial social change in terms of the means of production. Also, the politicization of consumption itself needs to come fill circle, from blind consumption, to wary consumption and non-consumption, back to a strategic use of advertising and cultural symbols in commodities to produce social change. By making advertising a total-social-experience – a lifestyle, a steady supply of malleable and highly potent symbols has been placed in the hands of people merely living their everyday lives. No image will ever totally determine how people use it, and the potential for meaning slippage increases as advertising more totally defines our entire lives (the Far Side cartoon “Giorgio Armani at home” applies here). Even as ads come to encompass both assent and dissent, third-ways open at every turn.

Duncan

fetish objects

2007-10-21T22:01:00.000-07:00

The celebrity souvenir is the document of copresence, the embodiment of a mode of association that animates how we demonstrate authentic connection while simultaneously mediating our relationship with death. Memorials to a person inevitably come to objects of personal worth, objects that spent time on or around someone, more solid than they but slyly imprinted by their transient touch. We seek out objects of our heritage because they embody something that survives, that imprints our identity onto a linage stretching backwards and a future stretching indefinitely forward. The associations we make to specific people through objects derive from the power of being there in communication. We imagine that a more authentic connection comes as we approach each other physically, and owning Elvis’ hotel towels tell us that we have brought ourselves all the closer to some form of communication that defines intimacy. Not only are there less of the memento we seek, but they also signify something like a conversation with the king. Just as email or phones mediate an irreconcilable distance, the mass produced object implies a gap formed by the death of someone we with to memorialize: the objects don’t require the body of the idol and in fact hint at their death in their finitude. It implies a subtle contradiction between the need to embrace the finitude of one person, at one time in a unique connection produced by co-presence. Alongside this there is a need to exceed death by tying memory to a stable object, embodied in a photograph or similar fetish object.

Duncan

Dreaming ourselves

2007-10-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

In many surprising ways, the new age practice of mythic dream interpretation relies on popular modern myths concerning subjectivity and communication. First, the whole processes, particularly that of the use of lucid dreaming as a mode of self-discovery, seems radically committed to the processes of recovering a unified subject from the divisive, fragmenting power of the unconscious. The unconscious reveals that egoistic rationality necessarily fails to describe the whole range of human emotion and psychic activity: more than we care to admit, our thoughts have no basis in abstracted rationality. The process of translation (which I will talk about later) commits dreams and ideas back to a ‘one mind’ with desires, goals and needs understandable in terms of an ego. It recovers the unknown, unreflexive nature of self into an empirical practice

The process of translation reveals its own difficulties and missteps. First, the commitment to determining objective symbols suggests a misplaced faith in human grammar to explain the world. The recovery of the unknown into nouns with qualities and verbs with desires prioritizes a form of knowing composed in the massive process of organizing human relationships on a large scale. The process of producing meaning through a regular means discounts the idiosyncrasies and selectively communicative nature of dreams. The description of the world dream interpretation provides scripts unconscious desire in the garb of a specific language with a specific grammar; in the case of English, this becomes the noun – verb – object form, with a myriad of implications concerning human agency’s relationship to a lived (static?) world. this plays an important role in the appropriation of the unconscious into the conscious world, a process of escaping and losing meaning perhaps best left unsaid.

Duncan

Monuments and Plots

2007-10-12T19:43:00.001-07:00

What do you do at the point of your own dissolution? The problem I have with meaning is the deterrence of deconstruction, the ability to systematize everything into causes, effects and trends of power which subject our bodies to forces beyond control. I feel an inability to realize meaning in something that has no origin in self. I’ve found myself engrossed in reading about the spaces I inhabit, the modes of presence I practice – I always do these readings on the top floor of the library, looking down, silently. The monuments here capture you: somehow, their scale as a backdrop transposes onto the scale of your actions, the decicive texture they render on our bodies signals the experience of meaning in its own right. They say: “nowhere else but!” “no place other than!” to your every move, somehow their declarations of where fill in for answers to why. The monuments, the size and scale themselves help to erase what is human between us. They draw your attention towards achievement and permanence in the singular sense, the embodiment of phallic individualism, each erection of concrete and marble secure in their significance and inevitability (with no damage extracted by the photos and films in their various idolatries). It is this final analysis, of the absurdity of practicing self-performance under the tutelage of such immensities and mythical significations leaves me disarmed in purposes, at a cross-ways for understanding meaning: before me lies the massive promises of a world without doubts, behind lies the peculiar isolation of non-participation through deconstruction. Each plays off each other, constructs lurid tales of power, between that of the wise and detached and the engaged and overcoming. Neither seems to respect the immediacy and absence I feel at a point of articulating where my life will lead: predictions for the future tend to ignore us now.

Plots tend towards death: we act on them with an eye towards exceeding ourselves in death, to overcome it by killing others or monumentalizing ourselves. We attempt to rebel from our subjugation to the powers of annihilation in the historical memory. Killing someone else is the final imposition of order, the indisputable mark of potency that also demonstrates our overcoming of that act of death. Disorder, then also signals the inability of any force, including ourselves to produce meaning: there are no economies of attention, no reason to pay attention to any one part before the other, all elements reduced to the same by fact of their mutual irrelevance toward each other. The plot organizes, it draws power between elements to create ourselves anew, now in the eyes of those around us, the co-conspirators as well as those whom we plot against. Deconstruction is the attempt to hatch plots around us in everything we see or do. Deconstruction is the plot without promise of death.

Duncan

Mind the posting gap

2007-10-02T15:13:00.000-07:00

I believe that the notion authenticity produces itself as a photo-negative to the ‘cartoon’ of reproduction technologies in a given era. Scott McCloud made the point that every representation cartoonally (yeah, I said it) is a selective choice that represents particular salient features of the world in a way that suits the author. In a similar way, technologies of reproduction (mechanical or otherwise) selectively ‘cartoon’ the world to produce salient or what we perceive as real, representations of reality. Inevitably, reproduction leaves something out – it can never capture everything we know about the world through embodied experience, and so it selectively incorporates important objects. The photo-negative of ‘authenticity’ emphasizes the terms or fields of knowledge under- or un- represented in the act of reproducing (something). So, when visual elements were subject to reproduction, as described by Benjamin, what became important to ‘authenticity’ was an author, situated in time with the aesthetic werewithal to create an original document – an idea situated within the analog reproduction technologies which required some form of physical correspondence to create a copy. What cannot be reproduced in the copies becomes the foundation for ‘authenticity.’

So, what cannot be reproduced in an age of digital reproduction? In a consumer society tactile objects are subject to mass production, as are sounds sights and even tastes (ever tried ‘real’ Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavor beans?). What remains elusive to reproduction is the non-sensory: in this case, the most important feature is time. Indices of recency, originality, and time of creation produce what we know as an original document: no matter how fast transmission occurs, the display of certain media events occurs in at least one place before transmission, and that then becomes the standard of authenticity. Before the age of mass reproduction, artists working in isolation could simultaneously produce similar/identical works of art and still be considered original, or even masters in their work. With mechanical reproduction, and now digital reproduction, the simultaneous ubiquity of ideas and images accelerates the production of ‘authentic’ works by drastically increasing exposure to individual pieces of art, and so increasing the body of work against which ‘authenticity’ sets itself. When art can be copied and reproduced with great ease, the measure of authenticity becomes one of primacy: of being first, before the copies, before the imitations.

Duncan

Memorializing Memory

2007-09-11T22:37:00.000-07:00

The first question I asked was why I even wanted to see the World Trade Center site today. I don’t think I had a clear reason, but I wanted to start making sense of the strange contradictions I’ve felt towards the terrorist attacks. On one hand, I feel as I always have, that the attacks were little more than a prop for a more terrifying agenda, and that any discussion of the meaning of the actual attacks should be weighted towards a macro-political stance. However, seeing a few pictures of New York before 2001, and my feeling of being (minimally) present in NYC has mad the event more vivid, if not real. There are places and people around the city that really make September 11^th feel like a loss as much as a movie.

So, that’s the first real question that’s raised: how do you discuss the politics of September 11^th, while still recognizing the loss (of place, of people, of politics) produced during the attack. The site of the WTC deliberately leaves that open: it seems strained between creating a grand narrative of the attack (and thus something to at least discuss politically), and of leaving the space a memorial for families (largely cutting off discussion). Most of the memorials seemed to be half-efforts to compose lists of names and photos into a coherent picture – the word ‘heroes’ was everywhere, and names imposed on images of flags or the towers dominated the memorials. Mostly gone were individual pictures or sites of mourning – a few were left at the PATH station, a few more around the barrier-fence, but the most prominent and peopled memorials were compositions of names and images displayed under a title or banner of some kind.

Everything about the site shifts and flickers: it’s the only way to memorialize an absence. The most dominant visual feature – the huge twin spotlights pointed into the sky – embodies this most fully. First, the lights are different on closer look: they aren’t on the site of the WTC, but rather a block or so away, mounted on buildings. So, the lights go from resurrections of a dominant visual feature from afar, to inadequate attempts to represent the loss up close. This mirrors the meaning of 9/11 in general, as a simulated event, played out on TV screens, isolated in a space where our eyes and ears are drawn away from the actual event and towards glowing re-presentations of video. The lights themselves flicker – they cannot be shown in the daytime, at best a nocturnal embodiment of loss. Most of those who died at the WTC were commuters, so the lights remaining are memorials for a visual embodiment as seen by most New Yorkers, not so much those who died. They once again show the near impossibility of representing a loss fully – the irreducibility of loss experienced during an event like September 11^th.

The space itself seems part crime scene, part construction site, part memorial. Signs of construction are everywhere: cranes, ramps, signs warning for hardhats, etc. However, no signs of construction seem present – no scaffolding or raw materials are on site. In fact, the fence surrounding ‘ground zero’ is largely covered by a green fabric which prevents people from congregating and looking – making meaning of what remains. Access still seems restricted, the details still secret. The points where people seem to gather generally remain shielded. One spot I found where the tarp isn’t is off to one side, almost in an alley, a carefully restricted perspective. The end result is that people end up wandering, looking for something to see, to hold on to that would make sense of what was lost or emerging. Memorials appear at random intervals, entire parts of the site remain functionally invisible. People remain moving, occasionally pushed into the street by disappearing sidewalks or generally lost in the meandering boarded walkways sandwiched between fence and walls. The movement makes the memorial site a disoriented, transitory place, hindering introspection or contemplation. Never do you get a sense of having seen something- it remains an elusive absence.

Significantly, these features prevent the use of the site as a political tool except on the level of the symbolic, primarily played out through the endless tapes and movies about September 11^th, 2001. Representation of the space remains a private and regulated process – you must climb one of the surrounding buildings to get an aerial view, and this is something controlled by the owners of the buildings. The other representation depends on access to the global media systems which defined the event for the majority of the world.

The uncertain meaning of the memorial and the aftermath leaves the history and meaning of the event relatively uncertain. The appropriation of September 11^th into politics has been surprisingly fragmentary. The images and idea of memorialization has been the justification for peace groups, war-mongers, and whatever the Alex Jones contingent calls itself. On one level, this is due to the difficulty of appropriating the attacks as an attack on anything in particular: the government calls the object American values, the opposition calls it capital. Both could potentially be true depending on the position of the listener. The memorial embodies this difficulty, divided between the desire to create a national monument and the need to develop a huge part of the most valuable land on earth. To what end: the space of images which memory of September 11^th resides is a space of manipulation and a-historical reality. Thus, the first task of filmmakers (relatively successfully) challenging the supposed master-narrative of September 11^th was to establish a history, brandishing rumors and dossiers from the past into what appears to be a coherent history of deception that would prove their conspiracy. Similarly, the global war narrative relies on a perceived history of entrenched ideologies battling on an epochal scale. Both appropriate certain images to create an otherwise absent or fragmented history, and define the conditions for memory in a post-September 11^th world.

Duncan

Old Post #2 - gargling guggenheim

2007-09-09T20:54:00.001-07:00

Written Saturday

I visited the Guggenheim museum in New York yesterday and I enjoyed the experience much more than many other museums I have visited. What stood out for me was the architectural layout, which contrasted with other museums in allowing an openness of meaning in the art itself. The interior is a uniform matte white, with 6 ‘levels’ of art, unified by a spiraling mezzanine. Generally, it avoids flat walls and corners at right angles. The layout operates in two moves. The first creates an economy of attention, the second shows where to focus that attention. The meaning of the space is connected to other spaces with similar functions: it stands out as an expression of fluidity, and a desire to break with uniformity. Essentially, the physical building draws attention to the space itself, makes the space a point of consideration in the experience of the art on the walls. Then, the color of the walls redirects that focus by erasing itself: the white signifies a lack of attention, or at least a desire to avert eyes from itself. Rightly, the space recognizes its participation in creating meaning, and then takes steps away from that power.

Part of what makes art enjoyable is its openness to interpretation, which allows a potential point of identification for a number of viewers while at the same time drawing them together around a particular expression. My favorite art at the Guggenheim drew attention to different forms of meaning: methodological, as well as visual elements other than that on the surface. The building opens the art by avoiding strict genre and historical divisions, while levering open the spatial divisions which divide other museums. The central rotunda that links all the galleries is ringed by a spiraling ramp that avoids stairs and walled off spaces: the walkway allows each gallery space to be experienced as a progression of movement, rather than abrupt transition. The associations between individual works, artists and sections remains available for interpretation, rather than having those associations negated by more abrupt walls or doors.

Duncan

Old Post #1- C.R.E.A.M.

2007-09-09T20:52:00.000-07:00

Wrote this over 2 days last week-

Nietzsche said that the value of an idea did not solely concern its status as truth. In the same vein of ideas, the value of a political project may not have anything to do with its status as authentic, unified, or concrete. Sometimes, the meaning of a movement or activist project may have nothing to do with the established measures of meaning. The typical tool for social empowerment and ‘opportunity’ for disenfranchised people (such as the homeless) is money. However, an equally valuable (by any measure..) tool can also be mutual support systems, contacts with industry, self-fulfillment or even just a sense of accomplishment. In the inverse, donations of money can have an impact other than the merely monetary. Panhandling is a process that makes homelessness inconveniently visible to people who otherwise may not directly encounter abject poverty. The attempt to remove panhandlers is an overt example of erasure of homelessness without an effort to remedy the problem. However, there can be other forms of erasure: the attempt to prevent giving money to panhandlers, treating them as irresponsible or incompetent also erases the way that money acts as a form of communication. Money in transactions, like metaphor, connects two otherwise disconnected acts of labor. It designates particular people and acts as worthy of compensation/reward, and so also acts as a social sanction in its own right, independent of the disciplinary effects of capital. The non-economic becomes economic, the economic, non.

