Roving Hotel: Steven
February 2, 2010
**This should be read as a pairing with Roving Hotel: Alfonso
Steven’s b
ody aches from sitting all day. He had told his team leader time and time again that his chair was not ergonomically-correct and was going to cause long-term damage to his spine if it wasn’t changed. She had listened and the chair had been ordered but it wasn’t fast enough for him for he could feel his spine beginning to pinch at the tailbone.
He enters the station at World Trade Center. It’s 9:00 PM and Steven sees that the E train has just arrived. He runs, his cashmere coattails trailing behind him and his wingtips click on the dirty cement platform. Once in, it is a race to get a good seat. He sees a woman searching as well and swoops in to grab the seat before she can get there. She is displeased and to avoid her darkened glances he opens up a newspaper and pretends to read. She is made invisible.
The train is moving now. Steven places the paper in his bag, reaches up his well-manicured, white hand and runs his slender, soft fingers through his well-combed, blond hair that he has swept back and to the side not unlike his father used to. A strand of hair falls on the right side of his face and he gently takes it and weaves it back into place. With his left hand he loosens his silk tie, flips open the top button of his shirt. He is loose now, letting go and relaxing. Steven pulls his right leg up, places it squarely across his left knee. His hands are now folded on top of the other on his lap. He averts any gazes from the other passengers for the moment, stares out the subway window into the black and white flicker of the subway reel. West 4th Street stop. Students from NYU get on, most likely headed into the depths of Queens where the rent is affordable.
Comfortable now, he looks around. There are not many people in the subway car. He looks to his left and at the far end of the car he sees a man, probably in his late 40’s, unkempt and dirty, most likely homeless. Steven thinks he is a Mexican or Puerto Rican, one of the two but doesn’t see the difference. He didn’t smell anything before but now he is sensing a disgusting array of soiled sheets and urine. He reaches into his coat pocket, feels the soft fibers brushing against the hairs on the back of his hand and grabs his glasses, places them neatly on his nose and around his ears. Through frame-less spectacles he watches as the man curls himself tighter into a ball in his dirtied sleeping bag and plastic bags. “Like an animal,” Steven thinks to himself and is revolted yet fascinated to observe his epitome of laziness. He thinks to himself how nice it would be to sleep all day, beg for money from complete strangers, treat the subway as your personal hotel and never have to deal with a boss or responsibility. He doesn’t think he could handle not being able to bathe regularly.
42nd Street stop. An older Puerto Rican woman gets on, looks over at the man and shakes her head, moving clear down to the other side of the car. Steven has four more stops before he gets off. A police officer crosses cars while it is moving, the doors slide gracefully open and slam shut. The homeless man jumps but falls back asleep. Like a breath of fresh air, Steven welcomes the cop’s presence and the justice he will reign down upon this man. He pays $90 a month to ride the subway and sees no reason why he should have to smell this man or all the others like him that just use the cars for a place to sleep. The cop grabs his baton and nudges the man with it in the ribs. He starts but then falls back asleep. Steven thinks he is most likely drunk and swears he can smell some type of booze coming from his direction. The cop nudges him again, this time continually. “You need to wake up,” he tells him. “You can’t sleep in here.” The man wakes up and with tired eyes he looks up at him and agrees. “Collect your stuff and exit the car please,” he says and he obeys, wrapping his things back up in the plastic bags from whence they came, tying his sleeping bag into a manageable ball. The constant movement releases all the odors which were once before contained and Steven scowls, tries to stop breathing through his nose. The cop sits to the side, watching. The 7th Avenue stop is next. Steven shifts in his seat, his suit pants sliding across the subway benches, ice skating on a field of plastic. The homeless man stands, looks over and for a moment, locks eyes with Steven. Steven sees his tired, brown eyes, his ragged, dark beard, his hands that are toughened over with calluses and scars. He sees his hair, tousled and worn, his pants ripped, his shirt torn. The train stops, the man leaves and Steven breathes deep as the cop exits and his comfort level is restored. “Glad for the NYPD,” he thinks to himself and looks up to the stop map. Two more. He’s almost home.
Photo Courtesy of Downtown Express
Capsule Hotel: Sumi
February 1, 2010
**This should be read as a pairing with Capsule Hotel: Ebisu
Sumi wakes to find that the screen on the edge of her capsule has been lifted and a small white boy named Mark is looking in curiously. It was becoming a daily ritual for the boy, an exercise in naturalist tendencies and Sumi felt like a rhino on the plains of Kenya, the ones she saw on the small television screen above her bed. She yells ‘Dette!’ and kicks at the boy with her sore feet and aching legs. The boy scatters, looks on from a distance and disappears down the yellowed hallway. There is no use in trying to go back to bed she knows and moves her body forward down the cylinder enclosure towards the entrance where she will sit and listen to the crowded capsules birth their occupants into the morning air.
She had come from poverty, a house with poorly maintained infrastructure that blurred the lines between nature and clean, demarcated living space. Her father, Akio, was a farmer who grew rice in the terraces left untouched by the major agricultural companies that had taken over Japan. He still worked by hand, refused to use mechanization to increase productivity and as a result, produced little more than what was needed for their subsistence. Her mother, Cho, was a weaver and made mats and Fedoras out of the dried rice stalks which rarely sold but kept her occupied throughout most of Sumi’s childhood. Sumi had come to Tokyo with only a few yen in her pockets and an idealistic dream of becoming the next big Japanese pop star. Years later, she found herself working at a department store selling shoes and suits to well-groomed men and expensively-clad women and was disappointed only temporarily that she had not achieved her dream of stardom. She was proud to have a steady job, enough money to pay for a place to live even if it was pretty small and enough to eat and send some home to her ailing parents. It wasn’t much but her life in Tokyo was far better than it ever had been back home.
Sumi’s legs are dangling now over the edge and she looks to her left where the long-faced Ebisu is sitting, face ground into the tiled floor below. She never understood how he could be so depressed all the time. She knew his daily routine like the back of her hand. He would wake screaming often, sit dazed at the edge of his capsule, pouring over the dirty tiles on the floor and then would lean back temporarily watching some trashy television before he would get up and as if in a daze, walk down the hallways without looking anyone else in the eye. He was a strange character, one completely internal to himself and she often felt like reaching over to shake him from his waking reveries, letting him know that it wasn’t as bad as he made it out to be, that there were many positive aspects of their lives in Tokyo. Instead she watched him, day in and day out and was grateful that the vision of life that she had carved out for herself nourished her soul and allowed her to give freely to those around her. She watches as Ebisu jumps from the edge of the capsule, dirty towel in hand and slowly walks towards the communal baths. She feels sorry for him but has her own life to worry about.
Sumi slides her legs out completely, turns around and steps down to the floor below. It is cold against the soles of her feet and she arches them to keep them from touching as best she can. Others are waking now and she greets those that sit on the edges of their capsules with cheery and heartfelt sentiments. Like a ray of radiant sunshine she walks the hallways of clouded gazes and warped visions and bids sordid specters to return to their darkened recesses if only for her temporary presence. Sumi has begun another day and makes her way valiantly to the mossy communal baths of the capsule hotel.
Roving Hotel: Alfonso
January 5, 2010
It was 6:00 p.m. The night had turned to frost. Another day, another unsuccessful attempt at getting work. The E train pulls into Jamaica Center, slows to a halt, bumping gently into the black and yellow bumpers at the end of the platform. Alfonso grabs his army-green backpack, throws the right black handle over his left shoulder, collects his two plastic bags with The Strand written across them in red and white, one with his toiletries, another with his blankets.
Alfonso had come to America seeking work, promised the glory of a land where the rich or well-to-do were lazy and would pay someone such as himself a large sum of money to do odd jobs. What he found were decent jobs in construction with long hours but good pay, nice people, many of whom were from places near to his hometown of Linares, Mexico, and affordable housing near the construction sites. New York City, for its reputation for being cold and heartless, was far from it for Alfonso and he was able to not only make enough money to live comfortably but was sending a large sum of money back home to his wife, Yesenia, and two children, Amada and Sol.
Deep in Queens, he and his fellow expats would build new condos and apartment complexes for the influx of white kids moving in from all across the country and Manhattan, where the prices that were traditionally astronomical had only gotten worse. They would spend days throwing up walls and stucco, nailing 2 x 4’s, running electrical wiring. It was meant to be fast, cheap and shoddy but Alfonso and the others would take their time to make sure that while they were fast, they were also thorough. He couldn’t imagine living in one of these places and wanted to make it at least livable if it couldn’t be hospitable due to mindless design and anti-human, pro-money sentiments.
The jobs had come one after the other and the boom of the 90’s and 00’s kept he and his compatriots in work from 8 in the morning till sometimes as late as 8 at night. But the idiots on Wall Street had thought it their right to play with the hearts, minds and money of those looking for a better life, a house, maybe a new car or small business. The loans had flowed freely to anyone, irrespective of their income or ability to pay them back. That bubble had burst and burst fast. From sometimes working 2-3 jobs a day, Alfonso and his friends soon found themselves working one job 5 days a week if they were lucky but more often 3-4 days a week. But the economic strains ran deep and the cranes stopped lifting, the buildings stopped growing, and Alfonso soon found himself competing with people he had at one time worked with for even the most menial of jobs. He had gone from building apartment complexes to washing dishes in the back of some Italian restaurant in the dregs of Queens and while it was still a job, here they didn’t provide affordable housing nor did they pay well enough for Alfonso to send money back home to his family. He spent the days which had now turned cold in the onset of winter working hard at the job he did have and trying to help his friends who had not been as lucky as he to find some type of work in the restaurant or somewhere else nearby. But his job was long and at the end of the day he was tired, his hands were worn and slowly, he began to sleep more and help others less not because he didn’t want to but simply because there were no jobs and he was tired. His savings rapidly dwindled.
The doors open and Alfonso steps in, moves to the far corner where there is a single seat near the end of the train. The cabin is warm and he pulls his jacket up tight against his neck, places his plastic bags underneath the seat and sets his backpack on his lap. “Please stand clear of the closing doors.” The intercom sounds. He pulls a scarf out of his bag, lays it across his forehead to block the dim yellow light of the subway car and settles down for a long sleep.
It had been December 1st that Alfonso had gone to his landlord to explain that he was unable to pay that month’s rent. He had talked to his boss, asked to be paid early for that month but his boss had declined, said the business was hurting too and didn’t have the extra cash to be paying people early. Alfonso’s landlord had said he needed the money, that if Alfonso couldn’t give it to him, he would get it from someone else. Thirty days later, Alfonso was homeless, tried going to friends but they too had been run out of their places and the few that hadn’t already had six or more people staying with them. The restaurant would fold one month later after being open for 25 years and Alfonso would be out of a job. The “hotel ambulante” or “roving hotel” of the E train was his only realistic hope, the shelters being filled with violence and drug-use, things Alfonso was not used to and had always warned his children about.
Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Ave. and the train comes to a halt. Alfonso removes the scarf. Some white kids in their teens get on, give him a look of disgust and move to the other end of the car. An older black woman gets on, sits near him but gives him sideways glances to make sure he knows he is being watched. He knows he must smell. It’s been over a week that he has gone without bathing and his clothes are soiled from the constant walking and accumulation of dirt that happens over time. A cop gets on, the NYPD, that blue force of steel that so often made his life more difficult than it already was. She’s a kid, no more than 25 and she walks over, cocky, one finger of her right hand tucked under her belt. She asks Alfonso where he is going, Alfonso says World Trade Center, the last stop on the E train. Next thing he knows, the cop is pulling him up and pushing him out of the subway car with her nightstick. “Find another place to sleep,” she says and the doors close. She is gone. Alfonso is used to this by now as are most that have chosen to make the subway their roving hotel and he waits on the platform for the next train.
He will find work soon he hopes but in the meantime will continue looking, continue visiting the soup kitchens, friends, the churches. Wall Street had its best year yet he had read in the discarded papers as they haggle over million dollar bonuses and bail-outs to the tune of billions of dollars.
The next train arrives, he enters and settles in for another fitful night of sleep.
Capsule Hotel: Ebisu
January 4, 2010
*Note: this should be read after reading “Askew,” the post from January 2nd, 2010.
Ebisu screams and rises up in bed, slamming his head against the cubicle ceiling and lies back down. Another nightmare where he is being pushed by an unseen force off of the Toshimbo Cliffs and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. He shakes his head, tries to forget and gently turns over to his right, looks at the beige plastic wall not inches from his face. His knee grazes the slippery confines of his sleeping cube, reminds him that he is no longer in Yamagata. He is in Tokyo and inhabits cube number 505 in one of Tokyo’s many capsule hotels in the dregs of the failing metropolis where the gap between rich and poor grows exponentially and people like Ebisu fall through the cracks.
The wall doesn’t comfort him. He lies on his back, reaches his right hand over a few inches and turns on the yellow light near his head, the switch covered in the oils from past inhabitant’s hands. He can adjust it only a few inches to the right or left and the light shines directly into his eyes either way so he closes his eyes. The light pushes through his eyelids, makes him see red, and he takes himself far away to the mountains near his home, the face of his wife expecting him to come back soon with riches from the big city as he had promised, his little boy, now 6, playing with his kite along the river who will run towards him upon his return. They will embrace and he will smile once again. Happiness. Somewhere but not here.
The old man from Tainai three cubes down is coughing again. Everyone says he has tuberculosis, the new kind that is resistant to the drugs doctors have and people shun him, tell him to leave in whispered tones and angry looks. But he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Like most of the people here, he had come to the big city looking for work, promised by the papers and friends in Tokyo that work was there awaiting his arrival. But things had changed and changed quickly. People were out of work, the once-rich were now poor and jobless and things were no better in the countryside. People still flocked to the city in search for a better life. Most ended up here, in the capsule hotels, where their living spaces were constrained to 30 square feet of a plastic cubicle, one of hundreds, all exactly the same.
Ebisu can’t get back to sleep. He edges his body down towards the entrance to his cube until his legs are sticking out and folds them over the edge where they dangle in the doorway to his downstairs neighbor’s home. He pulls his torso up and to the right at a diagonal so as not to hit his head again, lifts the cheesecloth at the entrance to his cube and leans forward, head and chest exposed to the chilly, thin corridor lined with cubes. There’s an art form to exiting these things that is learned only after time. He will sit here for a few minutes to wake up before chancing the communal bathrooms.
Aneko, an older, gray-haired woman who came from a fishing family in Imizu, is crying again. Her sobbing fills the plastic corridors, the corridors that smell like bleach and forced sterility. A new man at the end of the corridor leans out, lights a cigarette and looks over to Ebisu, nods his head. Ebisu nods back, knows the man is in the early stages of coming to accept his new living situation, knows that no matter how hard one tries, there are more bad days than good. After a while, one wears it in one’s forehead, across one’s eyes, in one’s slow-moving gait and countenanced forms of a hazy apparition. The smoke trails along the old man’s cheekbones and rises in a straight line to the ceiling above, now brown with tar stains and mold from the showers down the corridor.
Ebisu leans back, lets his legs dangle freely, reaches his hand over to the TV set and grabs his headphones. He used to care that they were covered in past inhabitant’s earwax, used to hold the headphones near his ears so that they wouldn’t touch. Now he pushes them into his ears tightly, has come to own the earwax of past and present, feels that if he can leave a bit of his own earwax on these things, he will in some way own at least these, that even if he leaves, some new inhabitant will be forced to reckon with the remnants of his existence in this cube, along this corridor, within this hungry city filled with wandering ghosts.
The TV buzzes in his ear, the picture is fuzzy and the sound is no better. These capsule hotels used to be the overnight hotels for the wealthy businessmen and women that missed their last trains home. They used to be well-maintained, the TVs used to be top-of-the-line, the headphones were replaced daily, the sheets were washed constantly. Now things went untouched, unimproved. Poverty, or the presence of the poor, has a way of breeding indifference in landlords.
Ebisu shuts it off, throws the headphones to the right and edges his way out, jumps to the cold tiles below. In a stooper, he walks past the sleeping inhabitants of dreams gone awry, listens to the constant buzzing of the florescent lighting overhead, passes the smoking old man, the crying old woman, the man with TB. Passes so many others, some long-time inhabitants, others merely transients working their way through the musty alleyways of Tokyo. He turns the corner, sees the communal bath, the other naked men wrinkled and worn soothing their pains in the warm waters, filmy with the oils of the cubicle colony. Ebisu takes his clothes off, joins the men as naked as the day he was born, lets the pungent steam enter his nose, roll across his mind. He is elsewhere now, in a big space filled with nature, his family, a semblance of happiness. A young man across the bath begins to cough, the woman’s sobs from the corridor intensify. He is nowhere but here.