Attempts to constrain the meaning of acts of (non)compensation (particularly the designation of ‘waste’) delineates the social and the economic, and by implication, what remains open to politics. Moreso, it tells us what we think about ourselves as social beings. If we believe certain acts to be non-economic, it presumes the separate domain of the economic to consist of relationships between autonomous individuals, acting on rational principles. The implication of social, non-economic relationships in economic transaction demonstrates that economics and industry also run on social connections, norms of behavior, and a particular form of agency ensured by social networks. Similarly, in projects for social change, the domain of the corporate and capitalistic should not be totally excluded: ‘by any means necessary’ includes the means of power. Purchases, donations, endowments, etc. aren’t merely excuses to avoid ‘real’ change, but also function as symbols of allegiance and identification, which can be valuable in their own right. The use of corporate power expressed through donations (corruption), should not be seen solely as the outer limit of power in capitalism, but rather a specific strategy by a company, individual or industry to achieve a particular goal. A response that attempts to restore ‘genuine’ democracy by way of revolution cuts off struggles from empirically effective tools of change (money, advertising, PR are working, though perhaps for the wrong people) using a vision of political life that always was an illusion: the myth of genuine democracy born out of interpersonal debate.

Duncan

contradiction

2007-08-30T21:15:00.001-07:00

One of the greatest assets to hip hop culture is the recency of its appearance. The foundation for its development has been a democratic ethos that allows for the transformation and rewriting/mixing o f cultural texts. Brevity lends itself to transformation; new voices still could play a potentially significant role in historical development of its power. The remix and the graffiti paintbrush are two of the most durable elements of what can be identified as hip-hop culture; both take an otherwise static text and write over it while using the remainder of the original as a feature of the new message. Not just the text or message of the graff matters, but also the fact that it took over an otherwise public space and made it into a canvas. Every time someone writes about hip hop it puts cultural dynamism in potential crisis. The challenge is to develop a self-sustaining cultural practice that makes that crisis transformative but open to challenge in its own right. Writing about the culture of the remix has the potential to gloss over the role of writing in solidifying/tying down a practice (by committing an idea to permanence in a text), but also the layers of copyright, bureaucracy and technical knowledge which make that writing inaccessible and thus divorced from the culture it otherwise lauds. So, I think these things set out potential political goals for the dimensions of hiphop culture that focus on organized power: copyright law, technological empowerment, and the general transformation of our educational system towards a participatory model.

Duncan

Post from NYC

2007-08-27T20:00:00.001-07:00

When I went to Georgia, I set out with a stable of tasks and habits I wanted to develop to get what I thought was the most out of my trip. I was leaving something entrenched, something I at least pretended to have a grasp on. Stepping away from home meant I embraced the things that let me feel independent – I focused on my interests and wrote less home (except for calling peteo which I did lots). I felt a sense of patience and calmness that let me wait out what I could see was a transition point. Now, coming to New York, I have a much different impression of myself and what going to school means. My original task, that I embraced in Georgia, of finding myself, I find nearly impossible to do in NYC. The streets I’m walking have been beaten out so many times before, in songs, in movies, and in general American pop-lore. Navigating a cacophony of humanity requires a steely competence that doesn’t wait, that already has a bearing on you and your appearance, and so demands a response. In a city where so many people live, coping strategies develop to sort out what you see in front of you: you identify styles and appearances, and potentially identify with particular adornment or gestures. The process develops visual communication in common between people, and that communication cannot be averted. That is the inevitability of style: you appear before someone else, sharing yourself irrevocably. You can be swept up and marginalized without even realizing it. I see this as one part of the urgency with which I want to approach living and learning in New York. The other part is the simple expedience of having only two years of school left. Instead of merely sticking to a path I know, I want to open more doors, and perhaps leave a few that way when I leave. Regardless, as a facet of the self critical stance I want to take with my time here, I have to remember I’m essentially on vacation. Until I get a job, I can’t say I’m making it or really living in New York.

Duncan

Wikifuror

2007-08-22T00:03:00.001-07:00

So, the Wikipedia furor fascinates me. First, there was the initial backlash against the site, treating it as the downfall of knowledge and truth with the academy at its foundation: the problem was that just anyone could edit webpages, and well, it could just be anyone. The second wave concerns the project wikiscanner, which tracks the IP address of people editing Wikipedia pages, and subsequently identifies to the best of their abilities the identity of whoever edits. I think this has a few implications

One- understanding the death of the author may also require understanding cultural authorship. I don’t realize why direct corporate authorship of articles on Wikipedia matters so much. The author has died, indeed: it is impossible to identify any one writer as the authentic author of a work of the mind. To some degree, we always rely on the work of others to make ideas legible. However, that erasure of a single genesis point does not leave writing as a random process, floating in an ideological vacuum. Power relationships shape the meaning of ideas and how they are deployed, and it is a useful task to trace ideas employed in a work to a corporate or political source. Basically: with companies like Anheuser-Busch already controlling advertising and political campaigns both, who’s to say they aren’t authoring posts written by writers from other IP addresses? The person doing the typing matters less than you may think.

Two- The IP address as the new code for identity and authorship. To the extent that online discourse shapes political events and our understanding of the world, IP addresses are the one true link to individual agency remaining for analysis. IP addresses have several features that distinguish them from other forms of identity. They are explicitly regulated as on offshoot of corporate power. They are given out and assigned by companies with the power to reveal your identity, turn over records to law enforcement agencies, or really do whatever the crap they wanted. They function as a passcode: access is not denied at any point, but rather you trade in true anonymity and leeway for the ability of companies to track you. Part of that regulation and tracking involves implicit barriers to access established by class and race barriers. Other delineations of power involve technical knowledge: as an advanced and developed technical system, the Internet has running it an elite class of people with the technical knowledge to bend it to their will. That knowledge is the product of scarce and narrow education, as well as an acculturation into technical practice from a young age.

Duncan

today

2007-08-18T00:53:00.001-07:00

I need to keep track of my thoughts right now, before I go to sleep. In a world where I felt anything was possible and I was capable of any act, today restored my faith in god. Not the god that sends us to heaven or hell, but the god that reminds us we are matter, but that nonetheless guides us in our interactions with other humans. Why trust a phone call to tell you anything? There are times you know, when you realize words mean something more than they should on their face, when wires hum with truth. That for me, is god: the mysterious openness to human catastrophe that lets us feel the unseen and the unknowable with the force of a gunshot.

This summer, I’ve felt at least two different kinds of disappearing time. One, brought on by the repetitions of a life that doesn’t seem to matter so much, that slips away on wheels greased by its own inadequacy. When people treat you like your time and person matters little, it’s hard to marshal the will to make it matter by your own accord, and so the days turn to weeks, waiting for something to put you back on track. Then there are days which feel fated by means of absurd tragedy. It feels like fate because you never had a chance to say goodbye, because you seem subject to something beyond yourself that never even hinted at letting you have control. Events of your life, that make it life, seem inaccessible and under the control of other powers entirely.

Greif endures: we are followed by our own ghosts. The most terrifying part of grieving is that it pursues you indefinitely. Loss doesn’t end, it appears in times and places you know not yet. There’s something about hurt that almost immediately becomes truth for me. There’s no denial, no wistful remorse, only the way forward. What seems impossible is the sense that you won’t ever take a breather. It doesn’t quite quantify, nothing adds up, because it won’t come to you except in unanswered gestures. You lose what seemed natural, part of ourselves that we never had to question before. Absence itself hurts, but absence without respite defines grief for me.

how do you do justice to someone’s memory? What justice do we owe to someone’s memory, and to unspoken desires? In fulfilling someone’s wishes, we hope to revive them. They animate again, becoming agent to our lives, acting on us as if surviving. Justice becomes the vehicle to our fears of permanence. Its as if those we have lost would have one more chance to speak, and we let them speak the words we would want to hear – of vindication if need be.

The reason words fail us is that they stand inert next to a radically changed future. They offer condolence, but have been used so many times before in so many ways, we can’t help but feel like we’re falling into cliché. They are the tracing paper onto which we sketch a pale copy of what we really feel. Words were made for a thousand other people at once, and don’t seem suited to where we stand, to what we’ve lost.

Dispel the rumors of healing and take each day to mean something intrinsically and eternally worthwhile. Seizing the day we too often take to be an endorsement of a petty recklessness which rather leaves us numb. Living to our fullest also means care for your relationships and care for the people that matter. Sometimes we forget our impermanence.

Duncan

Clarification?

2007-08-17T00:40:00.000-07:00

When I wrote about my academic goals yesterday, I mentioned in passing the idea of aesthetics and its relationship to media systems. I wanted to draw out what I meant by this term to perhaps set me on a firmer course. TS Khun in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows that at the turning point of a paradigm shift, scientists are presented with two potentially internally consistent views of the world, each with different accounts of scientific reasoning and potential errors. One way that two mutually exclusive paradigms resolve themselves into a situation of normal science (where scientists and institutions practice science under the conditions established by a single paradigm, which is universally accepted) is through aesthetics. Basically, adopting one paradigm over another may make the practice of normal science more appealing, and so that particular paradigm prevails. I think this example clarifies what I mean by questions of aesthetics: the political and rhetorical forces that privilege certain internally consistent systems of knowledge over others. I think this is a question of visual form as well as more explicitly political questions. For the relationship of media ecology to aesthetics, I think my primary concern is visual – how does the internet transform the aesthetics of other visual mediums, etc. For the science example, scientific practice presumes a stable and immutable natural world as the object of its study. In conjunction with that, it privileges an aesthetic of permanence and stability, which creates a tendency towards singular, simple explanations of the natural world over more complex and seemingly arbitrary ones.

Duncan

New York

2007-08-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about what I want from NYU – I think much of my frustration with the trip (and I still just think of it as a trip…) has to do with the force of a place and people and the intellectual meekness with which I feel I am approaching leaving this life. When I talk about New York with people, I’m uncomfortable with the degree to which the city is mythologized as a place of maturation – a city living up to itself, and I don’t’ want to have to live up to Simon and Garfunkel when I move there. My way of coping has been to emphasize how I want to focus on school and my more explicit education at NYU. So, in the process of talking about what I want from moving, I’m compling a list of questions I want answered while still in school.

The power of reading as a social process in relationship to media systems. I think that the move for media literacy, the use of satire, and the transformation of consumption into an ethical process are connected by the transformation of reading skills into sources of social capital. I want to investigate these as a linked process that concern the dominance of certain media forms.

Media ecology and its link to social spaces in the city – do certain media forms validate or enable spatial structures of the city?

Media ecology and its link to aesthetics/persuasion

Gender and visual strategies. I want to study gender norms as a function of visual norms, and the assigning of intrinsic meaning to certain appearances. I think TS Khun hinted at this tendency as a function of Cartesian reasoning about the investigation of the world, but what do I know. Gestalt.

The difference between truth and meaning

I want to study visual rhetoric in general, but also to improve my reading of photographs and their persuasive tendencies.

Duncan

Back from the dead?

2007-08-13T23:57:00.001-07:00

I find myself haunted by sunrise and pursued by sunset. More than anything I’m obsessed by the liminality of my life right now. Something about moving has made me feel ephemeral again, perhaps as if I never even lived here. Now more than ever I realize I have the power to remake my life. I feel as if I should assemble a list of demands, and agenda for the revolutionary vanguard party establishing my new constitution, my new consistencies and complaints. The trouble is that this summer has been as much a starting point as an ending point to itself. So much of what has gone on here has no reference point to the future. At the same time, I know from here I start to rebuild what I see of myself after Georgia, after debate, after I confront so many things which have haunted me for years. In a sense, I feel like this summer will be left behind as a moment of resuscitation – the seconds of blackout after concussion but before leaping back to life.

What I have done this summer. I’ve learned lists help

Rode my bike… a lot, more than ever

Got a job

Rode home at 5 am

Got lunged at by a rabid dog

Read 4 books by Don DeLillo

Drove to Atlanta in a day. Drove back in a day also.

Quit Georgia

Got into NYU

Bought a bike, twice

Sold a bike, twice

Learned how to have conversation

Didn’t do debate work

Felt heartbroken

Watched a sunrise from my street

Didn’t sleep at home a lot

Sweat out all the water in my body, probably 5-6 times

Went swimming in the greenbelt

Felt ambitious

Felt stymied

Became briefly nocturnal

Rode a bike through downtown Atlanta

Ate popsicles

Wandered through my mother’s childhood

Had intense conversations

Forgot

Learned to appreciate style

Fixed bikes

Met lots of interesting people

Lost faith in me

Gained faith in others

Listened to lots of rap music

for duncan

2007-07-17T06:09:00.000-07:00

napalm girl

Echoes

2007-07-16T16:14:00.001-07:00

Last night, I began to take notes for a blog post about blogging. I was momentarily troubled by this urge to write, stemming purely from other blog posts I had read, and a growing sense of having the news pass me by without response. Regardless of the validity of these feelings, I think this is a good starting point for talking about the nature of blogging as an activity that fundamentally concerns reading and re-reading texts. I think that its easy to over-emphasize a paradigmatic shift brought on by the ability to comment and re-interpret media through blogging. I think blogs and other ‘web 2.0’ applications are in line with other ‘postmodern’ media sources that emphasize the ability to read (or satirize) media events. For television shows like The Simpsons (or SNL?), the emphasis has always been on reinterpretation of public events, news stories and their actors. Also, I think the assumption of a paradigm shift assumes a certain level of passivity on the part of regular newsmedia readers or TV watchers. People talk about TV, it becomes part of our collective consciousness, etc. The basic ‘stuff’ that forms the foundation to blogging comes from this rereading process – the format for any ‘good’ blog suggests that a post include links to other media as well as about 250 words of commentary. This suggests that one primary function of blogging is a shift in the economy of attention that drives news cycles: allowing people with computers to highlight and reinterpret media events in such a way to encourage people to then read and reread their own blogs. Indeed, the big ‘victories’ for blog culture involved the ability to draw attention to certain news stories that otherwise would have remained ‘under the radar’ of mainstream news. The primary functions of ‘web 2.0’ software – tagging, indexing, wordclouds, etc. – concern the ability to highlight attention to certain ideas, and to link them to others. The effect of these functions, as with satire, is often to gain mastery over the news and the swarm of information that composes the internet, and to transform them into objects of easy manipulation. This function parallels the phenomenology of computers as tools for data, image and information manipulation, as well as the experience of using and customizing graphic user interfaces as a whole. The goal is empowerment of the user – and blogs feed this illusion by allowing for the reclamation of and commentary on news media. For anyone growing up in an imagistic childworld, the process of writing and linking news on personalized webpages mirrors that process of postering walls with ads for cars and athletes, or the use of graffiti writing to transform image scapes. Reading and rereading mass media environments gives the reader a sense of social power. The discourse about citizen journalism that vastly overstates its truthtelling function demonstrates the fundamentals of blog writing and reading: entertainment as attention-distraction and the ability to be a capable reader of texts.

Duncan

USSF one

2007-06-20T13:22:00.000-07:00

In the run up to the US Social Forum, I’ve been reading some bell hooks to help ground how I prepare for the event (mentally at least). I’ve been thinking about how participation in political movements occurs and sometimes fails. I think there needs to be a new way of describing political participation to initiate a third ‘wave’ of feminist activism. The metaphor for blame and agency became a stumbling point for a critique of patriarchy and people’s participation in it. Notions of legalistic blame that locates harms solely in the mind of an autonomous individual, and describes complicity solely in terms of guilt and innocence determines the reception many people (men in particular?) have for a critique of patriarchal thinking. The assumption that a criticism of someone’s action meant an accusation of conscious malice creates the idea that feminists irrationally hate men and blame men for their problems. The stumbling block comes at the association between action and people, hinging on the model of agency that locates the genesis for actions solely in the mind of an actor.

This problem also works in the other direction, in determining people’s willingness to participate in politics. Many people identify with feminist ideals or even identify as feminists but don’t act like feminists, sometimes in active contradiction with the label. The role and status of ideas and malice seems to play a role in this: ideas (as a concept, a notion) are divorced from action, and that good intentions forgive bad actions. These are undergirded by the notion that ‘freedom’ means the ability, as an individual, to have maximum leeway in making the available choices presented to you (on the individual scale). I think two things are necessary: one, a new way of describing participation and support for feminism, that goes beyond mental disposition. The most effective democratic exercises in America are aesthetic and commercial – American Idol anyone? Participation isn’t dead, but the foundations for motivating it have changed. The second is a conception of freedom that exists in multiple. Freedom requires an interest in the needs and choices of other people. We are mutually interconnected, by means of communication and common space, and freedom for ourselves and others requires attending to those connections. Choice for one cannot be the standard against which progress is judged, because that choice, within a mutual environment, impacts the needs and desires of others. Ultimately, there are limits to freedom, circumscribed by our participation in social spaces with others: someone may always intervene upon us. Freedom involves dealing with those limits: finding and negotiating them.

Duncan

Time and tone

2007-06-14T13:42:00.001-07:00

In the past few years I’ve developed a strenuous mistrust of the institution of marriage. This skepticism I feel has a healthy justification in a variety of reasons that I often have difficulty articulating, and whenever I discuss the issue with anyone else, I’m usually met with a negative response. This is most likely the result of my tendencies towards hyperbole, and I’m usually forced to retreat to the fundamentals of how I feel about the world and its operation in terms of relationships: the acceptance of impermanence and the fleeting character of existence. I wrote before about the association between meaning and death, and I feel like this plays out in interesting ways in my relationships. One, they cannot outlast themselves; each relationship I have with another person necessarily dissolves along with us, or with the dissolution of particular needs and desires. Also, relationships can easily become crimes of convenience, topical anesthetic to painful situations that perhaps need confrontation or deeper resolutions. This is a function of their situatedness: as with all forms of thought and experience, physical relationships and structural inequalities often determine our approach to what we may consider more cerebral or abstract relationships. Prioritizing the cerebral experience of relationships in shifting physical and experiential situations sometimes means an inability to confront forms of experience which may need changing. The commitment of relationships to legal contracts, in a permanent, written sense, writes off (pun) the forms of experience which we may find in indescribable, unspeakable, and fleeting emotions, such as that of intimate, quiet moments in love. This is the peril I feel in writing letters of love, and the skepticism I feel towards human relationships played out in a legalistic tone.

Duncan

RE: The time is...

2007-06-09T06:03:00.000-07:00

I think that context in which we have numerically based cycles needs to be flushed out more to understand why:

1) everyday is given the same importance as every other day
and 2) time projects the illusion of permanence.

The concept of cyclical time is not new. It is a cornerstone for the ways that most civilization conceptualize time. Just look at ancient Mayan, Native American, Chinese, and Asian Indian cultures conceptualize time. If anything, the West is marked by a break from cyclical time, conceptualizing it as a linear progression: the march of time.

Therefore the context of time in which you are writing reveal some thing else about our Western perception of time. We live in a society so large just in sheer numbers the important events in individual lives are statistically insignificant to be considered special because there are multiple someones somewhere elses having the exact same experience, whether it be giving birth, getting married, or passing away.
But more importantly we live in a society that breaks social relationships that would provide counter evidence to the regularity of day to day experience. We no longer live in a society where children are being raised in loving daily relationship with their grandparents. Cross generational relationships position us to question the effects of time. They allow for the recognition that we may have youth now but it might be fleeting. It allows for the elderly and experienced to directly relate their successes and failures within the context of being in the twilight of their lives. Finally, it forces us to address mortality, intellectually, emotionally, morally, and culturally, rather than shipping our old off to nursing homes to die in quiet disgrace so they don't mar our mistaken beliefs that we are immortal.

Another social relationship that we break (and Duncan you should have seen this coming) is our relationship with the land, with the real cyclical progressions of the seasons, and with farmers and farms who manifest the relationship between time (in season) and the land (in what is grown). Every day we can go to the grocery store and buy anything regardless of the season. By doing this we have no commitment to living in a temporal world. If we eat locally and by the seasons, we use another sense, taste, to perceive the passing of time that allows us to mark more occasions as special for everyone living in that region. Unlike birth or death that is happening all around us at all times, the first strawberries, blackberries and tomatoes of a season mark for all of us committed to eating locally a special time, an occasion worth remembering and marking as special. Harvest time is another such time, especially in smaller rural communities where harvest is an event that calls on everyone to participate and situates them in time and place.

Sorry this is so rambling. This was just going to be a response till I realized I wrote this much.

Craig

The time is...

2007-06-03T22:41:00.000-07:00

How would we experience time without numbers or cycles? I feel like there should be a way to connect the idea of repetition and the idea of progression without a series of numbered cycles, conceived of as mapped days on a calender. In pretending that we repeat, or mapping our desires against a repeating schedule, it is possible to think of a limited life as an unlimited, repeated occurance. Not just think, I suppose: the workweek, the day schedule, regularity are demands placed on the body that manifest themselves in a calender with days and times. Consistent, regular output requires a workforce subjecting itself to regularity. Cyclical time projects an illusion of permanence and stability onto the future, a flattening that equates one day with one day, one year with any other year. The numbering of days/months/years bind them as equal signs, demonstrate their fungibility and similarities. I want to discover a way to experience time that gives voice to the urgency of our limitations as human beings, and to embrace the inexorable march towards nowhere in particular that would allow people to embrace the timliness of any effort to overthrow whatever mode of being which oppresses us.

Duncan

Three Anti-War things

2007-05-30T00:14:00.001-07:00

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...

2007-05-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-24T22:45:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-24T09:19:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-16T23:35:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-08T15:38:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-01T20:39:00.001-07:00

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

Education Post #2 - The ecology of education

2007-04-26T08:22:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-23T21:18:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-20T15:17:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-04-19T20:26:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-13T17:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-08T22:43:00.001-07:00

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..

2007-04-07T23:09:00.001-07:00

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

2007-04-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-04T22:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

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

Poems I have written in the last day

2007-03-31T20:39:00.000-07:00

Untitled

banal bodies

we have

severed ourselves

castrated, circumcised

mutilated mysteries

we come to grace

in un/dis-covering

flesh from foreground

Office

green lights

lavender skies

blood red brick

impulses of eyes

this is the

dream

dust

demon

machine

REVOLUTION

Resist

facile rhymes

with fist

I like poetry as a form of expression, particularly political, because it involves the reader explicitly. Because it doesn’t ascribe to pretensions of transparency clarity or explicitness, the writer writes with an eye to self, but the openness of meaning and interpretation. It uses particular markers to divulge itself as potentially anything (line breaks in particular, rhyme schemes which assemble meaning in new ways). Poetry breaks grammatical boundaries but also involves itself in interpretation. I feel that the category itself spans and slips so much, that the only way I feel comfortable defining it is through interpretation, and almost, the medium in which it is received. I also don’t think I like spoken poetry. I feel the greatest potential that comes from poems comes from written word, to view the assembly, and the intertextual features, the visible ‘frame’ of the poem as a text with multiple features, outlined by placement breaks or punctuation

Duncan

Post - postsomething

2007-03-30T21:06:00.000-07:00

Plurality is collapsing on itself.

No, seriously.

http://txcommie.wordpress.com/2007/03/07/some-of-my-mail-after-i-debated-horowitz-on-laura-ingraham/

The tone of both David Horowitz, and the group Justice For All brilliantly forecloses debate by opening it; riding the coattails of multicultural plurality as a vehicle to undermine the progressive movements that otherwise used equal participation and justice as rhetorical tools.

Part of the problem with multicultural/plural/inclusive debates is their impossibility/self-negation. The views not included in a discussion that includes all views are those that question the framework of discussion, or the intrinsic good of inclusion. The framework ‘inclusion’ includes everything except any view that may ‘exclude.’ Because this determination cannot be made conclusively – what might silence other people? – the mask of equal inclusion creates silences around itself, silences prevented by the use of inclusion.

People, capital and culture transform discussions, which creates the other problem with inclusion for inclusion’s sake: prejudice pictures and power shape discussions to where, no matter how much any number of views receive equal treatment, people understand messages using filters which favor certain arguments. Also, certain groups have the means (money, fervor, brainwashing) that allow them to create more effective messages than other people. And, in a context where ‘all voices are heard’ people believe they have the capacity to make objective or rational decisions about the subjects of discussion and debate.

The upshot of all this is not just that certain (nominally conservative, definitely dangerous) perspectives should not be included in debate, because limiting out people from discussion/debate is not only impossible, but that there needs to be a progressive rhetoric that counters the use of inclusion/discussion rhetoric in fascist/conservative discourse. This potentially could come out of an alternative model for public discussions, but I don’t think should come out of the rhetoric of open discussion and inclusion itself. Not only will calling for exclusion of conservative/fascists put you on the wrong side of public opinion, it plays into the rhetoric of reasonability and prudence that animates much of American conservatism.

I think one strategy is to talk about messages as rhetoric, to address the persuasive value of certain statements as persuasion. Not: “This group calls for X, X is a bad idea” but rather to say “this group’s message won’t work, because of Y.” This is the ‘I statements…” post I made before. Messages labeled persuasive will be more persuasive (at least I think so [no pun intended]). Who knows. I just think that talking about inclusion had an important role in one historical situation, but that situation may not be the one in which we currently live.

Duncan

Some Rhetoric

2007-03-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

First, ‘I statements’ and being behind the scenes – I’ve been fascinated by the treatment of presidential campaigns in particular in the media, where media stories focus not on reporting a message, but the creation of a message and the coverage of predicted outcomes of politician’s uses of media devices. (example is this article in the NYT about Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer) This also appears in political documents which talk about the way that ‘the American people’ will receive arguments, particularly prevalent in the painting by both major political parties of the other as extremist and marginalized. These rhetorical texts seem to be on some level, prior to actual political messages, that gives the audience a sense of being ‘behind the scenes,’ understanding more than a message, but also the way other people will perceive a message. I find these strategies effective, and here’s why. When an audience experiences a ‘typical’ rhetorical text, like a speech, they make judgments about each statement, passing some judgment about the truth, morality or usefulness of each argument. So: “America is at war” requires the audience to question their understanding of war, the condition of America today, etc… However “A majority of Americans today recognize that our country is at war” not only makes the same argument, but bypasses judgment by the audience of the claim – we already ‘know’ the claim is persuasive, which makes questioning of its truth more difficult, and transforms treatment of the claim by the audience a question of ethos – what do we think about the American people and their belief about war? So with political analysts talking about politicians choices (and the implications stemming from them, the question is of the analyst’s ethos rather than how audiences in general might actually treat a message.

Second ‘pop-science –

Scientific certainty – science in general parlance and western rationality carries a mantle of absolute veracity, a standard of truth that cannot be surpassed. Good science is certain science, endlessly repeatable by however many people. This creates space for the strategy of doubt and mystification by industries which kill people – calling studies of harm or warming inconclusive or calling attention to dissenting opinions concerning the harm in question. People believe that studies should be absolutely conclusive to qualify as scientific evidence for a truth, because of the status science has as verification of our industrial civilization

Heartbeat – a bill in the Georgia senate would require providers of abortion to provide women seeking abortions a chance to listen to the heartbeat of a fetus before the abortion. This is the same pop-medicine pseudo science bullshit that we saw with the Terri Schaivo case- people make random conjecture about what life means and when it begins based on common parlance. I think the ‘heartbeat’ think (also seen here) comes from the (too numerous) medical entertainments where we see people being revived or being declared dead based on the machines which beep and show the line depicting heartbeat – the matter of life and death as it is most commonly seen in American public discourse looks and sounds like a heartbeat – it’s a visable and audible measure that transfers well over TV that becomes a stand in for realistic medical decisions (which shouldn’t be the subject of legislation, except to reserve space to make a decision for the agents directly involved, namely women seeking abortions)

Duncan

Theocratic Time

2007-03-23T23:16:00.000-07:00

This was more interesting when I started writing it a few days ago...

The role of time and liberation in fundamentalist religious movements has parallels in many non-fundamentalist political movements. I think it’s important to understand fundamentalist religious movements as rhetorical strategies for mobilizing people for political action. All messages make sense to someone, and all people make some sense through messages: the only ‘reason’ or ‘logic’ that matters in politics is the one that motivates people to act. That’s why fundamentalist religious groups should be seen as more than the outgrowth of irrational extremism, and more so as the mobilization of people through a specific rhetorical strategy.

The first similarity between religious groups and other political groups concerns the definition and possibility of freedom/liberation/redemption. I see these terms as tied up in each other because they all concern some escape from or transcendence of regular forms of oppression. Marx’s argument that religion is the “opiate of the masses” is an argument about explicit/specific ideologies in bourgeois capitalism, but it has parallels to debates within other liberation/nonstate activists about the function of liberal reform as a salve or mask for state violence (or other forms of violence). Marx’s treatment of religion has parallels in the ways that the argument for paid women’s domestic can be seen as a false promise for freedom, and the mere amelioration and rationalization of worse wounds by capital. Religion is one expression of the cry of the oppressed, just as any other liberation movement is. It merely identifies different means and understandings of what liberation looks like to mobilize people to action. Also, this explains why looking at rhetorical strategies in religious movements is so important: because they are first and foremost political expressions, with implications for understanding loci of oppression, but also for (re)directing political energy, with a co-opting of transformative energy.

I think one of the more important rhetorical strategies fundamentalist religious groups use is a redefinition of time. How people consider time, and how much of it they think they have, determines their perceptions of the political tools available for them. I think there is a general sense of some limited amount of available time, because only when you consider time as constrained on some level is it possible to compare potential costs and rewards for commitment to a political strategy. The perception of a relatively small sacrifice met with a long, sustained reward motivates a commitment to pursue a life of religious doctrine when the stakes, the scene on which life occurs, changes.