Askew
January 2, 2010
Eddie opens the New York Times as per his daily routine, cup of coffee in hand, wipes his glasses off on his shirt. His eyes trail down to the story at the bottom of the page, “For Some of Japan’s Jobless, New Homes Just 5 Feet Wide,” accompanied by a sepia photo of a miserable-looking young Japanese man sitting on the edge of what looks to be a morgue cabin marked “505″. Eddie begins to read and gets an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach as if he is reading the dystopia novel 1984 but knows that he is not, that this is real, that people really live like this. The article outlines the impoverished existence of the inhabitants of the “capsule hotels” of Tokyo, 6.5′ x 5′ spaces that resemble coffins far more than homes. Each space is furnished with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks. Noises reverberate along the corridors of cubicles stacked one on top of the other, fresh linen and access to the use of a communal bath and sauna are the only things which slightly resemble saving graces in this plastic hell. The spaces used to be used as overnight beds for salarymen who had missed the last train home. But that was decades ago and it had now turned into the last refuge for those looking to find work in a collapsing economy. For these cubes, each inhabitant pays roughly $640 per month. Eddie shakes his head, puts down his coffee. His stomach is now in knots, he imagines himself coming home to a plastic cube, barely big enough to move in, inserting himself into the capsule and pulling the ragged, widely-used blanket up to his chin. He imagines the fuzzy buzz of the small television in his ears in the overused headphones lined with the earwax of past inhabitants, the smells of sterility coming from the daily-bleached corridors, the lingering smell of cigarette smoke that one must wade through on the way to the communal bathrooms where mold grows in thin grooves along the white tiles of the shower stalls. Everything from the bathroom stalls to the lockers are slightly too small, his clothes are stuffed tightly into miniscule spaces and every time he wakes to go out into the streets of Tokyo, he imagines he must roll his shirts along the edges of the metal lockers to rid them of their creases. He imagines that the cubicle rests itself upon his brow eventually, seeps into his eyes, that his vision begins to fail and he begins to think of the world as limited as that of his living space. Eddie shutters and turns the page.
New York section and he reads of day laborers who have recently found themselves homeless as the US economy continues to collapse, reads about Carlos Ruano who was kicked out of his house for not being able to pay rent and spent the nights riding the E train. So many people have begun riding the E train overnight that it has been called the “hotel ambulante” or “roving hotel” by other day laborers. Eddie can’t believe it, can’t imagine what it must be like to ride those trains through the underground with the noise and the stench the constant movement all night long. Can’t imagine what it must be like to piece together a sordid mattress if one is so lucky, a few scraps of food, some clothing in the mean and freezing streets of New York City after coming to this country on a hope and a dream that somehow life would be better here, that this was the land of opportunity, that people could make it here if they just worked hard enough.
Eddie turns to the next section, sees the decadence on page after page of the Arts and Leisure section, reads about the opening of the Bizet’s “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera, the Travel section about the most posh places in Cairo and just heaves. He throws the paper to the side, is so sick of it all. “This is not right,” he tells himself. Over and over again he asks himself how things can be in the state that they are in, that in the same paper with not four pages separation one can read of homeless laborers riding the trains all night long because they are homeless or people across the world living in cubicles no bigger than coffins and then read about the inane trials and tribulations of the rich and famous who discuss the rawness and daring of Bizet’s opera,”Carmen”. Eddie was furious and it boiled up inside of him like raw steel. Everything was off, askew, twisted and fucked up and backwards. Things were not fucking right.
50 Degrees, Cold and Cloudy
December 28, 2009
Truly these are troubled times
When the nearest one can get to one’s brethren
Is a ten-foot pole’s length,
And the most one can talk about
With one’s nearest neighbor
Is the goddamn weather.
New York: Silent Entropy
December 28, 2009
Rock talk
To the concrete walls of New York City
The homeless appear as moles in the tunnels
And the hawkish CEOs of glim-gleam towers
Wait to pick them off
One brandished train tube at a time.
Rock talk
To the glistening rubber of overpriced name-brand boots
On the bitsy feet of Candy, Marsha, or Marlene
That tritz trounce the pavement
And just gliiide.
Rock talk
To the children of our tomorrow
Heads made of candied gaming goop
And ‘gimmie’ hands that can never be satiated.
Give ‘em poisonous input from all directions
And away they’ll munch.
Rock talk
Toa distant neighbor three inches away
And a squandered celebrity in the face of millions
Bringin’ fame only to the median
Of a fish amongst a school of sharks
In the hub-dub drub of underground passageways
And tribulations.
Rock talk
To myself in the sudden dark
Of an unlit underground chamber
And a nest of dreams a ramblin’
Within this projection system of a mind embraced
The roll keeps running, the film ain’t tarnished yet.
Rock talk
A picture frame of streaming continuals
And melt that rock into a thousand soupy strands
Of digestible truth.
To allow the people to reclaim their ears
And converse.
Rising Change, Tempered Falls
December 28, 2009
The waves remind him of continual change.
Born at sea where moon meets water
They rush towards shore,
Kamikaze waves bent on making one last stand.
White-walled faces arise out of sapphire sea
And then, amongst cousins, face the harsh realities
Of the tempered sand awaiting.
The rise, the fall, the hiss, the backwards crawl
And its over just as it began,
Another time, another wave
Time forever marking one after another,
Change continual,
And there is no need for fear.
Early Pressed Pants and Collars: Soul -1, Corporation +2
December 28, 2009
The stillness of my cubicle unnerving
As the whitewashed walls of human beings
Carouse the parlors of the corporate phallus.
Eyes sunken, lifeless, they peruse the many ways to be marginal
And succeed in all.
Bitty-ritty tick-tocks on my clock
And I stock
Up on the paper clips and file folders that comprise my life
I stack them one on top of the other
Till they touch the ceiling in my 4′x5′ cube
In the hopes that through calamitous confusion
They merge to form a robotic companion named Larry
Who I can speak to about philisophical nonsensical menageries
And attend to meaningful repose and reverical rantings
Amidst piles of instant coffee cups and despoiled sugar packets–
Styrofoam as far as the eye can see.
51 floors of what exactly I do not know
But Larry’s with me in our towers of paper, computers, pens and garbage
And guides me through my day
One cube of a second at a go.
Spirit Assault
December 28, 2009
A.M. comes with the sun and seas of people
Corporate drones march to the hive
In plain, baby-blue shirts and over-sized asses
Heads hung low, briefcases in hand
Unhappiness has become the norm
Plastic smiles and forced laughter coat
A cancer too many
As the machine chug-a-chugs away.
Premature balding on men
Fucked up twisted, junky-chunky knees on women
Stilettos to a painful tomorrow
And a clicking wingtip shoe drives me mad.
Steady, even-paced fury walking
Burning deep drive into souls of push-pin dolls
That some crazed masterful puppet master plays with
In his darkened mahogany offices
Of devils personified.
Money and lucrative personal losses
Breed unspoken discontent and existential yearnings
To know why and what we do
Fro 9-5’s-a-many
And working towards the weekend loses meaning
As we bleed, as our weeks bleed, as our lives bleed
Into the corporate fickle fabric of a never tomorrow.
My fear pushes me forward
As the crowd’s discontented gruntings begin to build
A stop in the flow of ‘progress’
For needless questions
A waste of time
Keep moving,
Keep moving
Just.
Keep.
Moving.
I take a sidelong glance from above my cubicle walls
To observe the madness of the busy bee comrades
And slink back into the recesses of my memory for sustenance.
I can do no more than hide
And wait for the torrential downward blades of skeleton sickles
To cease their slicing
And my soul will arise once the corporate ghosts have perished
In their rat race rave towards nothingness
And I will have survived by an inch.
But that inch will grow.
Nueva York
December 28, 2009
Nueva York ain’t so new
Prissy Manhattanites parade around the pew
Of 5th Avenue Bloomingdales and other such holes
Giving thousands of examples and a hardened credence to the word
Oblivion.
Rick-rick subticks roll underground
The ‘mole people’ homeless keep keen eyes in the darkened moldy abyss
As the silver bullet rips through their hood
And it’s gone just as it has come
Another hour, another ten trains.
Feathered lawyers and top execs spread their wings
In the skies of Manhattan
And watch eagle-eye style as their phallic shadows extend over the city,
As day turns to night,
And they speedily exit through the entrails of their towers into sleek
And shiny corporate cars—nests of solitudonous cash.
From the high to the low
Rains clichéd headaches
Of a city, of a city, of a god-damned city
That ain’t so new
But is sure as hell addictive in its
Topsy-turvy turmoil.
America
December 28, 2009
America. America is an ill-fated apartment
In the downtown slums,
New by years but old if you smell the smells
Of its worn, peeling, white-washed walls and
The black mold beginning to grow in the corner.
America is a long highway
Filled with cracks and potholes
And tar-brushed
Streaks of an over-worn tarmac.
America is a semi-truck rattling its bones
Down your not-so-small-anymore neighborhood street,
Calling out for the children of a younger generation
To come and play with its oil-streaked grill.
America is a fat man walking a fat dog
On a fat street filled with fat burger joints
And a cloggety-cloggety we run.
America is a stained plush carpet from the 1960’s.
Its liberal leanings crying out for peace and justice and such
But the cat’s just shat on it and
No one is willing to clean it up.
America is an overcrowded high school
Filled with over stimulated kids
Wording overplayed songs from the
Overly monotonous radio stations.
America is a cancer ward bursting at the seams
And no one knows why.
America in all its fame and glory…is not.
It has a taste of wine gone sour,
Muddled heathen breath of non-believers,
Personal gods on their hum-drum war paths
Cruising for that one good hit
That’ll give them stories 45 cocktail parties later.
America is a home like the home next to it,
Surrounded by pesticidal
Fields of production glory,
Labeled safe for human consumption
And the puppeteers steer clear.
America is a hope and dream gone contradiction
And a lie gone sour.
Please stand for the pledge of allegiance…
And I sit.
America is that bag lady on the street corner
Being beaten by a gang of teenage boys—
A movie in the making and
Four-star entertainment for the masses.
America is the bling without the substance,
The gleam without the eye,
The cream without the crop—
A window dressing to sustain its citizens
Through a long, drawn-out winter of know-nothing
Do-dads and banana splits.
America is a tattered flag flying
In the dusty shadows
Of a yard-stick highway.
America is a father without a son.
A patriarchal licenser of ‘Do this’ but ‘Don’t do that’.
Liberals expound their theories and say,
‘Let’s discuss’.
America, in its finality, is veneer
Without sincere or dear
And we are no where near
What we supposedly intended to achieve.
America is a history book gone fanatical.
The deathly bony fingers of
Columbus reaching up
To state that he was a great adventurer
And the discoverer of a new land—
New like water, wind, or air—
And the heads begin to bobble.
America is a series of weekends and 8-5’s
Of commemorative holidays for dead bodies we use
To keep the fiction rolling.
America is entertainment in war or peace—
Although the latter seems to have gone on leave.
It is a White House filled with white people
And white walls that, although they are prim and proper,
Are reminiscent of the ones I mentioned earlier.
On a bad politico day, which is often,
One can smell the reek
Of whitey politicians running circles in their hamster wheels
From damn-near half the world away.
America is tiring, exhausting, trying.
For, for this many people to
Believe in this place
Is an act of will beyond comprehension—
And we spin and spin away.
America was my home—a fiction of white picket fences
And wide open spaces (which closed minds helped constrict).
But, my childhood has ended,
The fiction must stop sometime.
And so I walk—
As far from this patriarchal poodle as my broken bones can bear.
For Fathers That Do Not Speak
December 28, 2009
How time has left its mark on you father.
Your splotched skin tells of truths left untold,
Awakening you in the early morning against your will,
Your skin has taken control of your biological clock
And has left you silencing the very thing which wakes you.
An upbringing of overbearing not-tolds
Leaves you with everything to tell,
But no way to voice it.
Your skin one day will pass
And the rest of you will
Unabidingly follow.
The many things left unsaid will seep from your pores
Into the loamy soil about you
And flowers will burst forth color and delight never before seen
On the very energies which you never released.
And slowly, ever so gradually,
These too will pass
And your stony grave will be inscribed
With the skins of so many things left
Unsaid.
Granny Insanity
December 28, 2009
Grandmother’s lost it again
Touting the fly-papered lollipops,
Kindling garbage bin fires
With the heads of her childhood dolls
And cick-cuck cackling at 3:00 in the a.m.
She rides her broomstick high into that dark dream-like dawn
And buzzes the lawns of the neighborhood with a face razor and determination.
She ties her hair to her legs so she doesn’t walk too fast
Likes to keep a snail’s pace,
Smell the roses, taste the lively buds of tree-born ticks,
Smick-smacking lips on little lizard’s heads
Twisting her cockeyed glass eye with her index finger
Till it pops out ‘plop’ into her potato bug soup
And spoons it up, rolls it over her tongue.
Her stockings stretched tightly
Over bony legs of viscous flesh
She applies for modeling positions in the dregs of New York City
Calls herself Marilyn and dons a wig of frizzled bacon.
Thick-rimmed slate glasses adorn her crooked nose
Held together only by the gum of yesteryear
Upside down press-on nails painted orange
Luring butterflies and hummingbirds into her web of nonsequiters.
Grandmother has lost it—completely
My only hope being that time-tested genes have met their fate in her
And found their regeneration in me.
We Forget
December 28, 2009
We forget the many tumbled tides
Of lonely days in darkened hours.
Our semblance to our sisters and brothers
In quickened paces and frenzied gazes.
Our compassion in whords of cold, hard cash
And spin-spun streamings of whirlish devil-makers.
We forget to say I love you to those who care
In a world where truthfully so few do.
Stretching our necks to continually find profit in other ventures
We forget to say I love you to the arms that hold us still,
The eyes that calm our souls.
We forget to say I love you to the warmth of a smile,
A slight nod of the head, angelic gestures of tenderness that sweep our tiredness to another time,
Another place that is not now.
“Why do we forget?” we ask
And we forget that perhaps it is not for us to know.
When we remember, remember well
And for that moment forget that you are
Ever going to forget again.
Water Drips, Timely Tolls
December 28, 2009
Water drips, timely tolls
Bring the weather of a rainy stole
To ask upon my breath
What never speaks
And laughs of loving
Wrap the sheath.
Say not what you think
For it is marked upon your lips, your brow, your very face
And you are upon the brink—
Of a coddled and lasting stink.
Ha-Joon Chang and Dani Rodrik: Applications to Mauritius and Madagascar
December 26, 2009
Kicking Away the Ladder: The “Real” History of Free Trade by Ha-Joon Chang
Ha-Joon Chang, within Kicking Away the Ladder: The “Real” History of Free Trade“, presents a compelling case for debunking the neoclassical discourse on globalization which states that, “free trade, more than free movements of capital and labor, is the key to global prosperity” (Chang, 2003). Chang successfully reveals the shortcomings of an “official” history of capitalism based on half-truths and an inability (or unwillingness) of most of today’s most developed countries (i.e. U.S. and Britain) to recognize that they used active interventionist trade and industrial policies which aimed to promote infant industries during their catch up periods. Through an exploration of Britain, the U.S., Germany, France, Sweden, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Japan and the East Asian newly industrialized countries, specific industrial policies point clearly to the fact that almost all NDCs not only used promotion strategies in relation to their infant industries but they also employed aggressive tariff protection, abolished patent laws, and importantly used a mix of policies not a single policy as some NDCs would have us believe. Developing countries, Chang points out, have grown much faster, “when they used ‘bad’ trade and industrial policies between 1960 and 1980 than when they used ‘good’ policies during the following two decades”. In recommending “good” policies, therefore, NDCs are “kicking away the ladder” to successful development, disallowing other LDCs the same conditions that initially allowed them to flourish.
“Growth Strategies” by Dani Rodrik
Dani Rodrik, within his working paper “Growth Strategies”, makes two key arguments: a) that neoclassical economic analysis is a lot more flexible than its practitioners in the policy domain have generally given it credit; and b) that igniting economic growth and sustaining it are somewhat different enterprises. To bolster his first argument, Rodrik explains that, “first-order economic principals – protection of property rights, contract enforcement, market-based competition, appropriate incentives, sound money, and debt sustainability do not map into unique policy packages” (Rodrik, 2003). Function and form of good governance, Rodrik explains, are not necessarily correspondent. Those looking to reform can (and have) reshaped the institutional designs of neoclassical economics by taking into account local constraints and learning to take advantage of local opportunities. He fills out his second argument by stating that it is often the case that sustaining growth is often harden than igniting it because of the fact that sound institutional underpinnings must be created to, “maintain productive dynamism and endow the economy with resilience to shocks over the long term”. This takes time, transparency, and a government committed to doing so. Rodrik uses countries which have pursued unorthodox, two-track, gradualist reform paths and found relative success as informative examples of the fact that there is not one, uniform way of approaching growth. Taking into account the economic and political contexts of the countries involved is paramount according to Rodrik and rule of thumb economics, “can be safely discarded”.
The Case of Mauritius
Chang’s book speaks very closely to the case of Mauritius but in many respects, due to Mauritius’ economic and political histories, the tiny island is a bit of an anomaly. Because of their dependence on sugar, the U.S. (and primarily the E.U.) have willingly offered non-orthodox protectionist treaties to Mauritius from associations such as the E.E.C. and the Lome Convention (which gave the island an assured market at high guaranteed prices for over one-third of the total Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific quote for the European Economic Community). Mauritius’ developmental history has been filled with a mix of fairly successful hetero/orthodox policy decisions, relatively stable government, and perhaps most importantly, the aforementioned perfectionist sugar (and later textile) trade agreements. Because of the colonial ties which Mauritius has kept very much intact as well as the respective colonial powers’ reliance upon Mauritius for a large percentage of its sugar imports (Mauritius exported close to 500,000 tons of raw centrifugal sugar to the E.U. in 2006), it is understandable why the NDCs have not pressured Mauritius to adopt the “good,” neoclassical policies towards development. The “ladder” has very much still remained and Mauritius continues to climb it.