I like this article http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,1344082,00.html because it explains not just a relationship to truth but the means that support a relationship to truth – the political institutions required, what sense of self and reading… (it also expresses a great love for the activity of reading which I really appreciate). However, I think it is too a-historical in that it doesn’t look at how fundamentalists look at themselves through rhetoric about their roles and goals in the world – what is common about fundamentalisms that requires literalism? There seems to be a very particular sense of ultimate rewards, situated in a broad historical time period – rewards that come to matter for their position as part of a history that erases other occupations. Meaning is constructed around time, and the perception of purposefulness attached to that. All forms of fundamentalism seem to be attached to an erasure of individual selfhood in relation to a political messianic goal – this requires the artificial creation of tension between individual desire and collective responsibility. Theocracies talk about responsibility in personal terms – either as sin or as violating revolutionary ends. Individualization is linked to political expedience – the regulation of self under conditions of scarcity for the means of survival, detachment from land/history. These are the conditions also of oppression under capital, which is a driving force for fundamentalist backlash. A litteral, mechanical understanding of words makes the individual responsible for every meaning, leaving everything up to particular forms of emotional control.

Duncan

Sontag, some ethics

2007-03-20T21:14:00.000-07:00

What do we expect from moral responsiveness when we describe the callousness of our response to photographs of horror? Nietzsche said that pity was the emotion of the weak, who react to events to which they have no connection and no power to change. Photographs capture a moment, preferably a moment with an event or action – the best news photos capture dynamism or its aftermath. At the same time, photographs are always of death, in that they refer (if we believe their veracity) to an event that has already occurred, and cannot be changed. Their power is also their disarming, in that the event, to which we know occurred, we also know to be past. The event always seems to tell the story, coinciding with the erasure of context. The moral callousness issue is a product of the photo’s seduction: we presume we see the moral story in its complete form, and that the event IS, providing the prerequisites for moral responsiveness. The context of images –displayed in an entertainment frame, competing with other stories (fictional, or no) that may be more appealing, and also in a context of continual image making, and the continual state of inaction that provides. There are a lot of wars, in a lot of places, and we don’t have access to all of them.

Every ethical calculus requires a consideration of what type of agent we perceive ourselves to be. This includes questions of what means of control and intervention we perceive ourselves to have, as well as consideration of the ‘goods’ we seek to protect. Lastly, the ethical decision includes consideration of more than outcome, achievement of goods, but also a question of whether we are satisfied with the calculus we entered into, the way we make decisions even if we fail in achieving our goals. The metaphor of the global village explains the way the call of callousness positions us in relation to suffering others. Not only to images appear near, we think of ourselves as physically near, but in a facile way. There is a sense of potency assumed, or implicitly hoped for. We wish to be able to intervene, to step in from a distance. The goods seem to be ‘avoidance of wanton human suffering’ – which is the only kind that can appear in photographs, which capture a moment and the fear of momentary decisions, preferably transition points in people’s lives. Two examples: “napalm girl” and the ‘execution of a viet cong soldier’ from the Vietnam war – in the pictures we see unnecessary suffering, but in both the context changes their meaning (the girl was immediately treated, the soldier was a man who just killed a small sum of the executioners colleagues). The last part: we really want to think we are moral, and that we can help in immediate ways – the outrage expressed at inaction serves as distancing and the creation of a moral calculus that the speaker finds acceptable, regardless of its usefulness.

Duncan

I can't account for this post entirely

2007-03-19T22:14:00.000-07:00

Because we have faith in photographs as verification of reality, our understanding and appreciation of other events changes to the point that we require more photographs. Pictures, and stability through a lens on paper (or screen) provides irrefutable evidence for many people of an event’s reality. Photos become the means and currency of verifying events between people. Truth acquires a sense of stability and referentiality – we can come back to the picture, it won’t change, it still tells the same story we wish it to, over and over again. Reality becomes transfixed by its own gaze. At the same time, the lives led outside the camera move, strangely, much quicker than photographs themselves. We don’t believe in the reality of an event until our understanding of that event operates in the same terms as the photograph – stable, unchanging, perhaps rewind-able and manipulate-able. Generally, people wish to believe their lives happened, and so the cycle restarts with the desire to verify with photographs. Pictures take the place of memory, not in the sense that we don’t remember, but rather organic memory is insufficient to verify anything about experience. And so, we become ever more record-prone – transference prone.

Perhaps this is because we relate to the world with a series of medals and achievements that construct us as beings. An image culture sets up a situation in which we see ourselves as being seen by others. We share ourselves in brief tangential relationships in which people move in different direction quickly. The currency of relationships lies in being able to paint yourself with ever more grandiose terms. The lack of any specific cultural background, or perhaps shared backgrounds of placelessness between people, creates a situation where identity comes from communication of shared events between people. Conversations between people proceed with questions of doing: coming back from spring break, people have consistently asked me what I did over the week, the assumption being I should judge my life in terms of the nature of the events it includes. We have to be entertained by our lives. The events people ask about are provocations and moments of excitement: we look for some heightened state of emotional intensity for its own sake, because it validates the time we spend and makes sure we know we are doing something; just like news organizations look for blood because blood makes an event creating news. People as agents create meaning on an otherwise blank world (a blank that in reality contains the things that just don’t happen to change between units of time: eating, sleeping). Event-ness requires an exception to something foregrounded as un-doing. Maybe we should reconfigure the whole thing. Living breathing sleeping shitting is something DONE on the world because they verify and constitute your existence in the world – they are space occupying events, they make up you. Loving killing jumping traveling photographing are now considered LIVING (that is to say inevitable, indistinguishable events) because they have no intrinsic content except to occupy what we see as empty space in our lives and form the preconditions for understanding ourselves.

Duncan

Habits and Terrorism

2007-03-18T16:18:00.002-07:00

I think the role of habit and politics determines the effectiveness of a variety of rhetorical terms. I think that by habit, I mean the practices that people accustom themselves to doing every day, the things caught up in the means of sustaining themselves in the world, the preconditions for daily life. These could be mental habits: the things we have to do to feel ready to ‘face the world’ or physical consumptive habits: what and where do I have to buy in order to (socially, physically, mentally) make it through the day. Because habits are tied so closely to the feelings of our basic humanity, questioning them can throw identity into question. Habits can also be presuppositions about choices we will have, presuppositions that determine which and what type of relationships we will pursue. Once we become invested in particular (types) of relationships, disrupting the choices that found them troubles our sense of self. So, the most effective way to convince someone a course of action is good is to just start that course of action. Our sense of choice and self emerge organically around this.

I think this makes certain governmental functions more effective than others. The executive branch, when it just decides to do something (invade, weaken environmental protections), it not only forecloses debate, but makes the most persuasive argument possible for a course of action, which is action. That’s why creating rhetorical and legal hurdles to executive action is so important: because the power to just DO matters so much.

I think habit defines the contours of debate about the choice to have an abortion, because heterosexual people have entered relationships around the notion of a right to privacy, and all it entails, including the right to an abortion. I don’t think that this means that we will never see legal restrictions on the right to abortion: I think it just raises the stakes. The force of habit makes the restructuring of relationships even more violent, and makes the pursuit of illegal, dangerous abortions more likely. I think it creates a rhetorical resource for those seeking to protect the rights of choice, as many heterosexual people think of their sexual relationships in terms of the choice of an abortion, and throwing those relationships into doubt threatens a great deal about their personal identity.

I also think that this shapes the nature of the discourse around ‘terrorism’ as a term. Its clear that under a strict definition, many of the policies that the United States has engaged in, and continues to pursue, should be labeled terrorist acts. However, the term ‘terrorist’ as a tool for mobilizing public outrage and resistance towards those acts in the US will remain ineffective because it questions the habits of political identity and consumption at the core of American identity. Cheap oil matters a lot to American self-identity. Terroristic actions taken in pursuit of cheap oil can be justified to the public because it preserves habits of consumption and movement fundamental to our identity. The term ‘terrorist’ carries no universal implications for people’s psyche; it is a term that matters for people when mobilized against (people/regimes/ideologies) that question American habits of thought and consumption.

Duncan

2007-03-17T23:10:00.000-07:00

Have any of you used the @ sign as an anarchy symbol?

In Need of Repair

2007-03-17T22:41:00.000-07:00

How often do social machines break? Can couplings come loose, bearings break, hoses unhook, circuits cease to circulate? And if so, does the machine continue to exist? I need to sort out how much I am invested in the social machines to which I currently attach; to find out the conditions for making new decisions and directions in my life. I know that I am invested in certain things: school (in particular), interpersonal relationships, family ties, etc. I also know that these things are a result of other machines investing in me: my parents, my friends, debaters, other social machines which like me as a productive cog. Because of these interconnections which pivot and move through me, I feel a loss of agency over my means of existence. Even beyond this, I don’t feel comfortable approaching decisions outside of the framework of funding and consultation with my parents, and my use of a certain type of education (most prominent examples of a larger number of habitual tools for negotiating my world). In many ways I don’t feel (or encounter any substinative examples of) a sense of breakdown in these social machines. I’m finding it hard to make decisions outside the frameworks already established in my life by these social apparatuses.

Perhaps this has to do with my writing about time and prediction earlier. There is no reason to believe we have a future (or that we should know how to make sense of it if we do). However I continue to engage the world with certain presuppositions about my ability to move and access certain things in the world, and in many cases those presuppositions are actually necessary preconditions to doing something. Example: how should I get from Athens, Georgia to Olympia, Washington? The answer I have comes to buying access to some form of private transportation: plane, car, bus, etc… I presuppose I have access to those things, and I don’t really know how to get there without them. There are probably more examples. I feel that the way I express my desire to live as a satisfied and ethical human being is constrained by the habits in thinking I’ve picked up in life. That is why I think my (upcoming) decision on where to go to college matters so much, because I feel that it concerns the social tools I will have available, physically and mentally, as I go through later life. Do I exist as who I am only because I am a social machine who (in/out)puts only in particular forms? Or could I survive a breakdown in the various means by which I am attached to the world around me?

Duncan

Document this

2007-03-13T12:13:00.000-07:00

The foundation for sovereign-state-governmentality lies at the juncture between text and document. A text consists of transferable assemblages of words and letters which form a message while a document is a specific, historical and authoritative text codified into a meaning carrying object. The meaning of a document cannot be reduced to the text, but also meaning carried by the relationship people, other texts and governments have to the physical object itself.

The difference between the two is rhetorical, whereby a series of ceremonies and physical arrangements transform particular texts into documents, and not others. Government in the state form works because it removes from consideration competing allegiances towards the administration of basic life functions; states must be univocal to efficiently administer populations of the size and scale of nationalities. Uniformity garners efficiency, and textual codes allow for mutual intelligibility and fungibility, promoting some degree of uniformity. However, the possibility of arbitrary amendment or transformation of a text undermines whatever efficiency garnered by the usefulness of texts. Thus, state administration requires a unique space of authority for a sense of univocality and unidirectional reference to create efficient administration. IN order for only one voice to be heard, one text must maintain authority, that text transforms into a document (a bill, a declaration, a constitution).

Government concerning documents allows for the administration of a particular sphere of human existence, which other forms of media cannot. Stability is needed for the administration of foodstuffs (planting requires planning, and planning implies the ability to predict into the future), or of capital projects (transportation systems, other capital investments make sense in an environment that allows for prediction of future needs). Other media forms may be poorly suited for achieving the goals of a nation state in these areas – imagine ‘open source’ contracting for road building that allowed for editing by anyone anywhere, or filmed constitution. The internet, digital media remain only texts because verification of origins and source is impossible, reduced only to manipulable bits and bytes. Film as a media form lacks the fungibility of texts. Textual symbols move between contexts and retain meaning in a way film does not. Film has a unique, singular referent, which is a subject filmed at a particular time in a particular place. The connection of events from one frame to another seems wholly impossible to recreate – intervening variables make perfect transference impossible. Film, or rather video may have genres which allow for transferable meaning, but generally remains a media concerned with one place at one time. A document must refer to one event/situation as the exclusive source of authority, but must also be able to refer to other events and situations in the application of the document’s meaning.

So, what does it take to make a text a document? There must be a performance that codifies originality and the uniqueness of the text. One form of mooting challenges to textual authority comes by distinguishing one text from another by affixing it with a seal, a code, a signature – something that distinguishes it from another. This distinguishing mark, then is co-productive with other narratives of authority established through argument, rhetoric or force. The signature of the President gives particular texts weight because of the nature of the presidency, but the President also must sign texts to be considered a president. Generally this also coincides with a physical locating of the text in particular halls of power, making all other texts that copy a document ‘reproductions of’ rather than documents with any intrinsic authority themselves. The publication of documents creates value around an original text, as a quality unique only to one copy of a text, an exclusivity that confers authority.

I originally thought of this in terms of foundational texts of the US Government, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Evidence of a process of documentation in the Declaration is everywhere. The agency of people in relation to their government appears as the ability to “alter or to abolish,” “institute,” or “laying foundations.” This transformation of government into a concrete forms parallels the transformation of texts into concrete documents: authority for government is conferred by physical and specific texts, which can be changed or destroyed, but authority moves from one central, particular text to other organizing principles of governance. The whole layout of the document confers a sense of legitimacy onto the text, giving it power as a governmental document, rather than a political text. The listing of grievances, reference to representation and natural rights, appeals to inalienable human nature: all these do the work of documentizing the text. The signers must distinguish themselves from joint publishers of a political tract as governmental authorities, and the bulk of the text does this work.

Ramble ramble ramble…

Duncan

The Party Lines of Thinking

2007-03-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

I wanted to address the degree to which I think sovereign political process has a stranglehold on political thought in general. this appears most distinctly for me when talking about left/right debates in general, as well as talking about feminist movements. We believe ourselves to be participating in politics that operates according to A (as in one) decision. The operation of government, particularly television government (working at even faster rates, with clearer results) creates a myth of social progress as on/off, yea/nay, veto/override. Maybe the frustration with the feeling of hopelessness comes from our expectations – we’re pre-empted from the start because a particular kind of change dominates our perception of reality. The hegemony of speed and efficiency rumble forth as the modes of knowing change. The means to affect change that occurs with such speed structures other relationships to the government structure issuing whatever orders.

Government forms its own genre of social change. Genre refers to consistant patterns of rhetoric that audiences and speakers of rhetoric refer to in the creation of meaning. Genres ‘work’ because they form a shorthand for communication: one statement implies another, implies another, easing communication, under the pressure of other needs. The power of this genre of social change rhetoric capitalizes on the function of genre as a reference to the speed of ideas – how fast they can move to create meaning.

Aside from the hegemony of speed, the grip of a governmental rubric affects perceptions of the unity of political movements. Feminists do not share a political platform or party, but the approval of one feminist of a political position allows for the spin of that as ratification of the position for feminists in general – i.e. Feminists for Life, who challenge the ability to mobilize feminists around pro-choice issues. Feminism looks more like participation in a party platform or an identity category rather than a political stance. What does it take to be a feminist? Can you believe in women’s liberation but not be a feminist? The identity marker for theory and humans ‘feminist’ may mystify political organization or conflate issues that need not be conflated. The response I get when I tell people I am a Women’s Studies minor is that “feminists go to far.” Well, which feminists, and what do they have to do anything? The conflation of feminist theories behind the structure of a party or monolithic body of thought allows for some degree of political organization, but also a platform for attack or disqualification of all thought concerning liberation behind the same convergence of thought.