In line with this, Rodrik’s claim that rule of thumb economics may be discarded seems to ring true with the case of Mauritius. The aforementioned trade agreements (particular to Mauritius) led to huge profits which were then partially reinvested into tourism, manufacturing, and the basic infrastructure but due to the extremely favorable terms of such trade agreements, there was a clear disincentive against diversification. The government of Mauritius then stepped in considering its local constrains and opportunities (Rodrik, 2003) and offered as many incentives (infrastructure, site and factory space at low rents, cheap energy, duty-free raw materials, etc) as possible to lure investors into manufacturing for export. But again, favorable trade agreements played a key role in expanding the government-led E.P.Z with the Multifibre Agreement (MFA). Neoclassical economics has most definitely played a role in Mauritius development but its limits have not only been changed or pushed. Instead, Mauritius has often stepped far beyond the confines of neoclassical theory into heterodoxy and has found great success as a result. This only lends itself further to Rodrik’s claim that one size does not fit all in the case of economic and social development and growth.
The Case of Madagascar
Madagascar, particularly during the early years of the military dictatorship in the 1970’s, was run under a socialist economy and unfortunately lends itself to many of the neoclassical arguments against state intervention. The Great Island goes largely against Chang’s claim that many LDCs that have used “bad” policies have encountered strong growth. With largely stagnant GDP growth throughout the 1970–2007 period, the GDP grew at a mere 1% in the 1970’s compared to a long term average of 2.26%. Government economic and social policies have largely been distorted in favor of the urban populations and during the state interventionist period of the 1970’s, Madagascar departed from the Franc Zone and the pegging of the Malagasy Franc to a currency basket (with foreign exchange restrictions) and this contributed to economic underperformance. Further intervention, rent-seeking and corruption marked the 70’s and export taxation plagued farmers who received less that 8% of vanilla’s price at times. An export tax in the mid-70’s drove the nominal rates of assistance to -70% and heavy taxation on the producers was worsened. These “bad” policies (traditionally looked down on by neoclassicals) may have, in fact, been bad. This is where Rodrik steps in.
There are innumerable complexities as for why Madagascar’s growth has been largely stagnant, particularly during the 1970’s. Good governance, however, has been particularly important in Madagascar’s case. To Rodrik’s point, it is clear that although the form of governance does not necessarily constitute its function, the government’s economic and social policies in Madagascar have often lent themselves to the critique that they were largely unaware of local constraints or opportunities and were largely dysfunctional. Initial GDP growth and GDP per capita growth in the 70’s was not sustained because the country lacked sound institutional underpinnings as well as any form of dynamism to adapt to the inevitable shocks that arise when running a country’s economic and political machine. With Rodrik’s arguments in mind, it is clear that the Madagascar government has not always taken into account the economic and political contexts in which it was operating and unfortunately for the people of the country, there have been many tumultuous political movements in recent history.
John Stuart Mill: A Conception of Truth Falls Short
December 26, 2009
Note: This was a first-draft paper written for entry into a Masters in Philosophy program at the University of Cape Town in 2005.
A multitude of books, papers and lectures have been created concerning John Stuart Mill and his conception of freedom of opinion and expression as written in Chapter II: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion in On Liberty. The classical interpretation of Mill’s outline for freedom of expression can be clearly stated in the following three points: 1) One may have a truth but due to the fact that society is not yet willing to listen to that truth, it may be suppressed as a falsity (Mill 77); 2) Truth, once grasped, runs the chance of becoming hard, cold and meaningless (‘dead dogma’, Mill 97) if not reconsidered, rejuvenated, rethought or “freely and openly canvassed” within a society (Mill 96); and 3) Truth can find itself in a precarious situation whereby the “conflicting doctrines…share the truth between them” and as yin and yang when placed together, the two parts make a more complete truth (Mill 108). After a brief discussion of the aforementioned points, an understanding of Mill’s classical interpretation shall be illustrated. Thereafter, qualms concerning Mill’s aforementioned points will be elucidated upon.
Let us take the first instance whereby a person may have a truth (such as Copernicus’ notion that the world is round) and that truth is suppressed as a falsity. It has been all too often that intelligent men and women have come to discover trying and revolutionary truths. One need only to think of the following examples: Newton’s concept of gravity, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Frantz Fanon’s depiction of Algerian resistance to French colonists and his overwhelming accounts of colonial atrocities, Martin Luther King Jr.’s push for racial equality, Nelson Mandela’s conception of a new South Africa, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Isabelle Allende. The list could continue ad infinitum of people that have helped burst through the walls that societies tend to build up to ensure order, stability, and comfort for its people. And as each man or woman has come forward, a revolutionary truth tucked neatly under the brim of their hat, each has met a resistance unparalleled and fierce. An explanation for perhaps why this resistance comes can be found in the fact that governments and individuals must not “allow doctrines which they honestly think dangerous to the welfare of mankind, either in this life or in another, to be scattered abroad without restraint” (Mill 78). This societal and individual resistance therefore may act as a sieve, sifting out falsities and eventually, through trial and tribulation, will allow the truth to live. It is exactly this resistance which eventually gives credence to the truth that is attempting to surface. In the case of racial equality, resistance was immense and many times violent and the resistance continues even to this day, violent eruptions occurring on the streets of America, the suburbs of Johannesburg, and elsewhere. And the resistance will continue unabated until one day, at a momentous time in history, we allow ourselves to understand our racial differences and begin building a common, socio-economically fair foundation from which to build.
Truths such as those encased in the push for racial equality will eventually arise from the ashes of conflictual discussion and will be stronger to the onslaughts of others. Even though Mill states, “the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another,” (Mill 89) he goes on to state that if a truth is in fact true, it will be suppressed, stepped on, tucked away and hidden time and time again but will, when the time is right, arise from the ashes like a Phoenix, finding fertile minds in which to grow (Mill 90).
Let us consider Mill’s second point: that of a truth that becomes cold, hard and meaningless if not reconsidered, rejuvenated or rethought. It is a common occurrence for teachers, when having taught something for many years, to find themselves one day mouthing words they no longer consciously decide upon saying. Hearkening back to the experience of many in the 60’s, the teacher feels somehow a third person spectator of his/her own lesson and the words have lost all the meaning, vitality, and truth they once held. Bu the best teachers, those teachers that continue to inspire and feed the hungry minds of children, are the teachers that reevaluate and reconsider what they are teaching yearly, if not monthly, weekly, or even daily. The truths they utter are not third person recordings but come from the heart, the approach to the teaching of the truth continually changing, but the underlying truth staying fixed. Christians and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, all denominations are sure to experience the same thing. Those that simply absorb the teachings of Christ or Muhammad (perhaps forced to at an early age) have no real corporeal sense of what they are absorbing. The truths uttered in the Bible or Koran lose their meaning, becoming mere dogma. And many times, those very same passive followers are the ones that most avidly pronounce their ideas as Truth, all others being false or somehow inferior in mind. Tending to think that “no good and some harm, comes of it [their ideas] being allowed to be questioned,” (Mill 97) they continue believing and shut out discussion. But when an inkling of question enters their mind, their beliefs crumble as castles made of sand (Mill 97). It is to those that reevaluate, reconsider, and rethink the words of the Bible and Koran for themselves that the real meaning and truth is felt and for many, it forever changes their lives.
Contestations to any belief system or truth must, in fairness to open and free discussion, come from those who truly and wholeheartedly believe in what they are saying (Mill 99). A man who proclaims his atheism and yet, has unanswered questions in his mind as to whether or not he is right, should not be the man to have a discussion concerning the existence or non-existence of a God with an avid and through and through Christian. It is an injustice to the side of atheism and it is unjust to leave the Christian feeling as though he/she holds the only truth in existence due to the fact that the faux atheist was unable to present a full-bodied argument (Mill 100). It is an injustice to the Christian precisely because, in thinking they have the only truth, their truth becomes fossilized and loses meaning. It is in the presence of disagreement and discussion that the truths we consider to be true are rejuvenated and in a way, reborn and perhaps more fully understood. Moreover, let us look to actions before words. As in the teachings of Christ, a Christian is expected to follow a number of rules such as “they should judge not, lest they be judged” and “they should swear not at all” (Mill 103). If a discussion is to be had between a Christian and an atheist, let us look not only for a true atheist but also a Christian who follows what he/she preaches. For it is elementary that if a Christian preaches love for thy neighbor and yet erects walls and electrified fences around his/her house, never talking to his neighbors due to the color of their skin, he/she is not the person to be holding an open and free discussion concerning the tenets of Christianity (Mill 105). The Christian teachings have become mere dogma to this unfortunate person.
Mill’s third point concerns the situation wherein two sides, carrying partial truths, are found placed together and in the process, form a more complete truth. Sitting in a café drinking cappuccinos, a Christian and a Muslim are freely discussing their beliefs, their Truths. After many hours of pointing out differences, they come to the realization that the differences they have been pointing out are mere trifles and that the overwhelming truth which can bridge both sides is this: they both believe in a higher being. There is a teacher who sincerely believes in teaching by the Rote method, she is absolutely passionate in class and she believes her truth is the most effective method of teaching. There is another colleague of hers that employs modern techniques of using as many mediums as possible (music, movies, cards, painting, etc.) in the classroom and believes that others should follow her truth. They one day enter into a discussion concerning teaching methods and after a free and heated discussion, they realize they share a more complete truth which is: they love teaching and they love children.
It is clear from the above two examples that seemingly opposing approaches can be made under the guidance of a more complete truth and that when reconciled, the two opposing sides combine to bring out a more universal truth that both sides can happily subscribe to. It is at times a violent struggle, this dialogue between opposing sides, but as Mill states, “Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has been made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners” (Mill 110-111). So it is, through at times violent combinations of seemingly opposing truths that both sides reconcile their differences and accept a larger truth. This is perhaps the argument of those who state that we should forget our differences and realize that we are all human. It is unquestionably true that we are all human, but is it not the devious nature of mankind to subconsciously nurture differences so as to make life interesting? A question left unanswered.
It is through considerations of Mills’ three main points concerning freedom of thought and discussion that one may imagine that Mr. Mill would have been a very happy man had he lived to see the creation of the United Nations, Parent Teacher Association Meetings, or debating institutions, all venues for an open and free discussion between multitudes of differing opinions. And it is my hope that through my frequent illustrations, it has been shown that I agree wholeheartedly with the notions presented by John Stuart Mill. In hippie-tones of peace, love, and understanding, I state that the world would be a better place were we, as the human race, to listen to one another, earnestly contest one another’s beliefs, and reconcile our differences in pursuit of a greater, unifying truth. Sadly, it is perhaps easier said than done.
It is my goal now to elucidate upon each of Mill’s three aforementioned points concerning the necessity of liberty of thought and discussion in what may be deemed a perverted manner. Concerning Mill’s first point which states a person may possess truth which is suppressed as a falsity, I bring up a case whereby someone possesses a false opinion and through an open and free discussion with others, is shown the falseness of their opinion. With Mill’s second point that truth once grasped, runs the chance of becoming hard, cold, and meaningless if not reconsidered, rejuvenated or rethought, an attempt is made to show that even speaking of truth is absurd; that there is no such thing as a universal truth. To Mill’s third point concerning the situation whereby two truths of seemingly opposite sides combine to make a more complete or universal truth, it is pointed out that a more complete or universal truth may not necessarily result from an open and free discussion. Instead, a more complete and individual truth may result, wholly unconcerned with the collective well-being of a society.
To the first case: Billy Bob and his adamant longing to spread the false opinion that butter is made of shampoo. A brief introduction: Billy Bob grew up in a small town that was known for its quietness and its stability. White picket fences lined the streets and at the city center sat the mayor, a man representing government in this scenario and a man who ruled over Billy Bob’s town with an iron fist. Newspapers were edited by the mayor himself, radio stations screened and all the teachers of the town were called together annually to discuss the upcoming year’s curriculum. Strong opinions not concerning Christianity were few and far between and even those who held strong Christian beliefs didn’t discuss them due to the fact that they thought them to be self-evident truths. The mayor’s main concern was to keep order, stability and especially quiet. And all the while, Billy Bob kept his opinion that butter is made of shampoo to himself, thinking that the world was not quite ready to hear his mind-blowing opinion and knowing that if he did air it, he would be considered a heretic. So he kept it and knew that it was true. But one day in November, a new mayor came to power named Jimmy Mill. The change was immediate. Street corners were filled with crazed homeless people selling fantastic stories about children born with scaled wings. Life, love, morality, religion, and sports teams were being discussed openly in cafes and buses and all the while, Billy Bob sat in the confines of his square blue room, afraid to go out and face the new town and air his opinion which had for so long been bottled up inside. But the time soon came when Billy Bob had to eat and so, with anxiety ringing in his ears, he stepped outside for the first time since the mayoral change. Streets that had once been sparkling clean and white now had bits of grime and chewing gum on them but somehow, it made those streets seem all the more real and they smelled of humanness, lively issues and opinions. Billy Bob became so saturated with the overwhelming creative energy surrounding him that he turned into the nearest shop and began a discussion with an Indian clerk. He soon aired his opinion that butter is made of shampoo only to have the clerk return his words with a quizzical gaze. ‘It is not made of shampoo but rather milk my friend,’ the clerk began, thereafter describing in detail the process involved in making butter. The initial shock of having his long held-to-be-true opinion shattered soon subsided and soon Billy Bob was learning things he never would have known had he not stopped and talked openly to this man. The townspeople continued to discuss openly, falsehoods were weeded out and replaced with part or complete truths, and a new community sense of truth began to emerge.
The above is, I hope, a useful illustration of the importance of open and free discussion to the creative vitality and well-being of a community or society. It is increasingly important that societies nurture open and free discussion in an orderly manner. With population pressures increasing and natural resources dwindling, it is essential that avenues are opened up for people to air their opinions. Billy Bob had within himself a rather harmless false opinion concerning butter but imagine if he nursed the opinion that blacks or Indians or any other non-white race was somehow not worthy of living. The obvious repercussions of not allowing that man to air his opinions, to stifle his guttural feelings and tell him that what he thinks is wrong without entering into a serious, open dialogue with him, are that that man would very likely keep his feelings and opinions to himself and would one day simply snap. Innocent people could very well be hurt when instead through open and free discussion, an understanding could have been reached, humanity somehow furthered. False opinions have the greatest potential for damage in a society for they are most often based on fear, ignorance, hatred, or a combination of all three. They must be aired freely and if not rectified, at least understood to the greatest degree possible.
Case two: a situation whereby somebody possesses a part truth but lacks other information to reach the complete truth. Through open and free discussions, the partial truth is more completely formed into a whole truth, but not necessarily a truth which can be shared by two opposing parties. Daily examples abound whereby a person has an opinion backed by half-truths. As Mill states, ‘it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied’ (Mill 111/116). Our second character, Greta Chernov, shall further illustrate this point.
Great Chernov was a recent Czechoslovakian immigrant to the United States. Aged 42, she already had largely formed her ideas and opinions of how the world works and how it should work. But upon arriving in the States, she was amazed by a plethora of things, particularly the fact that many Americans were ignorant of their political system and the shadows it had cast over the world. Greta worked an 8 to 5 job as a dishwasher and so met very few Americans as she was always working. But those Americans she did meet enforced her opinion that Americans are ignorant peoples and so, to make her life easier, she decided to instead believe that all Americans were beyond hope of recovering any semblance of consciousness. And so, our dear Greta Chernov held captive this truism of hers in her heart and washed dishes furiously, cursing the day she decided to immigrate to the nation of morons. An unfortunate time came (as sometimes they do) and Greta was cast out on to the cold streets of America, unemployed due to budget cuts and declining income. Greta felt herself immersed in a Stanley Kubrick film, reality somehow twisted to fit an evil scheme, and pounded the pavement grudgingly amongst those she believed to be ignoramuses. At the third corner of the third block she was traversing, Greta saw a ‘Help Wanted’ sign and decided to enter. It was a small café with dark wood seats and upon entering, she found herself within a chicken coop of people bantering left and right about the recent political frauds of the United States government and the horrific happenings in their names abroad. They were not only talking but formulating days and times for protests, marches, and workshops. She found the manager, explained to him her situation, and in a matter of minutes, found herself serving up espressos and lattes to her newly found comrades.
Over the course of the week, she came to know many of the customers and was able to dispel her half-truth notion that all Americans are ignorant of their political system. She did not give it up lightly however and her customers would bring in friends of theirs, quite active politically, to help her dispel the false aspects of her opinion. She was thereafter content with the truth that the majority (but not all) of Americans are ignorant of their political system and began to understand the socioeconomic and political situations which has led to such ignorance. A better citizen indeed and a happy immigrant.