Duncan

written yesterday - tradition

2007-03-09T18:44:00.000-08:00

Where and when can we find the traditional? Just like we should banish from all use the term ‘natural’ we should banish ‘traditional.’ I mean this in the sense of liberation studies of all forms, not merely in the recourse to tradition in the production of hegemonic norms. Traditional roles never were and our understanding of how other people understand ideal status for women or people in general often remains mystified as a form of arbitrary production. Seeing ourselves being seen, transgressing as a political act is a tenuous one, linked more or less to our understanding of social repression. I don’t mean that we should abolish liberation through practice of transforming ourselves, but rather we should abolish the idea of line drawing implied by the notion of transgression, when often the label ‘subversive’ creates the space sub-verted itself. A different way to systemically think of liberation could be through reference to specific object of a subversive act, or the acts relationship to fulfillment of human experience that we may or may not determine to be good.

Duncan

Tone deaf

2007-03-05T17:30:00.001-08:00

I feel a sense of muteness, of being tuned/toned/turned down by my surroundings. I don’t want to be transformed by the daily unrelent of predetermined acceptable terms for engaging myself: I am also tired of being told I am not happy with my life. Both feelings concern the way in which I mentally perceive the conditions under which I engage the world. I feel as if I should be have to interpret the things that happen as part of my life on their own terms, with out the impetus to transform "hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness" if the opportunity requires it. Sometimes embracing hysterical misery is important to understanding the conditions of existence and experience. Revolution, more than anything, concerns how we perceive the meaning of change: an end, or a means. Reform as part of institutional change doesn’t imply that revolution is necessary, the only problem arises when we allow reformism to dominate the understanding of what change means. The same applies to life on the whole: existence looses meaning when we allow acceptance of the status quo to dominate our understanding of what it means to be happy.

Duncan

Post not about disaffectedness

2007-03-04T22:17:00.000-08:00

Is calling someone beautiful dehumanizing? It seems to de-center their worth from any intrinsic value they have, re-orienting their value to their inclusion in a group of qualities, features, people culturally condoned to be beautiful. Considering someone beautiful, and valuing them for it removes the issue of difference, their mark on desire, and focuses on their participation in a social system of valuation. It almost seems to value an affirmation of the viewer’s social status more so than anything about the person complimented. To be associated with someone beautiful, almost by definition, confers status and privilege (of some kind or another). “you’re beautiful” requires reference to how someone will be perceived by others, or at least how the speaker came to be conditioned to have this response. Both of these prioritize the experience of the speaker/spoken to in relation to social norms, rather than any specific human, interpersonal connection.

Duncan

The future and past

2007-02-26T14:23:00.000-08:00

Debate involves the mind-god-trick of self evident goals. Debate operates under a myth involving the effects of personal reward and direct investment with an end we can see. The operation of the ballot is mechanical and absolute: win or loss, with minor gradations of speaker points. The incentive, because of the clarity, (moral – win good, loss bad; normative – what should be done inscribed with similar starkness) produces its own peculiar motivations for action, and means for thinking of the world. More than anything, recently, debate has struck me as egocentric, obscuring the ends for which it operates. The question becomes for me, whether the habituated structure of engagement of debating for a ballot overflows its original container, and spills into other forms of political engagement, whereby the expectation and structure of change must be as clear for me to be motivated to act. The normative function seems relevant too: if an argument appears to be true, is supported by a weight of evidence, someone ‘wins’ (in their ability to convince or effectuate change), how do these things determine how I act? Does debate structure my relationship to the world in an axiomatic sense? That is the loss I face: the loss of self-evident goals and means.

Thus I willed it: I also face options on how to perceive/define the past. Should I view my past investments with debate as less-valuable for the fact that they did not produce an end I feel satisfied with? What value/feeling should I feel towards them, for the appearance of futility now?

The past is the mirror image of the challenge I feel to treat the present with the worth and weight of a lived life, rather than a means to an end.

Duncan

2007-02-13T21:12:00.000-08:00

In Tehran [Diane Sawyer] even mingled with an anti-American mob to get a feel for the Persian street. “Do you not like me?” she asked an Iranian chanting “Death to America” slogans. (He said it wasn’t personal.)
NYTimes

This, to me, says a lot.

me, today

2007-02-04T21:41:00.000-08:00

Some days I feel like I’ve found purpose, other day I wouldn’t even know where to look. Most of the time I search without any map, and that’s where I find myself now. All these days just end up accumulating behind me as yester-days, which seems to be the only thing I have in real abundance. Things gone by. Not achievements, not even really sorrow, just accumulated chits of desire and thought: deposit slips to a bank from which I won’t receive any return. I decided that was the only way I could describe my life: the accumulation and re-distribution of desire in particular forms. The fact that I wake up and move makes me a social machine. I take the desire to live, to exist, to achieve whatever I achieve, then transform it into forms acceptable to systems of power. It takes time: the hours I spend doing school work, working on debate, putting off desire. It takes molding: the output has to be formatted (paper writing), blocked (debate), shrink-wrapped (sex?), socially acceptable (all things). The organization and production of desire occurs through the use of discourse, of power, which creates the awful regularity and repetition that surrounds me. I can’t find any reason to value any one form of desire over the other, I only know the degree of social sanctions attached to each transgression, each nickel into the wrong slot, each moment out of turn. That there represents the nihilism of my life. The constant fear of the future, which I imagine could transform itself into something unspeakable (I greatly fear the inability to articulate and describe whatever malaise), or something irrevocable. Of course, to some degree I’m already living the irrevocable, it’s not like I’ll get back these moments that I throw to the memory hole, but I am paralyzed by the greater fear of a future hiding around the corner, and so I just keep walking down the self-same hall. I pretend to be taking myself nowhere because of the fear of being somewhere.

I know what it takes to leave this. I know as much as I can. But

Duncan

Colonialism In The Brush

2007-01-19T23:24:00.001-08:00

The book describes the Hill Country as a trap, baited by grass. Thick, hearty grass that came up to a rider’s stirrups.

The tall grass of the Hill Country stretched as far as the eye could see, covering valleys and hillsides alike. It was so high that a man couldn’t see the roots or the bottoms of the big oaks; their dark trunks seemed to be rising out of a rippling, pale green sea. There was almost no brush, and few small trees – only the big oaks and the grass…
The grass had grown not over a season but over centuries. It wouldn’t have grown at all had it not been for fire – prairie fires set by lightning and driven by wind across tens of thousands of acres, and fires set by Indians to stampede game into their ambushes or over cliffs -- for fire clears the land of underbrush, relentless enemy of grass. The roots of brush are merciless, spreading and seeking all available moisture, and so are the leaves of brush, which cast on grass the shade that kills it, so if brush and grass are left alone in a field, the grass will be destroyed by the brush. But grass grows much faster than brush, so fire gives grass the head start it needs to survive; after a fire, grass would re-enter the burned-over land first – one good rain and among the ashes would be green shoots – and by the time the brush arrived, the grass would be thick and strong enough to stand it off…

As the white settlers planted their crops and grazed their cattle during the driving days, this same grass became thinner and thinner. The soil had taken time to accrue. Many fields of grass had been taken in flame or had died over the seasons, bending and falling, to form the thin layer of what was, over the slick face of Texas limestone. After the tall grasses were all eaten, this soft padding the cattle ate. The roots pulled, the soil remained in a loose arrangement. The heavy rains of the Hill Country came and, with settlers watching, washed this soil away.

When the settlers pushed westward, deep into the Hill Country, Comanche attacks, the book says, were common. For this reason, the first settlers were few and scattered. Over the years, as they grew in number, experience, and frustration, they began to push the natives back. Those white men north in the Comanche homeland purposefully slaughtered the buffalo: food, clothing and shelter to the natives. For this slow eradication 1869 was the final year of Comanche attacks, “forcing them to move onto reservations or starve”. Without the vast acreage of grass needed to sustain a lightning blaze, and no natives to start one, the brush came.

So the brush began to move out of the ravines and off the rocky cliff-faces to which it had been confined. It began to creep into the meadows: small, low, dense shrubs and bushes and stunted trees, catclaw and prickly pear and Spanish dagger, shrub oak and juniper – and mesquite, mesquite with its lacy leaves so delicate in the sun, and, hidden in the earth, its monstrous, voracious taproot that reached and reached through thin soil, searching for more and more water and nourishment. Finally, even cedar came, cedar that can grow in the driest, thinnest soil, cedar whose fierce, aggressive roots are strong enough to rip through rock to find moisture, and which therefore can grow where there is no soil – cedar that grows so fast that it seems to gobble up the ground. The brush came first in long tentacles pushing hesitantly forward into a grassy meadow, and then in a thin line, and then the line becoming thicker, solid, so that sometimes a rancher could see a mass of rough, ragged, thorny brush moving implacably toward the delicate green of a grassy meadow and then in huge bites devouring it. Or there would be a meadow that a rancher was sure was safe – no brush anywhere near it, a perfect place for his cattle if only grass would come back – and one morning he would suddenly notice one shrub pushing up in it, and even if he pulled it up, its seeds would already be thrown, and the next year there would be a dozen bushes in its place.

Whenever you see President Bush, on TV or in print, clearing cedar brush at his Crawford ranch, remember that it has its roots in this.

Oh holy shit, this LBJ book is good.

FoucaultFoucaultFoucault -or- The most important thing I've written in a while

2007-01-14T19:49:00.000-08:00

We still have no idea what liberation looks like. There’s no way to know you’ve reached something that can be called ‘freedom’ – people all too often desire their own oppression. Freedom is only a faculty of the mind. All too often our definitions of liberation and freedom affirm a very narrow and particular sense of the word. The liberation of women’s movement’s second wave was a white/western/capitalist one, with power jobs and access to power that structures the reality of biopolitical systems. The power to control, whether it’s yourself or others: this power coincides neatly with the demands of political systems that leach and exploit us in terms of capital and other means. Freedom must involve an analysis of systems of power – not merely the overcoming of a privileged/underprivileged divide. Oppression/control does not have a scale, a vertical set of boundaries, it exists as a set of relationships between people who come to be defined and privileged in particular ways that relates to a system of power. systems of power that allow us to ‘know’ what freedom is. Is privilege freedom?

Similarly, we seem to remain tied to the hegemony of ‘reality.’ We surely don’t know what reality is, or have the means to access it. The claim to do so serves as a mask of the real power, which is to define what is even possible for you to achieve or know. the process of line drawing, demarcating forms of knowledge into authoritative and non-authoritative forms constitutes the basis of any political system. Real freedom, real power, real reality: each claim affirms an interpretive schema that serves a particular end. The claim to truth/reality both masks the positive, creation that comes with any process of describing the world, but certainly also masks a great deal of power. The less we understand (or choose to think) about how the world is understood, the less it becomes possible to understand what liberation is.

Freedom itself, defined in the liberal/sovereign mode has a strong association with whiteness. A racist society privileges whites, allowing them to accumulate capital, through the means of property ownership norms, a relationship to capital and the state that is demarcated by notions of freedom in a liberal/modern sense. A person is free if they can own and not have their shit stolen. The relationship to basic means to live – the blackmail of artificial scarcity at the root of capitalism – forces underprivileged groups to adopt alternative modes of relation to capital – perhaps theft, perhaps communal forms of sharing (pirating – bootlegging). The structure of class and race divisions means that the protection of a liberal, bourgeois sense of freedom can only affirm the freedom of people already with the means to survive in the world of absolute property and personal sovereignty, ie white people. Why not a freedom to steal, to share, to graffiti, to drop out?

Similarly, what faculties are required to become equal with someone? Is it merely access to the same amount of wealth, the same jobs, the same colleges? This is a narrow form of equality that measures with gauges set in the context of power relationships that require exploitation through other means such as capital. It privileges a notion of the free subject because it implies a teleology, whereby inequality comes through a comparison of wealth, or access to a particular form of power. Another form of equality may come as equal psychic comfort, equal access to food, equal democratic control over the means of production. Equality comes as a process of line drawing, and scale weighting, specific political conditions define our choices in what to call equality.

The most important part of any image, any world, any knowledge are the invisible parts that demarcate what we cannot see. To be effective, power must hide itself: otherwise, it becomes an object of contention, avoidance, movement. To be known means to be know limits, leaving marginal space for escape.

Duncan

The banality of good

2007-01-10T17:16:00.000-08:00

The humanity and individual plausibility of a theory also influences it’s validity for activists.

Humans believe what they are doing matters, that they are doing it for sake of goodwill and with good purpose. Unless a theory is able to describe the way that people, in a casual, banal way engage in stupefying acts of evil, then it has not captured a reality that seems to be at the crux of systemic violence. Just as social evils arise out of banal acts, so should social goods. Humans have exigencies of existence that concern food, water, shelter, kindness, etc. – radical change must concern these, and the way these regular needs influence change. Theory that involves merely faceless, inhumane, commandeering forces appear to exclude any role for the people affected by those forces. They neither see themselves as part of the problem or the solution.

Vignette 1 – The Beehive Collective – a poster I saw created by this collective depicts the US of A as giant larvae consuming resources. This is depicted by a totalized image of the US as a nation state. There is no room for activists, or anyone else seeing the picture, to find themselves. No one wants to be a larvae. The US is faceless.

Vignette 2 – Bush. The new face of evil for the left. Lack of complexity and the depicted lack of humanity leaves many without a political lexicon after Bush leaves office. The absolute, cronniest, evil, corrupt picture of him scapegoats personal action out of the picture.

Radical, immediate change seems tied to a very particular way of thinking about politics. I think there is an analogy between calls for immediate, violent revolution and something like the invasion of Iraq. Both require the ability to marshal a great deal of force, on the scale of an entire nation. This requires the creation of systems of force and control that change the nature of a political goal you’ve set out to achieve. It also presumes a level of knowledge and authoritative control over the truth that we may not have. The death of god makes our ability to tie down the truth to any political goal nearly impossible.

Duncan

School: Education or Something

2007-01-09T20:07:00.000-08:00

I feel like right now I need to write down my thoughts about education even if they arent the most coherant. I've had a good amount of coffee and a spanish class.

Normally I don't feel the urge to write because I 1) havent done it seriously in a while, and 2) because I feel that conversation, for me, is a better way of formulating an idea or a system of ideas. The writing I do is somewhat loose and may in the end be better structured as short blurbs rather than long essays.

My favorite part about high school was not caring, not giving a fuck, because I guess I felt that if it was mandated that I be there, I was going to do whatever I could to go around the prescribed way of doing things and get the knowledge that I needed on my own, whether that meant doing my own reading, talking with friends, or paying attention in class. In college I feel much less free not to care as my attendance is not mandatory, and actually subsidized, in a larger way than property taxes, by my parents. I could very well drop out of school. I could very well go to classes and not pay for them, if the goal was indeed furthering my education. As a friend of mine said, none of the Marxist teachers here who would kick me out for not paying, if they were worth their salt. I am enrolled in school to get a degree. Nothing more or less. That is what those many thousand dollars are paying for. My parents are not paying for me to learn. They are paying for an education at a college specificly structured so that people like me can get diplomas. My father's favorite defense of the general Liberal Arts BA is that most people who get a degree don't usually end up using it in their job. READ: Peter is still employable.

What if I don't want to be employable?

What if I don't want to go to school to serve that end?

Even Evergreen, a semi "radical" institution serves that end. They certify that you are able to teach, be a manager of a nonprofit, work for the state. Evergreen is still the state. Evergreen is a very profitable state run institution. Maybe not as profitable as the UW football team. Evergreen maintains the state function by providing those that will work for it or alongside it. (whether the State itself is Hot or Not, I'm still not sure) But as far as it maintains the running of the service and industrial economy of global capitalism, it is successful. I'm not sure, but I bet that the University of Oregon down in Eugene produces more college attendees that actually blow shit up.

Yes, a college diploma will make me and my ideas more legit, but it does so at the cost of making the ideas and projects of those without that much more illegit. Do I really want to serve that end? To what extent does my being happy at college, with the setting, friends, and the shit that I'm learning about, make me all the more impotent or self satisfied, or passive to recieving information about bad shit through/about the state-corporate rubric? I'm still convinced that killing someone good or blowing someone up or leading global revolution against capitalism would offer more direction to my life than sitting through college.

Alas, I just hope that someday I can sit back and say, "Oh in my idealistic youth, I was depressed about everything, that was until I learned to ignore most everything that was formerly emotionally crippling. Now I contribute just enough to keep those feelings at bay, while I sit here fat and happy in my teaching job with my masters in whatever the fuck, stay in school."

Some shit I'm nothappy with but needed to write.

2007-01-07T20:53:00.000-08:00

The notion of the eternal return for me means the deconstruction of all fate or notions of intrinsic meaning to any action. If our reality is an iteration of infinitely repeating and varying realities, there is no reason our actions have to be meaningful, just by their occurrence. The only meaning that actions have arises out of our personal investment and human feeling that we produce as part of living.

I suppose this has something to do with prediction and a little bit the death of god. Future events can never be known, and the degree to which we impose a predictive frame onto them, we impose a manifestation of our own beliefs, rather than a universalizable norm. Because future events are inherently un-perceivable, any reality we extrapolate originates in the perception of the present, rather than a truth. For me, this doesn’t mean I should give up on actions predicated on future events. Rather, it means I should act for the sake of the joy created by that action, instead of the notion that I know how the action will be realized. So: resist! not because it will create change, but because you can save your own soul when you know the extent of an oppression. Also: act! not because you can determine what follows next, but because you know how things have gone before, and change can be it’s own good.

Blah.

Duncan

Maybe this concerns Derrida.

2007-01-02T21:50:00.000-08:00

I’m considering the path I will attempt to take for the next few years, and I’ve concluded that unless I’m willing to take myself totally out of my comfort zone, there’s very little reason to be alive. If for some reason I’ve concluded, involuntarily or not, that I have found the right living arrangement, relationship, whatever, for life, there is very little meaning to the continuing of my life. A commitment is a form of closing off just as much as it is a confirmation of an ideal state of affairs.

Unintelligability is the essence of communication, for communication only becomes necessary to the degree that some experience or fact is not already communicated/intelligible. That is why I only feel the need to talk or write when I already am uncomfortable. My relative lack of written communication when I am here is a sign of why I feel like I must leave: there’s nothing to work out, nothing not already self evident about my life that requires me to question my life. Nausea forms the foundation for communication that performs a change in mental approach to the world. I feel that much of my life here in Austin seems like an involuntary reaction that leaves me very little space for change. I’m not convinced that being here helps or would give me any real reason to live my life as if it was worth it.

I suppose on a smaller scale, this is why I think most conversations I have should be inquisitive or in some way confrontational. I want something to be produced problematized or thought about; if someone leaves a conversation unchanged then it may not have happened in the first place; you have created personal communicative amnesia. I need my life to ask better questions of me in order to be happy.

Duncan

Gotta keep moving

2006-12-19T19:53:00.000-08:00

Generally why I like being back. Or, at least why being here now matters so much. I’ve gotten a weird sense of picking up where I left off by being in Austin again. I don’t believe I find an authoritative, real sense of who I am here, but I know that the sense of place I have developed here brings out certain qualities and feelings that I need to stare down to understand what I need in my life in a more general sense. Who ‘I am’ can’t really be found or known, and I want to make everything that pisses me off about living as me to drive me towards a better sense or approach to the world.

It helps me figure out what’s missing, in a lot of senses. I guess this refers back to certain times in my life when I’ve been really happy, or at least happy and comfortable at the same time, which has some particular value.
In Athens – Austin is a sense of where I was, what my future requires. I think finding some reason for my comfort level gives me a base to work from to develop an activist/progressive future. Actually, no. I think being comfortable is the wrong approach, the times when I’ve had the most energy is when I felt the least comfortable, the most ‘off’ from myself. Knowing what made me comfortable and at least happy here makes me want to develop that sense of community/feeling again. Getting here, just smelling the weird stuff about Austin gave me a picture of what I love. The smells, experiences are tied into everything about my life that I miss, don’t always get elsewhere. Knowing it again makes the absence more pronounced, which makes me more focused in the drive to create. The ‘recharge’ I get isn’t physical or energetic, it helps me focus the energy I have again towards something else. Austin gives me the feeling of demanding satisfaction from the world, feeling good enough to stand on what I think is right to demand change.

Part of being here gives me a sense of misdirection and overstability. I know there are certain qualities to my life that my life in Austin meets. I know I have a home, certain privileges that afford me a sense of stability that I don’t feel elsewhere. Having this causes me to seek relationships with qualities I don’t think I could discover were I anywhere else. Knowing the places to be, the basics of living that can only be afforded through time, gives me a certain restlessness and particular purposelessness that searches for connections beyond the basics – I have a home with certain people and places, my desire to expand elsewhere extends to new types of feeling you don’t get when just searching for an initial sense of placement. There is a different kind of isolation attached to being here, which is isolation though my past. It’s easy to avoid human contact because of the nature of my home, and comfortable places that I developed here. This is different, and perhaps more dangerous than the isolation that comes with a new place and not knowing what to do. With the isolation by your past, it’s possible to miss out on your life and not know it, or care about it. My fear with being here is that I’ll become complacent with existence as me, when I don’t think the person I find here really represents the calling or sense of self I desire ultimately. That’s why I need to keep moving and driving for something greater.

I’ve been attracted to creeks lately. I like creeks in cities because they mix the human with the uncontrollable. Creeks remain because waterways are difficult to change or pave over, and they become built around. They can’t as easily be owned or directed, and the lack of a human element makes them ideal spaces to wander though. In our developed lives, walking through one will take you to places you may not otherwise be able to get – the means of a creek (or sometimes powerline right of way, or railroad tracks) provides access to places you ignore without the intent to, so they provide the ability to experience the in between in a way that other transportation (car, sometimes bike) wouldn’t. They provide a mix of the known and controlled with the indeterminate, which suits my approach to the world right now.

Duncan

Something about morality...

2006-12-16T23:12:00.000-08:00

I would like to stake out a position on morality and responsibility that walks a line between utter dependence and vapid individualism. Staking personal feeling and enjoyment on other people ends up failing you. Not because of corruptability or any overriding sense of self interest, but because of the shifting nature of their own desire and requirements for life. No one leads a static life, with static approaches to desire. Predictions and expectations about the actions of others becomes its own form of truth process, a strange form of personal morality that conditions our actions in relation to a supposedly self evident set of goals. Acting for the sake of someone else always in reality is action for yourself. This concerns a notion I thought about before, I think. Uncritically endorsing the choices of the oppressed to found a political perspective fails to theorize why those choices are available to people. Power operates by offering certain rewards and sanctions to create subjects who willingly adopt positions that support the privilege of particular groups. Creating positions around the norms that define subjugated groups – some forms of identity specific feminisms, for example – assumes that those social norms have neutral content.

The other side to this process looks too much like libertarian ideology of pure self reliance and abandoning of any concern for others. I’m finding difficulty walking this line, trying to cultivate human concern and affect without assuming a relationship of reliance. I find it difficult to tell people that they have total control over the entirety of their lives, that they can create anything they want, as I have regularly seen the differential impact class/race/gender privilege has had on my life. This response would further insulate myself within these privileges if it had the result of blaming people for subjugation to social oppression.

Duncan

Myth, censorship

2006-12-14T23:06:00.000-08:00

The rhetoric of censorship presumes that news reporting has self evident content. If something gets censored, there is pregiven content that gets blocked or diverted. This ignores the productive nature of language, as well as the shifts in meaning and content defined by the context and purpose of speaking. Even if there was a predetermined reality that would be reported on, what gets blocked out can never be known.

Doors of perception – the reality that people experience through drugs – “opening the doors of perception” – is no less constructed and arbitrary than the real that we experience without drugs. Both are equally partial and incomplete in that they represent one experience, but a different perception under different conditions. Neither can be considered authoritative because neither state can make any conclusive, material, claim to authoritative experience that is grounded in the different mediums by which reality is experienced. Nothing about one chemical process implies a realer experience than the other.

Unmasking oppression – exposes of oppression, seeing the reality of ‘the system,’ and to some degree consciousness raising all rely on the fact that the context and overall meaning of communication can be controlled by the people ‘sending’ the message. These tactics pay too little heed to the slipperiness of description, as well as the physical/corporeal stuff I wrote about before.

Duncan

This is not about progress

2006-12-12T22:40:00.000-08:00

Pain has to drive you forward. Loss and the irretrievable nature of communication means that the only way forward is through change and production from the life we experience. Irredentism in time fails –we can’t go back to join ourselves as we’d like to be seen as we’d like to know ourselves. Merely hating the “now what” is hating yourself and everything productive about existence. Being alive is productive, because it changes. Holding on to events that sting like a bitch and squeezing them, discovering every little thing about them that makes it hurt turns you towards a new mode of living that realizes the promise of existence.

This is why marriage is a bad idea – the threats attached to a lifelong bond between two people serves to constantly re-create one form of an ideal relationship between two people, to require that arguments be resolved in such a way that reinforces the marriage as a whole. Everything must come back to making a coercive relationship work ‘as it should’ in a way that subjugates each and every issue to a sustainable relationship for life. We become slaves to our own future. This is why I can’t promise forever to anyone, because creates expectations about my feeling that structure relationships in such a way to deny the dynamic life within it. Affect affect affect.

This is why we can’t sedate ourselves with drugs TV love or otherwise.

Duncan

Triple Threats

2006-12-11T14:09:00.000-08:00

More on the physical characteristics that define politics in a more profound way than language. The structural dependencies created by technology defines reality and experience more so than language. Three examples demonstrate the forms of dependence

Being in a doctor’s office: Expertise linked with physical ailment constitutes power. Medical training and time spent in practice leaves the patient with comparatively little confidence in diagnosing and treating their physical problems. Even if they are able to conquer the discursive tools used by the medical profession, access to technology and medicine are conditioned on control of capital (which ties to broader issues of relative scarcity and exchange). Even so, the physical condition of the patient determines their needs. Being hurt or ill (perhaps terminally) creates structures of dependency that calls into being certain realities that cannot merely be coded into language.

Riding a bike: when you ride a bike, after a while, you begin to hate people in cars, because of the physical relationship you have to them. They control large machines of metal and explosives that threaten you passively every time they pass by you. Your constant state of vulnerability makes every move by someone driving a car an expression of power over you, which creates resentment. Cars create affect and emotions in cyclists simply by driving, by technology.

Global food: the structure of export agriculture creates dependency which inevitably creates power relationships between different reigons. Areas reliant on export agriculture (or really any production/export, but agriculture in particular) also rely on other areas for survival. monopolizing and monoculture-ing farmland undermines a region’s capacity for self-sustaining existence. Survival becomes a function of exchange rates, commodity (oil) prices or political decisions concerning trade rules. The very nature of this power relationship creates resentment, as seemingly arbitrary changes in prices can drastically impact someone’s livelihood or existence. No system is entirely stable, and the power differentials within the trade system make those instabilities particularly dangerous.

Duncan

Radical reforms?

2006-12-10T22:26:00.000-08:00

When do political demands shift from being radical to being reformist? Does the demand “US out of Iraq now?” really represent an anti-war stance anymore? It seems that the question revolves around the rhetorical devices that other people employ to justify the policy; if the Iraq Study Group can demand withdraw in order to preserve US military and political dominance in the Mideast, the demand looses its force as an anti-System demand. Individual policies are transient, the real question is whether they coincide with ideas or concepts that can create a new political reality. When something can be logically adopted as a course of action that re-invigorates a form of political hegemony, the motivations and political position of the person constructing the argument matters less. However, not all types of non-radical demands end up with this fate. Demands for social justice, which are attached to some political figures, such as ecological sustainability can be linked to a variety of demands that cascade to seriously change our political situation. This is why impossible demands can be effective: they prevent the reduction of a political position to a particular policy proposal, and so prevent the redeployment of that policy for the sake of supporting a system the group would otherwise reject. So, the fact that the option “withdraw now” has become an option for mainstream politics – a way to win, a way to get out ‘OK,’ does in fact indict the usefulness of the demand for anti-war groups. This should inspire not just blind political opposition, but rather constant criticism, political groups willing and able to constantly reformulate demands for change once their proposals have been adopted as a part of mainstream political doctrine.

Duncan

Overman and such

2006-12-09T15:45:00.000-08:00

The internal contradiction of Nietzsche: Nietzsche’s contradiction comes at the moment of achieving status of the overman. There seems to be no way to ‘become’ in such a way to achieve the overman, as the constraints on the will come from two contradictory sources. First, the overman must become greater than the herd. They must embrace their own will and attempt to act in the name of joy and overcome the will of the masses and adherence to false idols (all of them). Second, the overman must become more than themselves, and overcome adherence to their will. This of course presumes that the will of the overman can be divided out from the will of others, but even more so, it contradicts the first step of overcoming. The only way to overcome the internal self constraints is the influence of forces beyond yourself, i.e. the people and ideas that have already been rejected in the first move in overcoming. Leaving yourself requires the influence of others to push beyond what you know already.

Why it’s not drugs that enable overcoming. The reason drugs won’t help is the association with the body, the corporal underpinning. Drug use has the effect of becoming something greater, of applying the will in a new way, however that use is tied to often addictive chemical processes that create a relationship of dependence. Also, taking drugs is a search for becoming that means we will only find ourselves again reflected in the new creations and thoughts that come from the experience. I am also disturbed with the rhetoric surrounding it that promises access to our ‘truer selves’ (opening the doors of perception…) as if there were an absolute notion of truth concerning the self, which again reflects not a truth but another instance of the will to power invested with the mask of authority.