And so it is that a half-truth was reformed, rethought, and renovated to represent a fuller truth to the individual, all occurring through the existence of a café full of open and free discussions. But, unlike the cases concerning Christians and Muslims and teachers of differing methods, no greater universal truth was reached. Instead, the individual’s sense of truth had been reformulated and strengthened. In a sense, there occurred no give and take between Greta Chernov and the café’s patrons. Instead, things were taken and used to better her individual sense of the world. Half-truth opinions many-a-times are left untouched and accepted as Truth. The majority of human beings are more comfortable with acceptance than they are with the massive amounts of energy and time it takes to discuss and reform one’s opinions. It is on this point that I perhaps disagree with Mill due to realistic callings. Reality (which I realize is an opinion) in a society is composed of those who lead and those who follow. Those who lead generally decide what Truth and Falsity and Right and Wrong are and generally speaking, those who follow (henceforth referred to as the masses) accept what they are given as truth or at least (for the more debonair) half-truths. The masses have lives to lead, jobs to attend to, children to care for, ailing old mothers to chide, dogs to clean up after and cats to keep from eating the goldfish. Life is a busy occupation. It leaves very little time for the pleasure of open and free discussion. One must simply choose one’s opinions from the impressions floating about in newspapers, radio stations or billboards and continue living, continue fighting to survive. I agree wholeheartedly that a society would be led towards the greater good of happiness if it endorsed open and free discussion but from what observations I have made, those countries which most affect the world financially and militarily are the very same countries that endorse this divided society of leaders and followers, the leaders living privileged lives as they decide upon truisms while the rest of the followers work towards distant goals. Upon these observations I state merely a question left unanswered: What is the motivation for a man or woman to worry about whether the opinions they harbor are true, half true, or false when they must work 8-10 hour days, five to six days a week, simply to feed their children and keep some semblance of a life?
It is then perhaps the duty of the government, as Mill may suggest, to make sure there is time allotted for free discussion to its citizens for a better society would result. And although I agree, I somehow must cynically ask as to what motivation men in power have to let a degree of their power of control over the masses’ opinions be given back to the masses. From experience in America, I can state that the masses must fight for their opinions against an overbearing government which breeds falsities and half-truths through its education system and media outlets but unfortunately, when constantly fighting for one’s opinions, one is left little time to reassess what one is fighting for. Truths are therefore left aside and half-truths and falsities breed in people’s minds like mosquitoes left unchallenged in monsoon season. A realistic assessment must be made as to whether or not Mill’s notions of free expression are applicable to today’s most developed nations. In perhaps finding that they are not, serious questions must be asked concerning whether his notions are most applicable to developing nations or developed nations attempting to consolidate power and maintain supremacy.
Mill’s third and final case is that of someone who possesses a true opinion yet lacks the corporeal and spiritual experience to fully grasp that truth. Many problems arise for me when Platonic devices such as Truth, Good, or Justice are used for it seems that when taken to the test, all are subjective notions built upon foundations of differing experiences. However, let us choose a test case: that of Tommy Reaper.
Tommy Reaper was a shadowy someone who since the age of four, focused his energies upon the ‘truth’ that we all die. At age 13, he lacked the physical and spiritual experience to give credence and understanding to his truth. At the age of 14, Tommy’s grandmother died in his arms after a successive heart attack and at the age of 15, Tommy’s turtle got eaten by his dog, his dog soon after perishing due to a sliver of turtle shell lodged in its throat. His grandmother’s death made Tommy realize that death was not just a word. His turtle’s passing was the first real pang of death he could feel and his dog’s death was his first experience of the excessive nature of death, that when it rains it pours. But it was with the death of his good friend Christoph that the full weight of his mortality fell in upon him and he knew, physically as well as spiritually, that his time was limited. His perception of those around him changed and he no longer fretted over petty instances but instead, enjoyed to the fullest every moment with every being he came into contact with. At the age of 20 he was said to be a wise somebody but in fact, simply carried with him daily the notion of his mortality. At 21, Tommy met a Hindu and at 22, met a Buddhist. Both men shook up his notion of death and instilled a sense of continuity in his mind, a life after death or a changing of energetic forms. At 22, Tommy traveled to Latin America and was imbued with the mysticism and morphation of life after death of the Nicaraguan peoples. And so it was that the more people Tommy met, the more he realized that a truth as self-evident as ‘we all die’ was in fact, just another half-truth impossible of ever fully being known due to the fact that very few have the luxury of dying and coming back to life to tell the tale.
It is with Mill’s last point for freedom of opinion and expression that I take opposition to. He states, “even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds” (Mill 116).
It is true that in the above test case of Tommy Reaper, his opinion that ‘we all die’ is contested by the Hindu, the Buddhist, and the mystics of Nicaragua. These contestations, however, do not lead Tommy to comprehend further the fact that we all die. Instead, the contestations lead Tommy to reevaluate his concept of death as half truth. Death, a universal condition of mankind, was a truth chosen for the opinion that ‘we all die’ seems to be widely accepted as true. However, hard-pressed and scrutinized, a truth as solid in our minds as ‘we all die’ crumbles at the feet of others who do not believe we die but instead live cyclical lives. The same contestations would be true if they were aimed at Hindu, Buddhist, or mystic beliefs. After all is said and done and an open and free discussion has taken place between contesting opinions, both parties are left knowing one thing: they know nothing. And truly, any given opinion when fully contested in the arena of worldly ideas will crumble if properly contested. The void is what is left, an unanswered space where all opinions falter and dissolve and Truths no longer exist. To even write ‘the void’ opens the idea up to contestation but what is a writer to do when he is chained to pen and paper? For ages, prophets and mystics have spoken of the void, the nothingness which cannot be put into words but must, for purposes of communication. This void that they have spoken of for millennia is the very void which swallows and dissects Mill’s notion of the existence of Truth. It is not possible to know a Truth applicable to all but perhaps only to know a Truth applicable to the many which in my mind, strips it of the title Truth with a capital ‘T’. However, as we live day to day we must try our best to attain Truth and as Mill states, ‘we [must neglect] nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us; if the lists are kept open, we may hope that, if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth as is possible in our own day” (Mill 81). It is true that we must do our best to attain the truths that exist for mankind today but let us never fool ourselves into thinking we have achieved Truth for as stated earlier, Truths change and dissolve when pitted against the correct contesters.
There exists yet one more thing to consider in this paper and that is Mill’s idea that truths, if honestly true, will continue to pop up in the history of mankind and will eventually find a favorable time in which it can hold its own against the onslaughts of others (Mill 90). Take for instance the opinion that women are equal to men. Bitterly contested throughout the ages and lauded occasionally by a few brave women and men (John Stuart Mill included), the equality of women has, it seems, found its time to blossom and societies are now seeing the financial benefits surrounding the equality of women. Even so, is it true that women should be equal to men? Playing the devil’s advocate, I can think of innumerable geographical areas (Africa and Latin America being areas of personal experience) where women are not equal to men but instead hold different functions in the household and society. There is a level of respect allotted to both the tasks that men and women carry out. The women rule the households and play a key role in caring for the children and the men (occasionally) supply financial assistance. Now, a woman may find such tasks daunting and stifling to her personal growth and instances abound where such women fight an uphill battle to enter into politics or the workplace. But there are a plethora of men and women who do not believe men and women should be doing the same things. The question must then be asked: Is the opinion that women should be equal to men a Western Truth or is it a truth that can successfully be applied to all the world’s people? The mere fact that a recurring opinion finally finds breeding grounds in the minds of people does not alter the fact that it can also find itself in a time in which it will be supplanted by a ‘truer’ opinion. To then call anything Truth seems to be an absurdity.
It is with the aforementioned test cases and points that I close by saying that although Mill is quite correct in stating that freedom of opinion and expression leads to the “mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends)” (Mill 115), he is incorrect in assuming that there are true opinions. Even if we may “assume our opinion to be true for the guidance of our own conduct,” (Mill 79) we must never assume that there is a truth towards which all human beings are moving towards but instead, must realize that what is true today may be false tomorrow and that the notion of relativity of time may allow us to appreciate that truth as encapsulated in milliseconds, seconds, minutes, or days but never to appreciate it as TRUTH for infinity and beyond. Imbued with the search for truth, humans embrace their humanness in opening their minds and ears to the opinions of others and in doing so, expand their consciousness into an all-encompassing inclusiveness of this human experience.
Works Cited
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. London: Penguin Classics, 1974.
Rawlsian Justice: A Hypothetical Through the Looking Glass of A Privileged, White Hope
December 26, 2009
Note: This is a piece far too small to pay proper homage to the depth of the works considered and the ideas discussed. I hope to merely lay down an outline with the thought of turning this into a longer piece later on.
Introduction
The complexities of identity and identity formation are seemingly endless. Many of us go through our lives with a general sense of who we are, which groups (religious, race, class, gender, sexuality, etc) we belong to, and what possibilities or restrictions we are allotted in the United States given pre-existing discriminatory practices related to race, gender, class, sexuality and a multiplicity of other ‘definers’. There are those that are conscious of such allotments given their restrictions from particular areas of society or the realm of the ‘possible’ and there are those that are not conscious of their identities because quite plainly, they do not need to be in order to be successful or renowned in this country. John Rawls, in writing of the abstract individual in a Theory of Justice (1971), reveals himself to be a man lacking in racial and class awareness. In fact, it will be my argument that only an upper class, white male would be able to speak as Rawls does of abstract individualism through his conceptions of the original position, the veil of ignorance, the liberty principle and the difference principle.
Within A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, we are presented with an argument for an egalitarian, liberal sense of distributive justice with the concept of abstract individualism as its foundation. Rawls’ work has been considered by many as one of the most influential works of political philosophy to be published within the last century. Adrian Vermeule argues that the Federal Constitution of the U.S. itself contains a number of rules that are usefully analyzed today in light of the veil of ignorance rules: “provisions, structures, and practices as diverse as the Ex Post Facto and Bill of Attainder Clauses, the Emoluments Clause, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, Article V’s procedures for constitutional amendment, the doctrine of precedent, and the original mechanism for selecting senators, and the rules governing presidential election and succession”[1]. Within his work, Rawls attempts to find a means to a stable, just society through employing Western liberal egalitarianism. Within this paper, my intent is four-fold: firstly, I will provide a brief biography of John Rawls. Secondly, I will offer a brief introduction to the Enlightenment/liberal ideals that Rawls’ ideas clearly descend from so that we know whose work we are analyzing. Thirdly, I will define and outline John Rawls’ concept of the original position and the veil of ignorance as well as the liberty and difference principle as found within A Theory of Justice. Fourthly, I will present a Marxian class-critique of Rawls’ ideas. And lastly, I will respond via whiteness studies to the concept of abstract individualism. My overall hope is to show that it is the case that only a person with the racial and class privilege such as John Rawls would be able or willing to present an egalitarian concept of justice based on abstract individualism as seen through his use of hypotheticals. And while it will be recognized that Rawls does pay heed to the worse-off in the difference principle, the argument will be made that this brings up pressing questions related to legitimacy (i.e. Can individuals not belonging to a particular group legitimately speak for such a group or is to do so an entertainment of a neo-colonial silencing of the subaltern?).
This is by no means a finished work. This paper is a work on identity, identity formation and the privilege not to see identity at all. It is a paper about hidden power structures, unconscious privilege relation, and the violent act of writing as owning ideas as well as the means to distribute one’s ideas through highly greased channels of historical and racialized power and privilege.
First and foremost, this paper is an interrogative paper and as such, asks questions while offering few answers. It is the nature of identity and identity formation, critical race theory, and psychoanalytic investigations to ask pressing questions, give (hopefully) insightful comments, and bring forth perhaps more questions than answers in an attempt to lead the discussions related to race and privilege towards new formations of speaking and conceptualizing this very complicated topic. As a white male just having recently entered the field of critical race theory (realizing that I have been taking part in such race issues for the entirety of my life, albeit unconsciously) I at times feel like I am stabbing in the dark at an ever-changing amorphous set of ideas and identities but more importantly, attempting to formulate a consciousness of race and privilege as it occurs in my own life. It is the case that it is my privileged position via whiteness that has allowed me to spend a little more than 20 years living unconscious of race and privilege. I therefore find myself in the precarious position of attempting to write through the lense of critical race theory while simultaneously continuing to operate under the power-laden and privilege-stricken identity of whiteness. Before I continue and move on to the main part of the paper, I wish to define a few terms. Race, as amorphous a term as it may be, will in this paper be considered a fictive notion of identity-allegiance sometimes based on skin color, manners of speaking, hair or fashion. The term whiteness is a bit more complex. Noel Ignatiev defines whiteness as such: “The white race is a historically constructed social formation—historically constructed because (like royalty) it is a product of some people’s responses to historical circumstances; a social formation because it is a fact of society corresponding to no classification recognized by natural science”[2]. Abstract individualism concerns the nature of Rawls philosophical formulations as based upon an individual that does not exist in reality. As such, the individual that makes the decisions Rawls posits exists within Rawls’ mind. This is problematic considering that very seldom are humans able to keep themselves from creating images of abstract people in their own image (in this case, an upper-class, white male). In using this abstract individual as his main tool to reveal his concept of justice, many non-abstract individuals are left out of Rawls’ calculations concerning justice. With such terms loosely defined, a brief biography of John Rawls is in order.
Rawls As The Privileged White Looking Glass
Before we begin with Rawls’ thoughts, what of the man himself? Surely an argument can be made that a person’s thoughts, concepts, or views of the world around them are intimately tied to their upbringing, class and race. A brief biography of John Rawls would then behoove us[3].
John Rawls was born into a wealthy family in Baltimore, Maryland in 1921 (at this time an epicenter for port activity on the Eastern Seaboard before economic changes led to a massive white flight from the city center). He attended school for a short time in Baltimore but was quickly transferred to the renowned Episcopalian preparatory school in Connecticut called Kent. Kent is a prestigious boarding school boasting of the following school motto: simplicity of life, directness of purpose, and self-reliance. Tuition for grades 9-12 is currently $42,000 (around $45,000 with all additional fees) per academic year and has an average student to teacher ratio of 8:1[4]. These are of course 2008 figures but hardly ever is it the case that such a school would have been of less stature, cost and prestige when Rawls was attending in 1936. After graduating from Kent, Rawls attended Princeton University, obtaining a B.A. in philosophy. From 1943 to 1946, Rawls served as an infantryman where he toured New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan during WWII. Upon exiting the army, Rawls retuned to Princeton, obtained his PhD in 1950 and from 1950 to his death in 2002, taught at a number of prestigious institutions: Oxford, Cornell, MIT, and Harvard University. John Rawls, it is important to note for my later arguments, came from a privileged background and circulated in and around prestigious and privilege-laden institutions within the US and England. In light of this upper class, white male’s upbringing, we will now move to an outline of the concept of the original position, the veil of ignorance, the liberty principle and the difference principle as found within A Theory of Justice.
Ties to the Enlightenment
John Rawls’ ideas are direct decedents from the Enlightenment period. As such, the problematic, institutionalized racial amnesia of the time period is inevitably included in his writings and thought.
As it is a key concept to the remaining portion of the piece, I wish to tie to historical thought movements the concept of the original position and the veil of ignorance before moving on to a number of critiques. From Rawls’ brief biography in the beginning of the paper, it is quite clear that he, for the majority of his life, studied or taught within traditionally ‘liberal’[5] educational institutions with conceptual traditions stretching back to the European Enlightenment circa late 17th and 18th centuries which emphasized reason and individualism over tradition. As such, the original position can be likened to the conceptions of original human nature as proposed by a number of scholars, philosophers, and statesmen, most notably Jean-Jeaques Rousseau (Discourses on Inequality, 1774) and John Locke (Two Treatises of Government, 1689) (both of whom were responding largely to Thomas Hobbes’ conception of the original state of human nature as proposed within Leviathan, 1651). As stated earlier, Rawls’ original position is considered a purely hypothetical situation. Likewise, any and all proposals towards the ‘true’ original human nature as presented by Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes are taken to be completely hypothetical as well. This is extremely important to mention as such hypotheticals have had extreme influence on how future generations have not only viewed their own lives but more importantly, how governmental and social institutions have been formed, the very institutions which today we find ourselves operating within or against. The line between hypotheticals and enacted social contract theories as found within governmental institutions then becomes blurred. Is it possible to create hypotheticals without directly affecting the real-world? And if it is not possible (or not desirable to keep them separated) is a hypothetical not merely an ideologically-driven conception of the world created in the hopes of altering the real-world? I will return to this at a later point in my critiques.
Under such humanistic liberalism, the primacy of the individual is paramount. Freedom, reason, rationalism, order, government consolidation, centralization, and primacy of the nation state, rights and most importantly for our purposes here, justice were all concepts being bandied about within the zeitgeist of the late 17th and 18th centuries throughout Europe (although it is nearly impossible to limit the development of ideas to such succinct periods of time, the Enlightenment being no exception).
“Enlightenment philosophy was instrumental in codifying and institutionalizing both the scientific and popular European perceptions of the human race. The numerous writings on race by Hume, Kant, and Hegel played a strong role in articulating Europe’s sense not only of its cultural but also racial superiority. In their writings…’reason’ and ‘civilization’ became synonymous with ‘white’ people and northern Europe, while unreason and savagery were conveniently located among the non-whites, the ‘black’, the ‘red’, the ‘yellow’, outside Europe”[6].
“This vocabulary belongs to, and reveals, a larger world of analytical categories that exists as a universe of discourse, an intellectual worldview, which, in turn, determines (by making possible and constraining at the same time) not only how studies are done, but also what are constituted as objects of scientific, philosophical, or cultural study”[7].
Original Position and Veil Defined
The original position and the veil of ignorance are couched of course within Rawls’ conceptions regarding the principled role of justice. He states, “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truths of systems of thought,” and “denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others”[8]. In light of the pursuit of justice, Rawls hopes to show that free and rational persons (that are concerned with furthering their own interests) would accept an original position of equality as a means of defining the terms of their social contract. Once these terms have been agreed upon, other types of social cooperation can be entered into and forms of government can be established[9]. Rawls refers to this throughout his work as justice as fairness. The original position is one of a purely hypothetical nature, a mind game to lead us to ponder and reach a particular conception of justice. Explicitly, Rawls defines the original position as thus:
“…no one knows his [note gender] place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances[10]”.
Liberty Principle and Difference Principle Defined
The liberty principle, the first of Rawls’ two principles of justice can be defined as such: “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others”[11]. This principle is inclusive of many of the same ideals bandied about during the Enlightenment period in Europe and America: political liberty, liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, freedom of the person (psychological oppression, physical assault, and dismemberment), personal property, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law.
A second tenet to Rawlsian justice is the difference principle which states that inequalities in life prospects are only justifiable when allowing such inequalities would better the life prospects of those that are considered worse-off[12]. These decisions of justice are said to be made, in the Rawlsian hypothetical sphere of ideas, from the original position. Thus, from the original position, we are asked to allocate resources from behind the veil of ignorance as if we “did not know that actual distribution”[13]. Through such principles, Rawls attempts to “govern the assignment of rights and duties and regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages”[14]. The difference principle is the only time Rawls pays lip service to those that may not reap quite as many benefits as his race, gender, and class would form his justice as based on hypotheticals.
Before moving on, I wish to pose a few questions: is the original position and the veil of ignorance even possible? In other words, is it possible for a person (or a group of persons) to not know their place in society, their class or social status, their psychological propensities? If it is not possible, what good is derived from speaking in hypothetical platitudes? If the foundation for our discussions regarding justice are based on an impossible, unrealistic hypothetical, are not all arguments that follow built upon a shoddy foundation of an imaginative but unrealistic mind game? In fact, I will argue, it is not accidental that Rawls sets up his conceptions regarding justice as such. His manner in doing so is directly linked to the platitudinal nature of the Enlightenment as well as his class and racial privilege. I wish now to move on to a Marxist class critique of the original position, the veil of ignorance, the liberty principle as well as the difference principle.
The Red Response To Hypotheticals
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, within the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848, state the following: “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class”[15]. Rawls’ theory of justice as based upon abstract individualism (in particular his notions of the original position and the veil of ignorance) are of no exception. The long history of human activity from Marx and Engel’s point of view, has been forever a class war of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, the haves against the have-nots. Any improvements in the lots of the worker’s living conditions have been won through class conflict, the bourgeoisie adamantly attempting to hold on to their exploitative gains while the proletariat attempt to find a means to basic human necessities or better living or working conditions. Beginning in the late 17th century, the Enlightenment period of Europe revolutionized the means of production through the advent of the industrial, capitalist machinery. More importantly, an advent of ideas occurred, ideas which were marketed as universal and humanistic that we have today lumped together largely under liberalism or more specifically humanistic liberalism (which the previous section outlined). Under such humanistic liberalism, the primacy of the individual is paramount. Freedom, reason, rationalism, order, government consolidation, centralization, and primacy of the nation state, rights and most importantly for our purposes here, justice were all concepts being bandied about within the zeitgeist of the late 17th and 18th centuries throughout Europe (although it is nearly impossible to limit the development of ideas to such succinct periods of time, the Enlightenment being no exception). Important questions must be asked: who exactly is proscribing these universal concepts, who was buying into them, and who (it must be asked) benefited from such ideas becoming the accepted norm? For answers to all of these questions, we need not look further than the ruling class. Indeed, as Marx and Engels state in their advocacy for Communism, we have seen a continual succession of old ideas from the subsumption of ancient religions by Christianity, Christian ideals by Enlightenment ideals, and one could argue that today we see a subsumption of Enlightenment ideals by materialist deconstructionism trumpeting the primacy of the material and the individual while recognizing the fallacies of universals[16]. What is important to note is that through every historical development of ideas, parts of the old ideas are kept, reformulated, and presented anew and all of these ideas, Marx and Engels would argue, are created and furthered by the exploitative ruling classes. Rawls’ conception of justice is no different given his class background, his educational tenure within the institutions steeped in Western ideals and, I will argue, his unrealistic and in the end, harmful concept of the original position, the veil of ignorance and the liberty and difference principles. We should therefore view Rawls’ work as emanating from the ruling class, for the ruling class even if he makes seemingly honest attempts to pay heed to the “worse off” through one of two of his main tenets for justice, namely the difference principle. Throughout Rawls’ entire piece, the consideration of the worse off is only granted in his discussions of the difference principle. As an individual more than slightly aware of the many injustices committed daily within the U.S. and abroad, this seems strange until I remember where John Rawls comes from. How is it that when one writes of justice as a platonic ideal (as Rawls does) that injustice (and the many real-world examples of such) does not show itself within the opening pages and/or chapters of a book on justice? It is due, arguably, to the fact that Rawls has: a) Never experienced deep-seeded, prolonged, institutionalized injustice as an upper class white male; and b) Was for so long isolated from the world outside of ‘ivy’ league institutions that perhaps he has had the privilege of thinking injustices to be lessening and/or obsolete. Rawls abstract individual as found within the original position, has the privilege to speak of justice without being aware of that privilege.
Considering the difference principle, a very serious question arises: is it reasonable or historically conscious to assume that the ruling classes would, under the difference principle, give up particular benefits in social status or wealth to better those considered worse-off? And while this may be true in Rawls’ hypothetical mind game, this cannot be further from the truth in reality as people are accurately aware (consciously or subconsciously) of their social class and position. Rawls’ theory is understood to be hypothetical and considering this, pertinent questions must be asked: what does Rawls’ theory pave over and what do we lose from such a theory of justice? If it is true that Rawls comes from the ruling class and writes from a privileged position as such, so what? Is not the theory admirable for what it is, especially in light of the fact that he does pay great heed to the worse off in society? I would argue that the theory is admirable but applicable only to the ruling class, the class from which Rawls writes. Can people from privileged positions write about the worse off legitimately? The fact of the matter is that historically it has been the case that the ruling class has created or reformulated ideas and has had the means to disseminate such ideas throughout the state, the country, and the world, marketing them as universals applicable to all. The working classes have been and continue to be inculcated by the ruling classes with such ideas, the entry into the ruling class being set up as the ultimate goal worth pursuing. If we lose one thing through Rawls’ theory, it is the voice of the subaltern, the voice of the voiceless. Would the theory of justice as presented by the working class exist? Would we continue to use the language of the enlightenment (i.e. justice as universal) or would we need to devise something different? If Marx is correct in stating that “there is no social contract that the best-off class and the worst-off one will acquiesce in, except as a result of defeat in class struggle or a tactical retreat to preserve long-term advantages” perhaps any such hypothetical, original-position arguments are completely useless when faced with a very problematic and attention-deserving reality[17]. As Gayatri Spivak states, “…a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to put the economic ‘under erasure’, to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased…when it claims to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified”[18]. If class is tied to privilege and privilege gives one voice, then social status is paramount and draws its strength from a historical, imperialist, and colonial agenda of speaking for Others. Doing so is arguably not implicitly wrong but I ask, what of the other voices? Have we not heard for centuries the voices of privileged, white males?
“There is still much national solace in continuing dreams of democratic egalitarianism available by hiding class conflict, rage, and impotence in figurations of race. And there is quite a lot of justice to be extracted from plumy reminiscences of “individualism” and “freedom” if the tree upon which such fruit hangs is a black population forced to serve as freedom’s polar opposite: individualism is foregrounded (and believed in) when its background is stereotypified, enforced dependency. Freedom (to move, to earn, to learn, to be allied with a powerful center, to narrate the world) can be relished more deeply in a cheek-by-jowl existence with the bound and unfree, the economically oppressed, the marginalized, the silenced”[19].
Let us look briefly at a critique of Rawls as offered by whiteness studies.
[The following section eluded me every time I sat down to write it. Through bits and pieces of chicken scratch, I have included nothing but the quotes I was intending to include. Perhaps with time I will be able to complete this section appropriately.]
Writer John White Rawls
“No man will treat with indifference the principle of race. It is the key of history, and why history is so often confused is that it has been written by men who were ignorant of this principle and all the knowledge it involves…” Benjamin Disraeli, 1880[20].
“The future hangs on our ability to breathe enough life into the ideal of equal justice under law to fire the imaginations of the world’s angry mobs in order that they might believe our society worthy of respect, and perhaps emulation”[21].
White Liberalism: The Backbone to Rawlsian Justice
“The white liberals are this republic’s new power elite. The liberal’s basic economic and political theories are now being translated into action after centuries of ideological subservience to conservatism”[22].
“The literature of the United States, like its history, represents commentary on the transformations of biological, ideological, and metaphysical concepts of racial difference”[23].
“My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served”[24].
Conclusion
We conclude perhaps knowing less than when we began. The complexities of identity remain obtuse. And yet, there is something hopefully recognizable within the writings of Rawls. We may recognize this ‘something’ as white, class privilege, as connected to a long line of problematic thinking stretching back to the Enlightenment and beyond, or perhaps something different altogether. What is verifiable is that Rawla wrote from a privileged background, privileged in class as well as race as it was (and is) read in the United States. In speaking about justice through the use of abstract individuals, Rawls failed to recognize the many Others that are currently voiceless. He failed to recognize the many-faced, many-colored complexities that constitute the world that we are operating within and the country that so many of us call home, even if at times we do so begrudgingly. Instead, he embraced through his writings a creation of his own mind over reality, that of the abstract individual who knows no reality, breathes no air, feels no pain, and most importantly, has never truly experienced injustice, let alone justice. As those from privilege write (whether that privilege is derived and fed from class, race, gender, or sexuality), how should they write? Who must they remain conscious of and pay credence to? In short, where does their legitimacy lie, within themselves, their subjects or the many institutional inequities that allow them to write and speak for Others in the first place? I leave this question unanswered.
Bibliography
Alcoff, L. M. (1998). “What Should White People Do?” Hypatia 13(3): 6-26.
Harris, C. I. (1993). “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106(8): 1707-1791.
Marshall, I. and W. Ryden (2000). “Interrogating the Monologue: Making Whiteness Visible.” College Composition and Communication 52(2): 240-259.
Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Retrieved October 1, 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Miller, R. (1974). “Rawls and Marxism.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 3(2): 167-191.
Nagel, T. (1973). “Rawls on Justice.” The Philosophical Review 82(2): 220-234.
Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Roemer, J. E. (2002). “Egalitarianism against the Veil of Ignorance.” The Journal of Philosophy 99(4): 167-184.
Sleeter, C. (1996). White Silence, White Solidarity. In Ignatiev, N. & Garvey, J. (Eds.), Race Traitor (pp. 257-265). New York: Routledge.
Spivak, G. C. (1982). “The Politics of Interpretations.” Critical Inquiry 9(1): 259-278.
Spivak, G.C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 24-28). London and New York: Routledge.
Spivak, G. C. (1992). “Acting Bits/Identity Talk.” Critical Inquiry 18(4): 770-803.
[1] Vermeule, A. (2001). “Veil of Ignorance Rules in Constitutional Law.” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 111, No. 2, 400.
[2] Ignatiev, N. & Garvey, J. (Eds.) (1996). Race Traitor, (p. 9). New York: Routledge.
[3] This information is widely available over the internet but I specifically consulted the biography base website (www.biographybase.com/biography/Rawls_John.html)
[4] www.kent_school.edu/admissions/admissions.html
[5] According to the Oxford American College Dictionary (2002): “Favorable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms”
[6] Eze , E.C. (Ed) (1997). Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. (p. 5). Malden Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
[7] Eze , E.C. (Ed) (1997). Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. (p. 7). Malden Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
[8] Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. (p.3). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
[9] Ibid. (p.10)
[10] Ibid. (p.11)
[11] Ibid. (p.53)
[12] Ibid (p.67-68)
[13] Roemer, J.E. “Egalitarianism Against the Veil of Ignorance.” The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 99, No. 4, 2002, 183.
[14] Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971, 53.
[15] Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Retrieved September 24th, 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Spivak, G.C. (1988). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Ashcroft, B. & Griffiths, G. & Tiffin, H. (Eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (p. 24). New York: Routledge.
[19] Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark. New York: Vintage (p. 64).
[20] Rowan, C.T. (1965). No Whitewash For U.S. Abroad. In Nipson, H. (Ed.), The White Problem in America (p.31). New York: Johnson Publishing.
[21] Ibid. (p.33)
[22] Lomax, L. (1965). The White Liberal. In Nipson, H. (Ed.), The White Problem in America (p.39). New York: Johnson Publishing.
[23] Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark. New York: Vintage (p. 65).
[24] Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark. New York: Vintage (p. 90).
Nomadic Trajectories: Traversing Through Conceptions of Places Fragmentally, Presently Past
December 26, 2009
Preface
Everything is connected. I am limited only by my inability to currently experience and see the connections of all with all. This paper relates to a topic without beginning, without end, in continual becoming and destruction. If I could write on it for the entirety of my life I would not only do so out of desire but out of necessity—the process involved is effervescent, hungry, and weaves together strands of the sane with the insane, the normalized with the bastardized. To sing a song in stanzas. To never stop singing. This nomadic traversing of trails bases itself on the premise that there is no Truth; that we know only that we do not know. In this humbled severity, the paper is acted upon by its objects of inquiry with the burgeoning knowledge that the manner in which we approach subjects matter. There is only effective: that way in which we approach something intangible, unspeakable which translates this to another human being in effective and affective ways. To succeed, even if only partially in this, is a worthy goal.
Each individual piece of this paper has a deep and complex history. As such, individual papers (or books) could (and have been) written on each but the goal of this paper is not to dwell on such histories individually but rather create a collage of interrelated objects, disciplines, ideas, and visualizations to build connections and bridge gaps. It is my hope that by glossing over such deep histories, my attempts to build such connections will not be undercut as it is in the visualizing of the connections between that I see a necessary project to dissolution ourselves from believing that we know ‘Truth’, that fixedness in particular areas of knowledge exist, that specialization does anything other than divide us as human beings from the larger picture, in essence, that we know. This project is an attempt, the first of its kind for me, but undoubtedly, it is in no way a first. Perhaps for me, it is a beginning and for this paper, it is my hope that this will suffice.
Frenzied, distracted, the complexities traverse my mental networks and explode upon the page in messy, filthy sentences, words, and complex architectural tones. Distant leaps into the brain can be accompanied by the severed limbs of endless accounts, attempts at clarity—it must contain the visual, the auditory, the felt and the tactile as they allow us to compose our fragmentary yet fluid lives of becoming and decomposition and yet, I have limited myself for my purposes here and now to the visual. So often are our other sensory inputs translated to the visual, the image. It is for this reason that I feel it is appropriate to firstly take up the issue of visualization and it is my hope that you, the reader, feel the same.
“As you shed your beauty, your youth, as the world forgets you, as you recognize your transience, as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one, as you know there is no one watching you and there never was, you think only about driving, not coming from any place, not arriving at any place, just driving, counting off time. Now you are here: it’s 7:43. Now you are here: it’s 7:44. Now you are…gone”[4]
I
I feel like I’m searching for a lost conception, a timely remembrance of how once the world and our functioning within it was simpler. But no, this is not it. I see an apple, hold it in my hand. The red overtones remind me of the buttocks of a lover I once had, the stem curves upwards and to the right, a fallen timber of a historic now. The apple now in my hand is absorbed and devoured through my eyes traveling at light speed into the mushy matter that resides between my ears. It traverses the temporal. Frontal, parietal, to the occipital lope and hunkers down in my brain stem but does not stop there. It leaves trances behind as it goes, rememberings of “appleness” in my eyes, throughout my brain as it shoots outwards, down my spine, through this central nervous system of mine. The apple has become a synapse of milliseconds shooting outwards and inwards, erupting throughout my body as Deleuzian rhizomes leaving traces as it pulses through the rhythms of now. It eventually reaches my bony fingers, urges them to grasp its ‘appleness’ tighter, pull it towards my face and take a bite. This apple in my hand is a multitude of apples now and remembered, a multitude of many pulsing apple-traces which have marked my body, my mind over the years. It is a remembered apple, never the same as those recalled, never the same as the one I am holding. It is the historical now present, the futuristic becoming. It is an apple but so much more.
Traverse this body of ours for pages ahead. Schizoid searching shall be our style, a bundle of nervous twitchings attempting to etch out a story of the mind. Tools to play with: body at Deleuzian strata (molecular and molar, accumulations, coagulations, sedimentations, foldings, forms, substances, codes, milieus, extremely mobile, rhythms)[6]; brain as assemblage (operative in zones where milieus become decoded, extracting a territory from milieus, made from decoded fragments of all kinds)[7]; thought as rhizomatic (assemblages of complexes of lines, breaks and twists, frees itself of things, passing between, through, over things, nomadic multiplicities of becoming, flight and repute, micro black holes that breed creation and destruction)[8]; the visual apparatus enveloping sensory input; the wisp and whirl of electrical impulses through the optic nerve to the brain; the brain processing such information in milliseconds, organizing, making connections, leaving traces everywhere and treating these traces as memory; the visual apparatus as one hand writing upon the Freudian mystic writing pad while another (the brain) raises the covering sheet from the wax slab[9]; the place in which memory is deposited, the nature with which we recall such memory, the creative reproductions of such memory; brain as physical territory and scientists embarking upon the enterprise of ‘mapping’ out the brain, colonial in their approach; the brain as an active recipient and resister of such coloniality. From colored, Crayola drawings to schizoid neural mappings, attempts are made to understand the utterly complex, non-definable through defined and restricted mediums. Input arrives, leaves traces, we attempt to understand the rhizomatic eruptions and implosions of recall and colonize the brain through mappings, tests, trails, and forced confines. But the brain responds perplexingly even the most ‘apt’ to study it. To try to understand is to attempt control.