Nietzsche has no discussion of the communicative practices involved in achieving the overman. Conversation and communication necessarily invests our human essence, our selves, in other people. Mutual intelligibility (even the self-perpetuated myth of it) demonstrates a connection with other humans. The ability to discern intent in communication means we see a certain level of equivalence and concern for other human beings. In order that communication elucidate a response from anyone requires an understanding of the conditions of another’s experience. Language undoes the notion that we may transcend the herd.

Duncan

Grand Unified Theory...

2006-12-04T11:44:00.000-08:00

I hope to one day find a ‘grand unifying theory’ of power capable of explaining the reasons why certain discourses become prioritized over others in structuring of politics. It seems like there should be a way to describe why certain subjectifying experiences become dominant over others in the way people internalize their identity and notions of self. Obviously, this should consider the marginal nature of any description of the world: how any description or theory of human action originates in a particular social experience, and contains residual elements of a ‘will to power.’ Still, the notion of a ‘will to power’ overemphasizes the role of language and individual will in shaping people’s outlook on life. Both of these things seem interchangeable to me. The recent election demonstrates the relative unimportance of individual people in determining the structure of power, and our subjectivity as citizens. There are more powerful forces at work, shaping political constructs such as the ‘War on Terror’ and ‘The Senate.’ Similarly, with language, the fact that language can be deconstructed, and often is, suggests that forces beyond language determine reality. Often politics concerns competition over how to interpret particular terms, suggesting that interests and ‘reality’ lies beyond language. The question remains as to where and what beyond language and people drives politics.

Duncan

The myth of a $150 dollar computer

2006-11-30T06:54:00.000-08:00

For $150 Dollars, third world laptop stirs a big debate - IHT

I’ve been reading about this thing for a while – it’s a computer designed for use in ‘third world’ countries, and people from MIT (and now Rupert Murdoch) seem to think promoting it serves some philanthropic goal, though no one seems to know what that is exactly. With quotes like

"It's as if people spent all of their attention focusing on Columbus's boat and not on where he was going," [Nicholas Negroponte, instigator] said in an interview. "You have to remember that what this is about is education."

And

"The soldiers inside this Trojan horse are children with laptops," said Walter Bender, a computer researcher

I’m not sure why anyone really thinks this is a good idea.

First, in terms of goals. No one seems to know what people would actually do with a computer, except… learn how to use other computers. Remember, media is the message (have we still not figured this out? Seriously, remember McLuhan, it’s been 40 years, can we get past the idea that media is value neutral?), and considering that this project isn’t linked to any broader political/economic goals, the only educational development computers bring is computers. There’s no new content, only a medium that will develop a limited skill set and influence delivery towards a model of education that prioritizes technological prowess.

What educational good does this bring?

Does it create a more sustainable world? (no, it makes communities more dependant on a tenuous network of high tech high energy info networks for the sake of economic competition, ultimately a development paradigm which is killing everyone through ever increasing consumption) Who does it benefit? (Probably very few in the ‘recipient’ countries, considering the sources of production as well as a history of scientific ‘brain drain’ to larger wealthier countries) What kinds of wealth does it create? (kinds dependant on investment schemes by development banks and an export economy)

That gets to a second problem, which is the supposed philanthropy. This seems more like a Trojan horse of profits for technology companies posing as philanthropy. The company producing the machines, Quanta, is the second largest laptop producer in the world, and will turn a profit. Along with that immediate benefit, they get a brand new market to potentially sell to for an indefinite future. This gives something people don’t need for the sake of turning a profit. This is a poisoned gift meant to secure the interests of a narrow portion of the world. This seems particularly evident in the structure of the donation, which does not provide the means to produce these computers, only the computers themselves. A genuine act would allow them to begin producing on their own, instead of using mass importation of new machines.

Neither of these things really gets at some basic questions: how will they be paid for? Is this a donation or another ‘aid’ loan like those that continue to wreck third world economies? Where do the resources to produce the computers come from? Computer production is resource intensive: it takes 10 gallons of water to produce one chip. What impact does producing 5 million computers with hundreds of chips each have? The perverse structure of the ‘donation’ also comes up in the production techniques, which require resource extraction in the form of minerals and oil from the countries to which the machines will be donated.

The costs to people everywhere belies the myth of the '$150 computer.'

Duncan

Pleasure in joy but no joy in pleasure

2006-11-28T22:06:00.000-08:00

The difference between joy and pleasure comes at a relationship to the present and past. Too often we accept pleasure as a substitute for joy in living, and I wish to uncover the difference for me in order to embrace the truly good in my life. Pleasure has a repetitive and lethargic relationship to change. Pleasure allows us to be content with our lives, it accustoms us to being where we currently are. To be pleasured, pleased with something implies a judgement of the activity/item, and then an acceptance of it as good for you as such: neither you nor the object must change. Joy concerns a process that transcends a particular moment in time. Joy relates to events that involve and transform you into a new person, something that pushes you to discover what is good. There is a stronger correlation to thought with joy in my experience – a joyous event challenges me to discover something about myself or the world in the process of living it. This is why joy can come from unpleasurable experiences, as they often challenge me to find something new by fact of my unhappiness with a situation. So is it good to seek pleasure? Yes, but to be pleased is not an end, and joy often brings pleasure as a result of self discovery.

Duncan

From Yesterday: ethics/language

2006-11-27T21:58:00.000-08:00

Ethics emerges only through the organizational power of language. The ability to define an object as something other than itself through language allows for the creation of ethical norms. Only by the ability to include an object of ethical concern under a metaphorical or categorical sign in language does the ability to construct ethical categories make sense. The abuse of ethical norms and codes emerges in the indeterminate but dividing role of language. People use language decisively to include or exclude, but it has no definite value. The flexibility of language – its inability to totally describe something – allows for interpretative space which judges (juridical or social) use to exclude in accordance with their own interests. Language is intrinsically tied with language, but because of language’s flaws as a guideline-setting tool, which leaves space for interpretation-misapplication.

This is why animals have not been granted moral agency. The inability to communicate in the terms that define ethical agency excludes them from consideration as moral agents, which often means humans deny them ethical value. Perhaps the relative contingency and arbitrariness of animalistic action causes us to recoil? I don’t think this necessarily denies them the capacity to judge, but merely denies their capacity to communicate consistant/categorical norms for their actions.

Duncan

More on communication and technology

2006-11-27T21:57:00.000-08:00

A relationship of exclusivity and choice creates the difficulty with the notion of a global village, created through communication technology. A village has one forum, a single mode in which people meet – in one language, in face to face communication, with the caveat that often there is no choice but to interact with someone. A village has some feature of co-dependance, particularly in terms of a commons area or shared resources. The internet and other media technologies employ processes that allow a wide variety of choice in communication, with multiple channels, codes and addresses which create very little opportunity for random encounters. In order to get anywhere on the internet, you must know an exact site URL, and have foreknowledge of the proper codes to use to access the information that has been put online. The same applies for email, or even telephones. The people in a global village are the people we already know, our families and friends who we have met through more chance, random encounters. For this reason, I believe that the internet, and communication technology serves a negative purpose for the goal of creating cultural harmony or understanding. It allows for the intensification and maintenance of very particular relationships already readily apparent to us before the internet existed. It does not necessarily create new bonds, only affects old ones.

Duncan

Zarathustra Thus Far...

2006-11-25T18:04:00.000-08:00

A lot of Zarathustra resonates with what I have been thinking about for a while

Crisis and independance. The affirmation of crisis (personal and political) means the embrace of what transforms us in these moments. In this, there is an implicit relationship to a norm that never existed - the 'secure' or 'stable' situation that much of our politics aims to restore. So, when we enter times of personal crisis, we have an opportunity to find and affirm the good in life, and to question the forms of life that produced the crisis we seek to address. I know this sounds vague. Example: being in UGA, which hasn't been great, but I wouldn't trade it in for anything else, because in the process of being here I have discovered more about myself and where I want to be in life than I would have anywhere else.

The will to power. This relates to debate. Because an empirical, universal reality cannot be proven after the death of god, our descriptions of truth and justice can only be interpreted as extensions of the will to power. Descriptions of the good or the transcendant are an extension of an individual's personal reality, and serve their individual interests. Thus, the will to describe or act on Truth is acctually a will to personal power.

Independance- this relates to previous posts about mass production and my reactions to it. I am a little but put off by the idea of my life being subject to political/economic forces beyond my control. Affirming independance is a way to transcend that.

Duncan

Why I Hate Charles Rangel

2006-11-24T17:45:00.000-08:00

Of course, there are probably more reasons than I already know. Included in what I do is his position on the military draft. As a sheer publicity stunt (with the only end being his own self glorification), the move to call for a draft probably worked. However, it fails on every other possible count.

Ideologically - There are much better ways to encourage the US to avoid pre-emptive war. As a the incoming chair of the House armed services committee, I suspect you could find some. Maybe it has something to do with the military budget? Or the nice lightning speed technology that we keep paying for? The notion that the military is OK but maybe we just need to think harder about how we use it is absurd: the sacrafice of anyone for political ends doesn't become more acceptable because the people with theif hands on the lever are even more convinced of the justice in their action than usual. Thinking harder does not create justice.

Ethically - Charles Rangel has chosen to make me a political bargining chip. Calling for the draft to prove a point is playing a really high stakes game that shouldn't be played. His logic is internally inconsistant: he is now willing to gamble with the lives of potential draftees to prove that politicians shouldn't gamble with life. His bill bets for a norm that was established over 30 years ago. Which brings me to his last failure:

Political - Continually (this is at least the 2nd time I have heard of) using the draft to prove a point makes actual reinstatement of the draft much more likely. It makes the issue politically palatable, and spawns editorials such as this, this, or this. To prove his point, people will undertake 'serious discussions' about the draft, an impossible notion in a politcal world controled by televisual media and centralized media conglamorates. In the context of a very de-mobilized political space like ours, it doesn't take much more than a handful of very motivated people to construct an earthquake. Re-introducing the draft idea makes this kind of coup more likely.

Basically, Charles Rangel needs to keep his ideas to himself.

Duncan

100 years of...

2006-11-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

Today thinking of what to write, stuck in mental deadlock, I came to the question of who I was writing to. Why the internet? Why an audience? As I thought more, I decided that ‘who I was writing to’ was a question of process and not of purpose. I am writing ‘to’ as in a goal, a direction. I am writing to be me, to define myself more closely and effectively, and to use method in writing to become something new. Isolation is a strange thing, but the calm power of selfhood gives the isolated the opportunity to find themselves in new ways and new places never thought of before.

I need to stop seeing myself as on screen, as under observation. I do this in my head to explain myself to passers by or potential encounters. I imagine my actions when alone as if being filmed, in order to externally explain my actions to whatever imagined force or person that I find. This becomes a form of self censorship, and I need to learn to be myself, not to tell good stories or make poetic pictures, but to make myself.

Duncan

Ecological Time

2006-11-22T19:39:00.000-08:00

In environmental rhetoric, activists often refer to a natural system’s rareness or long history. This has both pragmatic and political origins. First, the rarity or temporal durability of a natural ecosystem indicates its importance to a constantly changing earth. If the ecosystem is rare, it would be hard to make up for its role if it were to be destroyed, making an overall, global ecological catastrophe more likely.

The idea of an ecological history, or ecological rarity has rhetorical impacts also. The first concerns the historical/personal notion that the earth is an infinite resource that will absorb any stress humans put on it. If ecological systems can be explained in terms of niches and specific places, the impact of any individual action looks less absorbable. It contextualizes the real impact of human actions in a personal way: rather than seeing the ecological question as one person versus an entire world, the frame makes the question more of one person versus much smaller systems.

These rhetorical tools also inspire a sense of ecological humility. The historical question literally transcends any human experience, and contextualizes human use of ecological resources within history, something much greater than any individual use. This has the effect of dethroning humanity as the master of the environment, and supporting the notion that a force greater than any person or group of people animates our world, as well as our reasons for existing.

Duncan

Speed/belief

2006-11-21T15:26:00.000-08:00

What happens when our own thoughts are not so self evident as we once supposed? I am beginning to grasp the complexity and obstacles to articulating my beliefs in arguments and realizing moreso the inherent barriers to changing someone’s outlook in life. Perhaps this is the onset of ‘mature’ argumentation, or simply disillusionment, but the sum of my feelings comes to the understanding that powerful structural norms determine people’s outlook, that rationality often has nothing to do with why someone believes as they believe. Reasoning (deciding actions based on logic [even though this isn’t even quite enough, who knows why people find some arguments logical and others not]), seems to require time, a paused period of comparison and introspection. In this regard, the most powerful ideology is that of scarcity. If someone perceives a scare resource, or a need to act for the sake of survival, it compels them to act quickly. Speed begets a decision making structure that encourages action in terms of pre-defined norms, whereby the content of decisions has already been made. Practice rearticulates our beliefs into reality by means of decisions we don’t realize we are making. Part of the problem lies in beliefs that people don’t know they have – the assumption of naturalness which refuses situatedness universalizes our beliefs, creating the ‘facts’ against which we determine ‘opinion.’ People don’t know why they act as they do, and yet they continue to act.

Duncan

A New Language for Privilege

2006-11-20T15:52:00.000-08:00

I want to find a better way to engage people over questions of privilege. I want to find a more effective way to divorce the issue from individuals. The agent focus of most of my discussions up to this point obscures and frustrates an honest discussion of privilege and disparities in two ways.

First, in framing the problem and garnering support. The focus on individuals creates a focus only on choices people make, rather than examining how choices come to be offered to specific groups of people over others. The response “this person could have chosen not to do XXX regardless of social pressures…” creates a credible copout and a structure of victim blame. Creating a systemic picture of privilege/oppression as a distribution of available resources and options is necessary to understand why bad choices are less likely to be made by those empowered by racial, class or gendered privilege. There also remains a question of why certain practices are rewarded as ‘good choices’ that undergirds this discussion that can only be described by a systemic analysis.

When addressing people empowered by privilege, persuading them to understand oppression and responsibility requires a more subtle tactic. Often my arguments frame the discussion in such a way that too directly undermines people’s self perceptions. People like to believe they have achieved what they have in their lives through personal hard work, and my discussions of privilege too often end up sounding like an argument about why their hard work and effort should not matter. It’s like telling someone that they haven’t earned their lives and deserve to be punished for their achievements, which is a difficult argument to win.

Second, in framing solutions. Looking too much to the individual makes remedies sound like handouts, which sounds patronizing to those they intend to help, and unreasonable to those it does not. In a similar way as described above, arguing that classes or groups of people require ‘assistance’ can enfeeble and disempower them. Agent focus makes responses to privilege look like handouts or even reverse discrimination, which alienates key sources of support for change

A note on difference and oppression. The ability to term social situations as ‘opressive’ requires a notion of a universal subject. Without this tool, situations that empower particular groups can be treated as the natural result of inherent differences between the privileged and the disempowered. A potentially universal subject also creates the foundation for deconstruction of particular gender norms which emerge as the result of social systems aimed at oppression. Only by the ability to see people as having a universal will or humanity can we construct arguments for social change.