II
Carl Bianco, an MD writing for the website HowStuffWorks.com begins his article on “How Vision Works” as follows: “It’s no accident that the main function of the sun at the center of our solar system is to provide light. Light is what drives life. It’s hard to imagine our world and life without it”[13]. Light, it seems is key to visuality. Yet, what is light?
Light waves, a concept envisioned by Christian Huggens in the late 1700s (reinforced in 1807 by Thomas Young), consists of energy in the form of electronic and magnetic fields. Light itself (thanks to Einstein) can be conceived of as streams of energy packets called photons. When we observe objects, occurrences, faces, or the quiet landscapes of the country, we are observing a conglomeration of visible light waves in the form of color, one of the seven currently accepted frequencies of light. Colors themselves are related to frequencies, violets being of the highest frequencies (most energy) and reds being of the lowest frequencies (least energy). As I read a book, I am visually bombarded by light traveling at 186,000 miles per second, light which is composed of collections, fragments and networks, of one or more photons tumbling through space as electromagnetic waves. What is important is that light is not unitary, nor complete. It is fragmented, only partially seen by our eyes and in this way, it is fractional, fragmentary, sectional, limited, and constantly networked not only as a conglomeration of photons amongst themselves but those very photons are networked with the visualizer and the visualized objects that we observe, the visualized light merely being those photons which are reflected off of the object and absorbed by our eyes. As Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “…what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels the earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, — i.e. only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself”[14]. Two concepts related to light will later be explained: energized atoms which fall from high to normal energy have electrons which emit photons with specific frequencies (or colors) that match the distance the electron falls, and colors are created through differently reflected frequencies of visible light off of objects and therefore depend on electron emissions, the objects with which they interact, and our eyes which perceive them.
Given this information, what if our vision is based on partial, collective, networked fragments (photons)? What if this vision informs our brain of how to conceive of ourselves in the world, our sense of memory and history? What if in formulating conceptions of the world, we act only to have objects act back upon us through the reflections of visible light (i.e. I see an apple, conceive of an apple, think to pick up the apple but in looking at it again, the light (fragmentary, fractional, partial, networked, and visible photons) act upon my eyes? What if objects act upon us? What if we are biologically capable of seeing only 1/7th of the spectrum of light and even then, we see only a fraction of that fraction?
III
“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world”[16].
The light from the sun beams through the glass of my windows and hits the book in front of me. I see the book only because of the fact that such light is reflected back into my eyes. Absorption, reflection, refraction, a smattering of scattered photons bombards my eyes, causes me to see only that which the book dares me to see. The light passes from its source to the book to my eyes, illuminating and reflecting as it travels, losing photons spasmodically left and right as it scours the room. My eyes are privy to the bloodied remnants of a high speed chase to everywhere, a photonic joyride. The energy of the light waves, the natural frequency at which the electrons vibrate in the material of this book and the strength with which the atoms in the material hold on to their electrons erect and whittle my vision down to a fraction of a fraction of a helping of that which is possible, saying nothing of the schemes the brain may have in store for the interpretive dance it may lead with the light it may receive.
“Everything we see is a product of, and is affected by, the nature of light”[17].
IV
Nicolas Langlitz discusses Weber Luhmann’s conceptions that the perspective of first order observation as an exploration of latent possibilities produces more knowledge about a certain object of inquiry while the perspective of second order observation can see, “less and other things”[19]. The observer of the observer observes how the observer observes but cannot see what the observer sees and instead sees the observed observer’s blind spot. A first order observer such as a statesman going about his bureaucratic day may believe his bureaucratic duties to be natural and necessary while a second order observer may see such things as artificial or contingent. Likewise, a first order observer may be adamant that when she observes injustice, it is verifiable truth that such injustice exists as well as natural, and again necessary but remains within the confines of her ‘visible world’ (that confined space which we, others and objects themselves create by limiting our vision of the possible) while a second order observer of the observed may see her ‘injustice’ as an acceptable form of justice. Through such second order observations, reality, “now appears as refracted by a multitude of different perspectives (and conceals others)”[20]. Alternative perspectives are disclosed, the picture is complicated and contingencies are communicated. Refraction (as a manner in which light hits an object) occurs, “when the energy of an incoming light wave matches the natural vibration frequency of the electrons in a material”[21]. Light of differing energies will bend at slightly different angles. Thus, 2nd order observations penetrate the observed observer’s perspective at differing frequencies and cause contingencies to erupt from within and new perspectives to surface.
V
Reflected light composed of photons passes through the cornea into the machinations of fifteen major parts in the functioning of the human eye. It eventually travels down the optic nerve as a cirque du soleil, miscellany of images in the form of electrical impulses to the occipital lobe of the brain. Simultaneously, cornea, ciliany body, iris (the dilator and sphincter muscles) and the retime (containing rod cells for vision in low light and cone cells responsible for color vision and detail) act to absorb, focus, detail, and register color with the light that is absorbed into the eye[25]. The retina contains two types of cells, called rods and cones, and it is when light contacts such cells that a series of complex chemical reactions occur and the chemical that is formed (rhodopsin) creates electrical impulses which travel down the optic nerve. Such impulses are transmitted to the brain and interpreted as light. This flow from light source to objects, reflected, acted upon the eye and transmitted to the brain is continuous, spasmodic, and composed of fragmented continuities of time, place, and matter. “Like all objects of perception, it lies within the universal forms of knowledge, time, and space, which are the conditions of multiplicity”[26].
VI
Electrical impulses erupt and travel across the train track optic nerve to the brain, through the intensities of the temporal and frontal lobes leaving traces of deadened impulses scattered like dried leaves along lobed landscapes. Those character-laden impulses explode with music, transmit memories, evoke long-gone moments, create thoughts, refill gaps with explosive rememberings. They come repeatedly, spasmodically, like the regulated images of musical notation in “Star Guitar” by the Chemical Brothers[28]. A new way of seeing, of perceiving music, oozes out of the timbered tones, beats, rhythms, silences and salvos. The repetitive cycle of the beats bring regularity and predictability while sudden eruptions and dissonances are read as interesting developments or bothersome noise but the sudden eruptions lead to reaction, cause judgment, incite cogitation. “Music makes one see some very strange things, colors and percepts, Deleuze says. He imagines a kind of civilization of those dimensions into each other, between philosophical concepts, pictorial percepts, and musical affects”[29]. Hearing particular songs can evoke memories, smells, tastes, emotive responses while dancers learn particular steps in line with musical dance numbers and students and children study and retain information with classical music, recalling it later when such music is played. Musical therapy aids ailing patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and singing is used as a retrieval technique for face-name recognition in nursing homes of the aged. Photonic packets of energy travel into the eye, laterally along the optic nerve transformed into electrical impulses and into the brain. Light enters the brain and like a Phoenix, memory flares.
VII
“Memory is a mental system that receives, stores, organizes, alters and recovers information from sensory output”[32].
What of this mental system, this fluid and pungent place? We have a sense of where this may be: for some in the grey matter between our ears, for others within demarcated places and objects, for others still a rousing, volatile web of electrical impulses fed by the optic nerve. Where else do we more often dwell than in our memories, the geographical and sentiment-laden spatial mental system of space? As Keith Basso states, “Animated by the thoughts and feelings of persons who attend to them, places express only what their animators enable them to say; like the thirsty sponges to which the philosopher eludes, they yield to consciousness only what consciousness has given them to absorb”[33]. As objects act upon our eyes by reflecting and offering visible light to them, so too do we act upon our places of memory, assigning meaning, temporality, prescribing thoughts and feelings to be attached to such memories, and acting through the resonance of the ‘past’. As the locale of endless streaming sources of input both audible, visual, and tactile (in short, sensory), this space of memory as mental system drips with remembrance as etched into its very fabric but also drips with narratives both verified and unverified but always present in informing our actions as well as our views of the world, of that which is composed of visible light. Bassos conception of Dudley Patterson’s narratives are telling: “…Patterson’s narratives have transformed its reference from a geographical site into something resembling a theater, a natural stage upon the land (vacant now but with major props still fully intact) where significant moral dramas unfolded in the past”[34]. The sense of place which we may locate in and around the mental system of meaning is laden with feeling and shared sentiment, although rarely (if ever) identical. How does sentiment arrive within the interstices of our minds, as traversing members of our cranial reality, as filaments which wrap themselves around our nerves and neurons and inform our actions? Is it, as Stoler states, that, “memory is that through which people interpret their lives and redesign the conditions of possibility that account for what they once were, what they have since become, and what they still hope to be”[35]? Is it that memory exercises a certain selection among the impressions at its disposal and oddly, the earliest recollections of a person often seem to preserve the unimportant and accidental, not the weighty and affective[36]? Or is it that memories, like geographical landmarks, can be mapped out, systematically and strategically targeted and erased as in the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind[37]? Is it none of these, is it others, or is memory an amalgamation of all of these conceptions? Who dares to say? Light (in its fragmentary form) plays a prominent role in illuminating objects external and internal, irradiating darkened corners of our minds through enabling objects (through visible light) to act upon us. Without such action, what forms might memory take, what gaps might memory seep from, what auditory forms might memory resemble, what olfactory concoctions might percolate within the complex neural networks of now?
If we distinguish between short-term and long-term memory, we may conceive of the former as that which, “includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome” and the latter (long-term) as family, race, society, civilization, traces and translations as acting upon it from a distance off beat in an untimely way[38]? And although sometimes shared, these conceptions of memory are not contiguous but operative under conditions of multiplicity, fragmentation, rupture and discontinuity much like our very vision and the light upon which that depends. And yet, like Deleuzian stratification, a world of conjointness is created from this world of vision-laden chaos in the process of being continually renewed and created. Strata (accumulations, coagulations, sedimentations, foldings, physicochemical, organic, anthropomorphic, consisting of coded milieus, formed substances and extremely mobile) as shared places emerge[39]. As Basso states, “Locked within the mental horizons of those who give it life, sense of place issues in a stream of symbolically drawn particles – the visible particulars of local topographies, the personal particulars of biographical associations, and the motional particulars of socially given systems of thought”[40].
We move laterally across the optic nerve into the geographical tundra of memory and into the interstices of the brain as the bullet in Tobias Wolff’s short story, “Bullet in the Brain”: the bullet smashes through Ander’s skull and comes under the mediation of brain time[41]. He remembers so little as the bullet clears its pathway but does remember the minor history of a summer day. He remembers that which he has thought himself to have forgotten and the bullet continues its work, leaves the troubled skull behind and drags its comet’s tail of memory along shadowed spaces of the brain. As we traverse the entrails of these places of our own memoried minds, what tracings do our bullets revitalize, what shadows do they dissipate? What is left when the bullets have exited our skulls and reaped wormy caverns in our remembered pasts which are now?
VIII
Roy Vedas’ “Fragments of Life”[44] plays in the background of a nebulous bar in Brooklyn, NY and although I am surrounded by acres of crooked, raw concrete, I can think of nothing other than the beach. The beach as remembered place surrenders itself to the surface through the medial pre-frontal cortex just behind my forehead. Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California at Davis says, “What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head…it calls back memories of a particular person or place…”[45]. Through the allocation of 13 UC Davis students, Janata played 30 different songs randomly chosen from the Billboard “Top 100” music charts while the students sat under an fMRI brain scanner and listened. Lit up were those parts of the brain which were actively tracking chord and key changes as well as any autobiographical memories that such songs conjured up. The most vivid and emotion-filled responses as well as the most active spikes in mental activity were most prevalent when listening to songs which evoked autobiographical memory. A piece of music, whether read or heard, is an object which acts upon us and which we assign knowledge and feeling towards: “When knowledge and feeling are oriented towards something real, actually perceived, the thing, like a reflector, returns the light it has received from it. As a result of this continual interaction, meaning is continually enriched at the same time as the object soaks up affective qualities”[46]. As we interact with objects of inquiry, memory, or the tangible, its actions upon us through the physical process of visual intake are often assigned meanings and feeling which confuse “what is felt and what is perceived”[47]. Thus, as music acts upon our senses, we perceive the object (music) and demand our perceptions to be real as first order observers through associations to places, people, and tracings of the past.
IX
“My job is to plumb the depths…so to speak. Drudge up something from inside, something honest. I gotta tell you: the life of the mind…there’s no roadway for that territory…and exploring it can be painful…kind of pain most people don’t know anything about…”[51].
The brain as physical object mystifies through the power of knowledge, intelligence, motor skills and consciousness that it enacts as performer. We locate the brain as a space saturated in performative, ascribed actions and meanings: a lump of gray matter (that you can touch, smash, cream, freeze, divide), the central nerve, one of the many locations of the mind, seat of intelligence, the battery (driver of motion-related forces), memory bank, central processing unit, a network (the depths of which continually befuddle), a synonym for thinking, feeling, acting, remembering, creating, coding, decoding, the Achilles’ heel of human existence, machine, electric impulses, stone fruit, ideas, feelings, disparate illustrations, gridlock, traffic, intertwining freeways, future, present, past, LSD trip, education, control, death, reason, molding, sculpture, self-monitoring, gender, race, sexuality, musical vibrations, planetary alignment, popping, fizzing, clicking, Benjamin’s Arcade project, a blank slate, a key to the unseen universe, the cause for all our worries, our loves, our laughter, our unhappiness, our forgetting and the sentiments we remember.
We dwell within our brains as a place represented and enacted and its meanings are continually woven into the fabrics of social life, anchoring it to the features of the landscape[52]. The mind as ‘sense of place’ is accepted as a fact of life but accepted through, “culturally mediated images of where and how they dwell”[53]. This habitus of the mind is enacted through the brain’s representation in two major mapping techniques: the elementary and the networked. Within the elementary, the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes in addition to the cerebellum and brain stem are assigned colors. Each color is used to slice the brain into recognizable locales or territories. Such brain-cartography follows from the state’s violent constitution of territory as sanctified through the project of the map, the over-simplification of which is clearly illustrated within the technique of elementary mapping[54]. The Center for Neuroskills has produced the image below as its model for the human brain[55]:
In observing the clean-cut lines, such a simple landscape does something to our conception of this very complex locale of interrelated component parts. What this does to an individual will be left to their subjective realities but societally, to see the complex as simplistic, to fail to offer complexity as a view in and of itself to the public at large for consumption is problematic. As Cosgrove and Daniels state, “Maps as an impersonal type of knowledge tend to “desocialize” the territory they represent. They foster the notion of a socially empty space. The abstract quality of the map…lessens the burden of conscience about people in the landscape”[56]. Desocialized, empty, color-coded space offers an image of the brain that people can control through the veneer of simple understanding. It is a product, viable enough for people to consume and through consuming, the brain is socially simplified, the terrain of this territory emptied of its innumerable complexities. Should mapping fail to satiate those longing for simplicity, here is a recipe for a brain using clay or playdough[57]:
Materials:
2 cups water
2 cups flour
4 teaspoons cream of tartar
One quarter cup vegetable oil
1 cup salt
Red food coloring
Mix the water, salt, flour and cream of tartar in a large bowl or blender until the lumps disappear. Then mix in the vegetable oil. Put the entire mixture into a sauce pan and “cook” it over low heat until it gets lumpy. Pour the mixture out and let it cool. Then knead and shape it into the form of a brain. Don’t forget to add wrinkles (gyri) to your brain. Squirt in different hues of food coloring for the different lobal sections.
Alternatively, neural mapping techniques of the brain and its interlaced environ offer complexities that astound. The problem no longer becomes one of over simplification but instead becomes overtaxing as this system of the brain, “is made aware of its internal contradictions, of viewpoints playing a part, of other possibilities”[58]. Mapping against the regimentation of the German forests that James Scott speaks to in Seeing Like A State, the neural mapping technique produces stems and filaments that seem to be roots in Deleuzian rhizomorphous fashion, understanding the brain as a, “multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neurologia, a whole uncertain, problematic system (the “uncertain nervous system”)”[59]. As assemblages (understood to be territory made of decoded fragments of all kinds, assuming the value of properties, assemblages of enunciation and machinic, and assemblages cut across other assemblages to create deterritorialized spaces), these neural mappings etch out an ever-changing territory of partial, collective, networked fragments in visionary form and open our vision to an alternatively ordered form of the possible across, through and under existing limitations. Such assemblages make connections between innumerable fields of existing and developing work in the nanosciences (particularly nanotechnology), chaos synchronization, postcolonial studies, anthropology, medical anthropology, biotechnology, history and new conceptions thereof, critical race theory, music theory, corporate organizational theory, defense technology, artistic design, architecture, and many more begging those of us daring (or crazy) enough to conceive of ourselves as human beings in a different light with regards to our relationship amongst ourselves and within the world at large. Exploded are traditional cartographic notions of fixedness. Instead, we are shown that perhaps, “maps do not mirror reality, but depict it from partial perspectives, figuring in accordance with particular standpoints and specific aims”[60].