Available choices lies at the heart of the discussion of oppression I would like to have. I would like to describe oppression by discussing why certain choices are only available to particular populations, or why making certain choices disproportionately impacts other populations. Yes, that homeless person should not have started drinking. But why is it that that choice resulted in homelessness, while it did not for the alcoholics on campus?

Duncan

The development of desire in space

2006-11-15T20:44:00.000-08:00

Development has to conquer more than primitive sociality. Develoment must conquer space in order to secure its grip.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1116/p01s04-woaf.html

This article demonstrates the point. The designated ‘winner’ of an election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo won most of the votes from the eastern part of the country, but has lost the west. The seat of government, Kinshasa largely voted for the candidate said to have lost. The transition to a steady democratic model for a large country relies on the subordination of local interests to the recognition of the theoretical privilege of government. Spatial, proximate relationships become subordinated to the ideograph of democracy and stability. In many ways, development is about overpowering the local to the purpose of ideological relationships and structures – democratic stability, etc…

Development – or at least the notions of convenience, luxury and efficiency – also primarily deal with the differentiation of space. The ultimate luxury in housing is space – the ability to create more rooms, each with a unique function. This also occurs in the factory, where each space/worker occupies a specific role.

This has to do with the production of social relationships in the world of television. Being socialized through television means socialization through the desire structures of television, which necessitates constant stimulation and simple affect. (been writin about this before…). Social relationships become a way to replicate this feeling of affect and stimulation, creating several scripts that replicate television norms to accomplish this. The specificity of form that comes from this produces specific spaces to play out acquired scripts upon. The repetitiveness of our social environment does not come from any specific desire to be the people we see on TV, but rather to feel the things we feel when watching TV. This is the mental trick that preserves feelings of individuality even as we become ever more socially homogenized. As long as we believe in the authenticity of our produced emotions, we will never know freedom. Television structures desire, and so structures space.

Duncan

In Response to Nancy Pelosi

2006-11-11T12:24:00.000-08:00

"The difference between the sexes is not whether one does or does not have a penis, it is whether or not one is an integral part of a phallic masculine economy."

- Antoinette Fouque

From bell hooks' Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

In the face of total defeat

2006-11-05T20:38:00.000-08:00

We live in an incomprehensible world. Incomprehensible in the scope of human cruelty and the degrees of power that support it. Total defeat is the feeling that there isn’t even hope in beginning. Total defeat demobilizes you before you begin. Total defeat also comes when feeling better can only be catharsis, when feeling better is counterproductive. There is no more comfort in comforting ourselves, we face catastrophe so great that comfort should make us nervous.

The only hope that remains external to crushing annihilation comes from other people: the hope that we can form connections with other people so that we may escape together. Our goal must be communication and cultivation of communities so that we can eradicate the crushing weight of an individual response to the constant war of existence. Technology delimits communication in communities, defining to whom and how people interact. The terrain of struggle must occur beyond content; it must occur on the ground of technology (of people, posture, cities and sitting in front of screens) to offer new and collaborative definitions of the problems we face, and how to overcome them.

Duncan

Two notes

2006-10-24T21:38:00.000-07:00

First note
The structure of knowledge determines the architecture of a learning environment. The myth of universal and objective truth, held by an educated teacher dispensing it necessitates an enclosed and separated environment. The only way to transmit unproblematially that knowledge (presuming that other sources or knowledge, or stimuli have less importance, less use) requires closing off the students from any ‘distractions.’ Lived reality in the context of nature, or just people interacting in human experience, because devalued, requires physical exclusion. The self compounding system this establishes implicitly creates the values it then cites as natural by physically excluding other experiences of knowledge.

Second note.
Darwinian description of natural selection produces anthropocentricism. Darwain sees ‘perfection’ of species from the perspective of their ability to survive in anarchic nature. Better concerns the ability to propagate a particular species with greater efficiency/effectiveness. Perfection defined through a relationship to merely one species does not capture the overall picture of sustainability and the need to maintain ecological balance.

Something more

2006-09-28T21:32:00.001-07:00

I need a challenge. More than anything I am tired of the blithe and empty nihilism of interests and occupations. I am not interested in debate. Interest implies attention but not passion. It is concern without caring, without compassion. Interests cannot speak to what drives you, interests concern what occupies time. Interests are the choices that fill an inevitable progression of time towards something else. The idea of an interest presumes that there is an immutable force that structures our lives beyond the immediately accessible, and that we require something to fill the gaps it leaves. The word cannot capture passion, or investigation of self, or anything that should be compelling about life. I don’t want interests. I want life, I want experience I want a challenge, I want something that represents more than time that keeps passing, I want to realize my world as contingent, as what I make it, I want to avoid that neurosis of keeping up with a bigger clock.

My Privilege

2006-09-01T21:18:00.000-07:00

Where does the criticism of privilege leave me?

In the context of Friedan, and the Feminine Mystique: should the housewife privileged by class and education concede to domestication? A life in the home could represent a significant source of freedom for someone constrained by poverty and other forms of systemic inequality. But then, where does that leave the middle class white wife? Her attempts to realize ‘freedom’ furthers the parameters of her privilege – the options to pursue more education, formalized equality represent what cannot be obtained by others with less options. Merely handing over the role of housewife to someone else still doesn’t question the rationale that created the inequality in the first place, so simple abdication won’t solve the problem. So then, who, what, where?

Similarly, the tools of racial privilege. The patronizing overtones of anyone trying to casually acquaint themselves with the culture of Others denies the efficacy of tourism and mere inclusion. Having more excluded people around again doesn’t question the material differences experienced by the different parties: the person of privilege, and the person subordinated by that privilege. Inclusion overestimates the significance of the privileged person’s mindset in determining power relationships, inaction underestimates their power in changing the world. Can I only wait for explicit confrontation and then try my best? What tools can I use?

I find it telling I have more questions now than answers.

Duncan

Morality

2006-08-26T18:15:00.000-07:00

This is the 100th post on this blog, and to celebrate I would like input from whatever number of people read it.

I have a question.

How do you resolve arguments between competing moral systems without a prior moral system to evaluate them by?

So, in the development of a personal ethical system, there can be a choice between a utilitarian ethic and a deontological rights based ethic. Each of them uses different arguments to determine why someone should follow a particular moral schema. But, neither of them can make a determinate claim to being ethical without presupposing some other grounds to evaluate on. For instance, if utilitarianism is good because it treats all people as equal, this supposes that equal treatment has intrinsic moral worth. This claim may be justified by the argument that formal equality prevents large scale violence, but then we're moving in circles.

What grounds you at your fundamental humanity that allows you to construct moral claims or schema?

Duncan

Poetry and Physical Fitness

2006-08-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

I do not believe in an authoritative interpretation of literature, or an authoritative ideal of health. Today, two events link these. The first came in my Comparative Literature course when the instructor spoke of an interpretation of a poem given by a student as being less right than another. His intention was benign, of course, but he spoke of interpreting literature in very narrow terms: being linked to a logical reasoning process. The second event was a friend to whom I gave the advice to exercise more. I did not mean this as an admonishment of his physical state as much as an attempt to realize a greater intensity of joy in feeling and knowing your body for it’s material character.

An ethics of joy links these two things in my mind. The ‘right’ interpretation for a poem should concern the reader’s (which reader? All readers, whoever happens to read at the right time in the right place) feelings of joy, and how the poem has raised or dampened those feelings. If one forking of meaning’s indeterminate paths gives you insight to a feature of living you did not know or appreciate before, then there should be no barrier to calling that meaning the truth. In my experience, the best interpretation of literature is the one that drives me towards new ideas concerning human experience and relationships (between humans, and non-humans). The more I feel changed by a poem, the better I find it, and if one interpretation leaves it politically innocuous, then I chose to believe my own instead.

In relation to exercise, the right shape for you relates to how happy you are with living day to day. Your body mediates perception fo the world in basic ways. Eyesight and other senses explain only one part of this. In the sense that humanity cannot be divorced from it’s myriad bodies, appreciation of the body plays a crucial role in defining our sense of self awareness and joy. Experimenting with bodies experiments with the very stuff of life and the meaning thereof.

Duncan

Democracy and Terror

2006-08-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

The most troubling thing I find about counter-terror measures is their undemocratic administration. Rules devised in the middle of the night by a group of very limited diversity immediately become dogma for a vast number of people – travelers (moving under threat of police action/response if they refuse to follow), police, airlines, etc.

I think that making democratic accountability the primary concern in responding to terrorism has several important impacts-

First, it creates an accountable process that ensures that the “Homeland Security” process doesn’t become a (bigger) propoganda machine. If forced to fully disclose for the sake of a vote the evidence involved in administering law enforcement guidelines, information must be pretty good, to avoid embarrassment and to justify to a less partisan group the need for action.

Second, it re-orients to type of response the government must take to deal with terrorist threats. The need for a democratic process removes the option of quick fix/immediate action law enforcement solutions to accommodate deliberation. By excluding this option, efforts would instead be taken to adjust foreign policy decisions preemptively to deter terrorism by removing incentives to attack in the first place. The convenience of the option to administer undemocratic but quick solutions creates a culture that don’t account for the root causes, as slow moving cultural shifts cannot keep pace with immediate threats.

Duncan

Ignorance and Power

2006-08-01T22:18:00.000-07:00

What happens when specific elements of consumer culture are made explicit? By this I mean, the act of decontextualization that comes with speaking about specific items in consumer culture and the supposed significance they bring in terms of their material components: “you are investing X amount of money and time to buy an electronic item that you believe will bring you self/social satisfaction.” The best examples I can come up with deal with the material/emotional relationships that people have with physical objects in their lives: for instance, coming home after work or school and staring silently at a box that flickers and speaks at you. This material connection inverts the power relationship the person assumes they have with the object. In the explicit version of events, the physical objects obtain a power over the user that the user hopes doesn’t exist. A basic element of consumer culture is satisfaction through choice. The American dream and car culture speaks to the autonomy of individuals in determining their fate. Talking about the material features of consumer culture subjugates the consumer to their material objects rather than the inverse. This is linked to a previous post I made about mass consumption. I had trouble identifying why it is pictures of mass consumption (or waste) terrify me. In these picture, the viewer identifies with the items in the picture as individuals but with their perceived role again undermined: they act as part of a mass of people compelled by greater forces crowding out individual autonomy. This description of mass culture partially explains the compulsion towards trendiness and being ‘ahead of the curve’ – an attempt to recover and individual’s power in mass culture.
Explicitness also initiates a reconsideration process for the people involved. Speaking out about consumer objects presumes that the people being spoken to don’t understand the reality of their relationship to technology. By speaking of it in a decontextualized space, they perhaps begin to question what they do or don’t know about their relationship to technology. This forms a significant line of questioning in the mind of someone using the technology for supposedly their own purpose.

Duncan

Written Previously, not posted

2006-07-20T13:05:00.000-07:00

Perhaps political organizing has come full circle. At some point, the choices in a highly mediated society fragmented experience (and opinion) to such a degree to require direct intervention on behalf of political change. If the channels can always be changed, then the effectiveness of TV ads diminishes. If other websites can be read, the power of internet based campaigning similarly diminishes. The proliferation of choice demands a style of political activism that disrupts the limiting channels of personalized transportation, entertainment, and living. This mode of political speech operates under capillary forms of distribution, and addressing one artery doesn’t guarantee that there can or will be a disruption of the overall bloodstream. In extending the metaphor further, the best method for change may rely on disconnecting people from the stream by direct action and organizing that focuses on spatial relationships as much as individual political choices.

Duncan

Dear Democratic Party of the USA

2006-07-20T12:56:00.000-07:00

There are several clear signs that should help you on the way to choosing canidates for office. One very important one includes who else wants them in office. If those people include Rupert Murdoch or 'The Republican Party' (consult inane cartoon for a stylized example), you should be very very wary of supporting that canidate.

Thank you, that is all for now.

Duncan

Lo, Lola, Lolita

2006-07-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

I find the aesthetics of Lolita particularly enchanting. Beyond the immediate lucidity and cascading intricacies of his prose, the whole work creates questions that I find compelling. In my mind, the exceptional beauty of the prose is a linguistic ploy that draws you in to questioning the role of beauty and ethics. The words themselves, separated from their role, leave you reeling (sometimes, like now, I think the words in this book somehow transcribe the world in clearer terms than I see them myself, perhaps because they also address in a particular way the spirit and poetic function of experience in a way that regular revelations cannot. Perhaps this describes the luxury and distinguishing marks of a unique talent: knowing and deploying images and experience in a constellation that shows more than stars.) but the role leaves you repulsed. The somewhat irredeemable Humpbert animates the words, and you can’t help but wish they were still again, because enjoying them almost hurts. So then, you have to ask: ‘what makes something aesthetically pleasing?’ Is it possible (or acceptable) to divorce purpose from method? Essentially, the question of why I enjoy books, words, and life keeps getting raised at moments I don’t expect.

Duncan

The danger of new psychosis

2006-07-02T21:29:00.000-07:00

For a while I have been thinking about the reasons why health (and, political) problems increasingly become framed in a biological and chemical context. The creepy articles about ‘resiliance’ and the treatment of depression by drugs both initiated this internal search. I think a particularly important catalyst, is of course the capacity to uncover these ‘causes’ through genetic analysis, blood samples and large scale studies under the scientific method. These alone however cannot explain the exploding industry surrounding psycotropic drugs, cancer medication, mental health, genetic tendancies for alcoholism or other addictions, and neonatal screening.

My problem in developing a theory to explain this arose when I kept searching for solutions that focused on the types of inputs and rationale for finding problems, when in fact the issue was in the rationale of solutions. Transitions in the framing of health problems link to economic and technological developments somewhat out of the hands of individual people. Cost benefit analysis drives the processes that develop this framework. My experience in the general age of human development we share is stratified by a diffuse sense of dislocation and separation from other people. I feel drawn out and fragmented by the multiple spaces I live in, separated and isolated by technologies that gratify a particular form of individualism that physically hides other people, and drawn apart by social norms privileging interactions on a model picked up on television. I feel all of these things drawing me forth toward something that can be called depression, attention deficits, irritable bowel syndrome, or any number of other ills and abnormalities. The cost of treating these causes cannot be charged to any one bill or person, and if they could, overwhelm those at fault. The benefits can only be measured in the accumulation of small joys, too small or poorly suited to ever show up as assets to ‘society.’ The costs then benefits those offering solutions that adapt to the situations at the root. These solutions also offer new opportunities for profit that produce willing problem solvers looking to capitalize.

Equally dangerous perhaps is the gradual adoption of what we now know as the disease for the norm. A new psychology of pleasure based around the technologies of disaffection poses a danger with equal magnitude. Of course, why not melancholy and individualism? Why not divide ourselves from our selves? Any of these could be adopted as the norm, making pathologies out of love and diseases out of humanity.

Duncan