In what I hope to be a much larger piece, one aspect (amongst many others) that I wish to expand on is the notion of brain mapping (in all its forms) as a colonial enterprise. The physical and forced entry into this once-dark space is enacted daily all over the world by scientists prying into the brains of their patients[61]. The skull removed in hardened sections and slices, the brain is subjected to fragmentations of light and the once invisible is made visible. The physical brain is inundated with machinery, light and foreign chemicals, mapped constantly by portable intra-operative magnetic resonance imaging (IOMR). To map such localities out, declare boundaries to lobes, classify particular parts of the brain and document such classifications is an exercise of colonial power worth exploring, with our very brains as the geographical territory[62]. What does it mean to take these darkened spaces of the invisible and make them visible through the introduction of partial, collective and networked photons?
X
Origin, “although a thoroughly historical category, nonetheless has nothing to do with beginnings…that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool…its rhythm is apparent only to a double insight”[66].
“The world is my idea”[67].
The mirror reflects the image of the imagined self. Thoughts arise, come and go just as fast, arrive as they become clear and sink back into oblivion. Like many-colored marbles, the fragments of the mind roll out upon the page as ideas, link to one another as assemblages, as “regulated improvisations”[68]. Thought is becoming and as such, can be conceived of as, “an inherent moment of the very process of (social) being, of collective praxis, as a process embedded in social reality…as its active moment”[69]. Masses of minds constantly chatter to the reverberations of consciousness amongst and within themselves. Through these at times steadied, at time frenzied, warblings of discourses (both internal and external), these ‘sedimented folds’, new planes and surfaces reemerge[70]. Thought is discontinuous, quietly leading from one thing to another, but rupturing suddenly and drawing connections between seemingly disparate ideas. How are we to understand this? Scientists state that there are over 100 billion nerve cells in the network which is the brain and that they have only just begun to scratch the surface of what this means[71]. Neural synapses exploding with electric impulses (bottled light) shoot star-like and gaze into both familiar and unfamiliar territories. Aware only of a fragment of a fragment of these occurrences, what are we to gauge the meaning of thought to be?
XI
“…in each of us, in varying proportions, there is a part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which we result. Yet we do not sense this man of the past, because he is inveterate in us; he makes up the unconscious part of ourselves”[75].
“Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times”[76].
“But if History escapes me, this is not because I do not make it; it is because the other is making it as well”[77].
History as teleological. How can this be? What temporality exists within that which images our minds, the photonic, fragmentary light that informs so much of our being? I view objects, their reflections are rendered distorted snapshot synapses in and through my brain, leaving traces of themselves throughout. The now constantly becomes and just as quickly leaves but the remnants and scatterings of its affects, the sentiment which it weaves through my being remains and I am interwoven with a sense of temporality that is not linear as ‘past’ but is so very present in informing their views of the world and their place within it.
History and memory waltz together at times in harmony, at others as chaotic feuding ex-lovers. But the relationship, whether soft or sour or merely indifferent, remains, and narratives are created in and through which people live their lives. These paraders of people are at once subjects confronting history and at the same time producers of the very narrative that shape their (and other’s) lives. Human beings, in Trouillot’s terms, are “doubly historical”[78]. As objects and momentary eventful glimpses of people’s lives explode or quietly seep across their historical, remembered presents, what sense if made of the madness? As objects of their own histories, what reflections of visible light are made possible through the words and actions of its participants?
History as object, an object which acts continually upon its possessors and subjects. The wind does not cease to exist simply because we do not see the effects of it upon the leaves. The currents of history too, never disappear and the affects course through our branches at times unseen, but ever-present. People wear their minds and the coursings of history upon and within their mismatched wardrobes of second-hand clothes.
Philip Glass’ “Etude No. 6”. Deeper. Confusing etchings, filaments, wrappings, deeper. Dancing vibrations, neuron romance, electric sparks, connections, calmness and clarity erupted, resonances of images within my brain, light-stricken pathways of moving train windows and all those people passing by with all of those thoughts, repetition, continuance, ruptures met with regular tempo. History.
XII
The visions-imagined inform action whether through words, gestures, or physical manipulations and the many conjectures which have trespassed our bodies erupt in outer manifestations upon, with and through objects.
XIII
“The end is built into the beginning”[79].
We arrive where we began, on pathways into the human eyes as objects act upon our vision and dictate what we may and may not see. As the objects act, they speak of storied pasts now operating through our vision, our brains, and the coupled romance of history and memory. The sedimented beings which incorporate objects speak volumes to that which we do not know. I am. I was. I was but am. Pressing flaps of time continuous, ubiquitous yearnings ravage our conception of the known and the interstices of the words upon this page explode with all of that which has not been said. An object is an object but so much more. What awaits us when our vision expands?
“Objects, these mysterious suits of armor beneath which desire awaits us, nocturnal and laid bare, these snares made of velvet, of bronze, of gossamer that we throw at ourselves with each step we take; hunter and prey in the shadows of forests, at once forest, poacher, woodcutter, that woodcutter killed at the foot of a tree and covered with his own beard smelling of incense, of well-being, and of the that’s-not-possible; free at last, alone at last with ourselves and with everyone else, advancing in the darkness with feline eyes…”[80]
Epilogue
This is potentially a huge project. Perhaps it is a project I will take up as my thesis work. I have limited myself in many, many ways due to the required size of this particular project but my interests were sparked in a number of other areas: auditory reception and interpretation as it relates to vision and thought, the feedback the brain encounters from other body parts, vision, memory, thought and action within the wider animal kingdom, the incalculable historical depths of vision, the brain, memory, history and action which I have only here begun to scratch the surface of, the many conflicting narratives related to vision, the brain, memory, history and action that only reinvigorates the notion that we know only that we do not know, the very deep and complicated role that language (both verbal and non-verbal) play in vision, brain trauma, networks sciences, blindness, savants, color psychology as it applies to how people go about color coding brain mappings, the olfactory and tactile, psychological disorders, the historical lineage of conceptions of the brain from as far back as possible, the greater role of psychoanalysis (particularly with regards to repressed memories—where do they go?), the mechanical and pseudo-unethical biological re-wiring experiments carried out on human subjects, deaf studies, short ethnographies on and with various communities regarding how they conceptualize their brains, amongst others. This is only the beginning.
[1] www.boingboing.net
[2] www.wiki.brown.edu
[3] www.anthonymattox.com
[4] Synecdoche, New York, Dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2008.
[5] JK Fowler
[6] Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 502.
[7] Ibid., 503-504.
[8] Ibid., 505-506.
[9] Freud, Sigmund. ‘A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad.’’ Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 21 (4) (Tr. James Strachey.), 232.
[10] www.mocoloco.com
[11] www.esch.dircon.co.uk/second/second.htm
[12] www.googlecology.com
[13] Much scientific insight on the nature of light for this section was gathered from: www.howstuffworks.com/light
[14] Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology: Volume I. Oxford: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 169e.
[15] All four drawings were gathered from: http://science.howstuffworks.com/light
[16] Schopenhauer, Arthur, and Irwin Edman (ed.). The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Modern Library, 1928, 14.
[17] www.howstuffworks.com/light
[18] www.neuroculture.org
[19] Langlitz, Nicholas. “What First-Order Observers Can Learn From Second-Order Observations.” Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Note, no. 3, 2007: 7-8.
[20] Ibid., 8.
[21] www.howstuffworks.com/light
[22] www.campar.in.tum.de
[23] www.philipkdick.com
[24] www.astronomy-pictures.net
[25] The following resources were referenced in collecting information related to the eye: http://www.nei.nih.gov/, www.howstuffworks.com/eye, and http://cim.ucdavis.edu/eyes/eyesim.htm
[26] Schopenhauer, Arthur, and Irwin Edman (ed.). The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Modern Library, 1928, 5.
[27] www.projektas-muzika.lmta.lt
[28] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws_R_GxZX2o
[29] Gilles Deleuze’s ABC Primer. Dir. Pierre-Andre Boutang, Int. Claire Parnet (1996), 41.
[30] www.math.uconn.edu
[31] www.content.techrepublic.com
[32] Coon, D. Essentials of Psychology. New York: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1997.
[33] Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, 56.
[34] Ibid., 66.
[35] Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002, 170.
[36] Freud, Sigmund. The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the Interpretation of Dreams, and Three Contributions To the Theory of Sex. New York: Modern Library, 1938, 30.
[37] Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dir. Michel Gondry, 2004.
[38] Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 16.
[39] Ibid., 502.
[40] Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, 84.
[41] Wolff, Tobias. “Bullet in the Brain.” Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2008.
[42] www.oasas.state.ny.us
[43] www.news.ucdavis.edu
[44] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6YhNcEbOHE
[45] Hsu, Jeremy. “Music-Memory Connection Found in Brain.” www.livescience.com/health/090224-music-memory.html
[46] Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search For A Method. New York: Vintage Books, 1963, 89.
[47] Ibid., 89.
[49]https://successfulenglish.wikispaces.com
[50] http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/10/BRAIN.jpg
[51] Barton Fink. Dir. Joel Cohn, 1991.
[52] Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, 57.
[53] Ibid., 57.
[54] Neocleous, Mark. “Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography.” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 6, no. 4, 2003: 409-425.
[55] http://www.neuroskills.com/brain.shtml#map
[56] Cosgrove, Denis and Stephen Daniels, eds. “The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments”, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography, 9, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 312.
[57] Neuroscience for Kids- Washington University: www.faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chmodel.html
[58] Langlitz, Nicholas. “What First-Order Observers Can Learn From Second-Order Observations.” Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Note, no. 3, 2007: 7-8.
[59] Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 15.
[60] Coronil, Fernando. “Beyond Occidentalism.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 11, No. 1., 1996, 53.
[61] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2UdpEGWD8A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqCGidmZ5sk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1ILrYHvnpA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF04XPBj5uc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZogbIvdgfzQ&feature=related
[62] Scientific colonialism is by no means new but the neurosciences offer new expansions of existing boundaries worth pursuing.
[63] www.smithkramer.com
[64] www.thethirddegree.wordpress.com
[65] www.photohome.com
[66] Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1991, 8.
[67] Schopenhauer, Arthur, and Irwin Edman (ed.). The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Modern Library, 1928, 3.
[68] Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 79.
[69] Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2009, 6.
[70] Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 160.
[71] Kandel, Eric R., James A. Schwartz and Thomas M. Jessell, eds. Principles of Neural Science. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000, xxxiii.
[72] www.pdphoto.org
[73] http://www.geekologie.com/2007/09/18/magical-weave-mirror.jpg
[74] www.pestproducts.com
[75] Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 79.
[76] Foucault, Michel and Paul Rabinow ed., The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p.76
[77] Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search For A Method. New York: Vintage Books, 1963, 88.
[78] Troulliot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, 24.
[79] Synecdoche, New York, Dir. Charlie Kaufman, 2008.
[80] Luca, Gherasim. The Passive Vampire. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2008, 71.
Book Review: Along the Archival Grain by Ann Laura Stoler
December 26, 2009
Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense by Ann Laura Stoler 314 pp. Princeton University Press. Paper, $22.95
“Universals appears to have two connotations. One is that of totality; in this sense, universal designates the whole world at all times. The other is one of generality: that which is applicable to a large number of instances.”[1]
“Common sense has its own necessity; it asserts its right with the weapon peculiarly suitable to it, namely, appeal to the ‘obviousness’ of its claim and considerations.”[2]
“There are many kinds of eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes—therefore there must be many kinds of ‘truths’ and consequently there can be no truth.”[3]
There are no absolutes, no guaranteed categories, no definitive markers, in essence no Truth. Conjecture erupts through momentary snippets of time, the seemingly insignificant recesses and grooves of innocuous objects (i.e. colonial missives and personal correspondence) and is constantly transformative, washing in and out of itself leaving remnants, what Pierre Bordieu referred to as “sedimented knowledge”[4]. As Wendy Brown states, convictions [i.e. Truth] “are, precisely, refusals to allow history and contingency to contour the existing dimensions and possibilities of political life”[5]. Convictions bred, born, and fed in the colonial conscious and unconscious mind are exactly what Ann Stoler attempts to challenge within Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Stoler wrangles with the process of colonial archiving in the 19th century Netherlands Indies as one not filled with conviction and certitude but rather, constant uncertainty filled with gaps, of questioned credibility and rumor. Stoler maps (to reference Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘map’) out a colonial heritage through a genealogy, a genealogy that is “neither an ‘acquisition’ nor a ‘possession that grows and solidifies’ but [is] an ‘unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile interior from within or from underneath”[6]. In the following few pages, I hope to accomplish four things: to discuss what I mean by genealogy and Stoler’s relationship to Foucault and Nietzsche in her book, where we find Foucault’s notion of the emergent history, how it is conceived as well as what work it does, to discuss Stoler’s choice of Frans Carl Valck as agent of colonial sentiment, and finally, offer a few questions that the work brought forth in light of genealogy, archival work, historical ethnographies and in reference to the formulation of my own work.
A man places the record “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis on the turntable, a woman screams at her child as the blouses and trousers flutter in the wind on the laundry line stretched taut between two crumbling brick walls, a car sounds its horn in the distance and a silently operating multitude of operations have brought us here, to this point, at this particular moment, through the “endlessly repeated play of dominations”[7]. Genealogy, as envisioned by Foucault and Nietzsche, destabilizes notions of origin, that fixed point from where a particular moment, person, or event has evolved. It cultivates details and takes notice of the accidents which accompany every beginning, plumbs and excavates the depths and awaits eruptions and emergents[8]. In short, it is cognizant of the utter complexities constantly at play in historicized or imagined moments of origin and thus, explodes any preconceived notions of Truth. Through this lens of constant inconsistency, Foucault states that, “every sentiment, particularly the most disinterested, has a history”[9]. And so it is, in a very real sense that Stoler takes head-on the notion that, “the mastery of reason, rationality, and the inflated claims made for Enlightenment principles have been at the political foundation of colonial regimes”[10]. Instead, she argues, things are a bit more complicated. Hesitation, anxiety, uncertainty, fear, confliction, and irrationality could often be found within the fissures of the Dutch colonial project in the Indies and she reveals such conflictual sentiments through ‘minor’ histories in the archives which attend to structures of feeling and force that in ‘major’ history might be otherwise displaced[11]. It is through focusing on such ‘minor’ histories that Stoler reinvigorates Foucault’s notion of the emergent, “the entry of forces…their eruption, the leap from the wings to center stage, each in its youthful strength”[12]. By focusing in on the entrance exams of the Indies civil service, the demonstrations at the Harmonie Club on May 22, 1848, the Inlandsche Kinderen (pauperized whites) and resulting state commissions of inquiry, the Mattray agricultural colony in France, Frans Carl Valck, and the Luhmann family murders, Stoler pushes up and through the façade of a unified, hegemonic colonial force and the emergent leaks forth from conflictual accounts of mistrust, rumor, love, pain—in short, sentiment. Stoler’s sense of the ‘sentiment’ is not opposed to political reason but act as modalities or tracers of it; as judgments, assessments and interpretations of the social and political world[13]. These sentiments reveal more than they conceal and beg us as readers to question the importance of the sidelined, the seemingly innocuous, or the mundane. This questioning, as Wendy Brown states in reference to Nietzsche, “produces an experience of vertigo, and the vertigo gives way to demand. The demand is not of a conventional political sort but rather seeks new knowledge—vertiginous knowledge”[14]. The archive, seen in this light and through the lens which Stoler fuses her work together through, is torn asunder and the infinite screams to be noticed between the interstices of words on archival documents, the space between photographed subjects and most importantly, within that which is not said. She focuses instead on archival form: “prose style, repetitive refrain, the arts of persuasion, affective strains that shape ‘rational’ response categories of confidentiality and classification, and genres of documentation”[15]. Knowledge is sought but never garnered and labeled as such and the interrogative replaces the declarative in much of Stoler’s work. Colonial sentiment is thus sought through an emergent history and it needs to be understood how she employs this within her work.
Stoler begins part one of her book (entitled “Colonial Archives and their Affective States”) writing against the “Weberian model of rationally-minded, bureaucratically drive states outfitted with a permanent and assured income to maintain them, buttressed by accredited knowledge and scientific legitimacy and backed by a monopoly on weaponed force”[16]. Although successful in doing so, how does she succeed and what does such a pursuit do?
Stoler posits the idea that the Dutch colonial authorities were most concerned with the distribution and states of sentiment, pertaining particularly to whether or not family, language, and homeland were at odds and whether they should—or could ever-be under the state’s control”[17]. As colonial authorities watched such ‘sentiment’, it was not, Stoler argues, through the sharp Cartesian lens of passion versus reason but rather existed and made decisions in large swaths of grayness[18]. Stoler then dives into the archives to explore the entrance exams for the Indies civil service and in doing so, illustrates clearly and succinctly the affective criteria set out by the state for advancement in education, inclusion in Dutch racial membership, claims to citizenship, and social entitlements[19]. But this is not to say that such affective criteria was consistent for it took the Dutch colonial authorities much work to uphold and standardize such criteria. Morality became a ‘manufactured consent’ in Chomsky’s terms that the colonial state treated as a business which was run, as Stoler states, on “affective judgments”[20]. Statecraft “was not opposed to the affective but to its mastery,” Stoler states and through such attempted mastery of the affective erupts what Bourdieu referred to as the habitus, “the product of history, [which] produces individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history”[21]. Such normalized matters of the state were in no way static but instead had to constantly be remade, reworked, re-stretched, and fit over an ever-changing landscape of sentiment and ‘the moral’, Pulling on such examples from the dusty archives such as the entrance exams, the Harmonie club, debates concerned with ‘mixed blood’ and poor white inhabitants and more does the work that Foucault speaks of when mentioning ‘eruptions’, that “hazardous play of dominations”, and shows us as readers how such attempted mastery of the affective reveals its successes and falterings within the wording and distribution of archived colonial communications[22]. Particularly to this point, the missive which Stoler surfaces from the annals of the events at the Harmonie Club in Batvia on May 22nd, although seemingly innocuous, is exactly the type of ‘minor’ history that can be overlooked but when strung out from the wash of history, can speak volumes from the minor alterations made and more importantly, from that which is carefully avoided. This is effective history in every sense of the term; it “shortens its vision to those things nearest to it…it unearths the periods of decadence, and if it chances upon lofty epochs, it is with the suspicion of finding a barbarous and shameful confusion”[23]. The documents which Stoler pulls on are not mere dusty piles of parchment but instead are weapons wielded by the state for evidence, particularly in the Dutch colonial state’s attempt to create racial categories in the face of ‘mixed bloods’ and poor whites. The framing of archives in this way uses this bundle of seemingly inanimate objects and does work with them, outlining a blueprint of colonial distress which was given cumulative and historical weight, justified inaction, reduced allocations, and caused the state to abort policy[24]. In eking out the boundaries of racial categorization, people were categorized via state statistical analysis and commissions. Importantly, Stoler says, “characterizations of people and things not only lodge in the tenacious hold of words: they burrow into bodies and then re-emerge as resurrected knowledge, upholding oppositional positions as they take on new political forms”[25]. This is vitally important as it reveals the work of archives and the people that participated in their creations to be participants in organic knowledge-creation processes of becoming, receding, emerging and re-emerging, not static actors fixed to particular points in history but actors constantly operating in and through the archived past as well as the present. Frans Carl Valck is a prominent player within Stoler’s work and I wish to explore her choice of Valck before presenting a few questions the overall work prompted.
Frans Carl Valck, at one point Assistant Resident on Sumatra’s East Coast in 1876, is a ‘minor’ figure in the overall Dutch colonial history and through Valck, Stoler lays out the colonial “sensibilities of the everyday—to what pressed on their bodies; what they chose to communicate differently to kin, colleague and superior; what occupied their feelings; what slipped to the edges of their awareness, erupted, and then escaped their minds”[26]. Within Chapters 6 and 7, Valck is utilized as an object of colonial sentiment and in the latter part of Chapter 7, fleshed out with a familial history. Stoler, by her own accounts, writes against “charmed accounts” revealing “jagged analytic edges” and avoids coating “complex commitments in generic ideologies and “shared” imaginaries as if people had little work to do with them”[27]. Although not nearly in the schizophrenic form in which Deleuze and Guattari write A Thousand Plateaus, Stoler is employing the essence of the rhizome as “short term memory or antimemory”, something that “grows between, among other things”, “blow[s] apart strata, cut[s] roots, and make[s] new connections”, and “collective assemblages of enunciation”[28]. The rhizomatic direction as delineated by Deleuze and Guattari, tries to “overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings…Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction…”[29]. Stoler, in affect, does overthrow the common usage of ontology or metaphysics, searching instead for the “ascribed being or essence of things…such ‘essences’ [being]…protean, not fixed, subject to reformulation again and again”[30]. Valck does this work, carrying the readers through the official missives about the Luhmann family murder which erupted with colonial fear, misunderstanding, apprehension and scapegoating, surfaces European planter’s atrocities, and shows rumor to often be treated as actionable fact. Valck’s eventual dishonorable discharge from the Dutch colonial apparatus reveals the man of flesh and blood, disappointed and angry with the colonial apparatus, longing for a real connection with his daughter, and attempting to bring together disparate distances in familial and empire relations. As Stoler states, we “are privy to lives in which the politics of empire bleeds into the texture of the personal and then, as if too present, is carefully washed out”[31]. The troubled account of Valck’s life pulls together empire of the external and internal if only for brief moments and allows glimpses into the ever-morphing essences of conflicted colonial existence.
A few questions arise when reading Stoler’s work, questions which are aimed at understanding choices rather than critiquing the work as a whole. Along the Archival Grain is of course an academic work but more so, it is a work of art and as such is imbued with choices, made at the time of writing, offering the reader a small slice of the overall picture which can never be conveyed. James Agee and Walker Evans, in writing their work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, talk about how the meaning of a house or person is channeled through them as writers but that their meaning is much larger. As they state, it “is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and as I do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist. His great weight, mystery and dignity are in this fact”[32]. If we make a choice to bring a character from the annals of the archives to life, what responsibility does this carry with it to be as ‘true’ to his/her life as possible? Understandably, we often have documentation from which to pull their lives, stretch them out, unwind the lurid details but what of the deep interstices, the much that is left unsaid? At these moments, we begin to inevitably fictionalize and these people (at one time flesh and blood) become archival marionettes and although we may be honest puppeteers with wonderful intentions, we are nonetheless puppeteers. This is an interesting dilemma: to be caught between historical essence and fiction. The overriding question I suppose is, is it not all fiction and if it is and we are not beholden to Truth of any sort, does it matter if we pull from archives or imagination? The former is definitely more esteemed in circles of academia but I nonetheless wonder if imagination is not at play more often than many are willing to truly accept for the vertigo such a realization induces.
The second main question that arises after reading Stoler’s work is related to style. Stoler has a washing and re-washing of commonalities that runs throughout her work related to the concept of the historical, the play of the personal with the broader empire’s conflicted aspirations and sentiments, and the archive as a living and breathing entity. In its circular tempo, there is a linearity that employs dates, times and places but distorts them, allows new perspectives to bubble up and reworks traditional concepts of the colonial. Stoler’s work is a Picasso that we observe and recognize but are forced to deal with distortions that beg new questions, cause new realms of vision to erupt. I juxtapose this with Delueze and Guattari’s work, a work similar to a Magic Eye poster (pop-culture reference intentional) that is composed of multitudes of disparate colors and images but when stared at long enough, causes a coherent image or narrative to arise. In eking out colonial sentiment and ‘common sense’, what would happen is we were to employ a more Deleuzian/Guattarian approach? What would arise and what would be lost?
Stoler’s work is successful in the aims it is attempting to achieve. It is a piece in a long line of endless work to be done in distancing us from our knowledge, “unsettling what we think we know, defamiliarizing the familiar, [and] defamiliarizing us with ourselves”[33]. And this reader, although riddled with questions of responsibility towards the archive and style, looks forward to the next piece of the ever-assembling and dissembling puzzle.
[1] Johannes Fabian, Time and The Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 3.
[2] Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: On the Essence of Truth (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1977), 118.
[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), 252.
[4] Pierre Bordieu, Outline A Theory of Practice: Structures and the Habitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 79.
[5] Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 94.
[6] Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (New York: Pantheon Books), 82.
[7] Ibid., 85.
[8] Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 101.
[9] Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (New York: Pantheon Books), 87.
[10] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 58.
[11] Ibid., 7.
[12] Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (New York: Pantheon Books), 84.
[13] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 40.
[14] Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 98.
[15] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 20.
[16] Ibid., 57.
[17] Ibid., 58.
[18] Ibid., 60.
[19] Ibid., 66.
[20] Ibid., 69.
[21] Pierre Bordieu, Outline A Theory of Practice: Structures and the Habitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 82.
[22] Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (New York: Pantheon Books), 83.
[23] Ibid., 89.
[24] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 139.
[25] Ibid., 175.
[26] Ibid., 249.
[27] Ibid., 252.
[28] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 15-24.
[29] Ibid., 25.
[30] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 4.
[31] Ibid., 278.
[32] James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 9.
[33] Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 95.
District 6 in District 9: The Metaphoric Menagerie
December 26, 2009
District 6: A Little Bit of History
Six Captivating Minutes
In Blomkamp’s films, Aliens are aliens
Scene from Alive in Joburg
The metaphor for blacks and coloreds living under the apartheid regime as majority populations, if not yet clear, becomes overwhelmingly apparent. (After all, using space aliens to represent “aliens”—immigrants—should be clear enough). Alive returns to the present to describe the appalling conditions of the aliens–“this place doesn’t want us” (subtitles make sense of their foreign language). And let’s face it—they are ugly. With protruding tendrils surrounding their mouths, the shantytown dwellers huddle around an oil-barrel fire dressed eerily like many of the characters in Tsotsi, the 2005 film about the Joburg township misfit that finds redemption through parenting the child of one of his carjacking victims.
Viral Aliens
The main thrust of the D-9 site is to offer humans the chance to “live long, prosperous lives” and “deal with non-humans.” It offers an interactive satellite image of the physical location of District 9, a community watch program, continuous news feeds, and revealing behavioral recommendation pop-ups for interacting with non-humans such as: Drawing pictures and using simple sign language can be an effective way of communicating with non-humans;” “Non-humans must be treated with respect. Actions deemed abusive will be dealt with by the MNU or animal safety branch [emphasis added ];” “Please refrain from using non-human drinking fountains to prevent the spread of disease;” “Refrain from the manufacturing and distribution of items that may glorify non-human culture;” and my personal favorite, “Speaking clearly and loudly to a non-human will help it learn English more quickly.”
Territorial integrity helps individuals feel safe, secure, and empowered;” as well as, “When encountering unfamiliar scenarios, it’s normal to react with aggression instead of reason.” The gist of the entire site is to avoid conflict and to inform humans that, if put in precarious positions, they should take heed and call on the paternal protector, the MNU, which exists to, “maintain a human and non-human population that keeps the great spirit alive.” What spirit Sony Pictures is referring to exactly is never explained. Glaring differences of MNU’s treatment of the non-humans becomes apparent when reviewing its list of available jobs. Humans, for example, are offered jobs with substantial salaries and skill-levels (i.e. dental hygienist, translator, customer relations representative) while non-humans are offered jobs in fields like “Non-Human Dorm Janitor,” “Non-Human Waste Disposal,” or a “Non-Human School Teacher” (teaching non-humans), all of which are assigned low, hourly pay rates.
Throughout his blog posts, George attempts to show the similarities between humans and aliens, at one point meticulously going through a typical day, hour-by-hour, and listing his activities to draw comparisons—commentators respond with, “BORING;” “Darn it! Get back to the exciting stories of abuse and salacious tales of corporate malfeasance;” and, “Uh, so this entry is supposed to make me want to campaign for alien rights or something? Forget about it. Go home!” On the right hand side of the screen, visitors are given the option to download wallpapers, posters, and icons in support of “non-human equality and rights” as well as the option of signing a petition for non-human rights. The opening sentence of the petition’s purpose (“It is our belief that all intelligent beings, both human and non-human, have basic rights to liberty and decency”) are reminiscent of civil rights proclamations in 1960s America or under apartheid South Africa. As of September 9, 2009, 13,879 people signed this fictitious petition. If interested in receiving further updates through the “non-human newsletter,” a visitor can submit their email address, date of birth, as well as their species (human or non-human) and gender.Implications and Questions
The largest market for this movie will most likely be in the United States. If a populace ignorant of African affairs (as Americans are wont to be) sees this film, what work does that do? Does it draw links between aliens and Africans, cause people to view South Africa as a land of hostile township battles, and reify once again the notion that Africa is an exotic, violent, and adventurous place? What would happen if Blomkamp had no aliens in his film but instead told the same story of the apartheid era using only people? Would anyone watch and, if not, why?
New Media Warfare: Tweeting on the Front Lines
December 26, 2009
“The most effective propaganda is that which is prepared in the guerilla zone.”[1]
“The military is still adapting to operating in an increasingly interconnected and integrated global media environment, where anyone armed with a hundred dollar digital camera and access to the internet can become an ‘information warrior’”.[2]
“How can a man in a cave out-communicate the world’s leading communications society?”[3]
Whether Hezbollah in the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Hamas in the Battle of Jenin in 2002, or the ongoing expansion of the “insurgency” across the internet, new media has opened up traditional warfare to that of the virtual and information (and the management and control thereof) has become absolutely paramount for those engaged in new media warfare. Stated succinctly, new media are the tools of the guerrilla information warfare of the 21st century. Often the discussion around new media and its effects are relegated to civil society or business but there is an arena of interest often overlooked: warfare. While broadly we may think of new media as, “that combustible mix of 24/7 cable news, call-in radio and television programs, internet bloggers and online websites, cell phones and iPods,”[4] perhaps a more timeless definition is that which is offered by Dennis M. Murphy, a Professor of Information Operations and Information in Warfare at the U.S. Army War College: “Any capability that empowers a broad range of actors (individuals through nation states) to create and disseminate near-real time or real time information with the ability to affect a broad (regional or worldwide) audience using global standardized communications technologies such as the internet as unifying platforms.”[5] With such definitions in mind, this paper will attempt to accomplish three things: firstly, it will outline the ways in which the U.S. military has begun utilizing social media to put a more human face on its divisions as well as open up communications between soldiers, families, and friends. Secondly, it will outline how the military has come to perceive new media as a weapon to be used in, as British military expert John McKinley dubs it, the “virtual arena of war”, and information operations as essential to winning the “war of ideas” which the Global War on Terrorism has become.[6] Lastly, this paper shall explore the ways in which the “insurgencies” have begun utilizing new media to fight the lumbering bureaucracies of Western powers, pulling primarily on the cases of the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006, the Battle of Jenin in 2002, as well as the ever-expanding presence of the “insurgency” across the web. This paper will conclude by stating that while the U.S. military is attempting to adapt to the guerilla warfare of the new media “insurgencies”, its long-standing culture of rigid hierarchies and vertical lines of power structures will have to speedily give way to the horizontal fluidity of its aggressors or it will find itself quickly defeated and madly outpaced in the “war of ideas”.
The presence of the U.S. military in social media outlets has expanded rapidly in just this year and it is worth briefly outlining how far the Department of Defense, US Army and US Air Force have gone in just a short time.[7] As of April 16th, 2009, the U.S. Army launched its own Facebook page, currently followed by 111,617 fans[8]. The US Air Force has garnered a presence on Facebook that currently has close to 51,000 fans and the Department of Defense (DOD) also has a Facebook page, currently with a mere 1,309 fans. However, in addition to their organizational Facebook pages, each have allowed for, and in many cases encouraged, individuals in the military to create pages and link to the overall organization’s page. This has resulted in the DOD having over 70 Facebook pages linked to it, 30 for the US Air Force, and 86 for the US Army. The DOD’s social media coverage does not stop there though. In addition to Facebook, one can find the DOD presence on Blog Talk Radio (2 channels), Blogs (the DOD Live blog plus links to 44 other blogs), Delicious (4 links), Flickr (the DOD Flickr page plus 25 other links including one to Space, Missile and Defense Command), iReport (2 links), Linkedin (2 links), MySpace (6 links), NowPublic (1 link), Twitter (the DOD Twitter site plus 68 other links), Vimeo (3 links), and YouTube (the DOD YouTube page plus 40 other links).[9] The story for the US Air Force and Army are not much different. The US Air Force boasts of over 12 YouTube links in addition to Air Force Blue Tube (the official YouTube site of the US Air Force), 36 Twitter links in addition to the official US Air Force Twitter page, an official page on Flickr as well as an official blog called Air Force Live.[10] The US Army has 76 Flickr sites in addition to its official site at soldiersmediacenter, 78 Twitter sites in addition to its official site at USArmy and over 40 YouTube sites in addition to its official site at soldiersmediacenter.[11] Add to these the fact that each department has its own webpage with multimedia interactivity (the US Army site even has a link to a video game called America’s Army 3[12]) as well as the fact that the Pentagon has recently released a new website called the Pentagon Channel which features live, streaming video feeds from inside the Pentagon as well as links to the Pentagon Channel on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and iTunes and a partial, yet staggering, picture of the US military presence in social media forums arises. With such widespread coverage, what guidelines are in place to protect information sensitive to the U.S. military and its operations and service members and what are the purposes of such a presence?
As of December 19th, 2009, there is no official social-networking policy for the Department of Defense and all of its affiliates. Although DOD officials have stated that a, “review weighing the benefits and risks of using social-networking technology was expected to be released months ago,”[13] no such policy has yet to be released and it is not expected to be released any time soon. While this may seem extremely troubling to those fearful of breaches of security, individual divisions such as the US Army, Air Force and Navy have issued brief social-networking policies internally to their members. As of early 2009, the Air Force Public Affairs Agency Emerging Technology Division released a 23-page document entitled, New Media and the Air Force which amongst other things arduously outlines guidance and guidelines with respect to the differing forms of new media usage. While stating that, “the Air Force views personal websites and blogs positively, and it respects the rights of Airmen to use them as a medium of expression,” it quickly follows by stating that all Airmen, “are on duty 24-hours a day, 365-days a year and all actions are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).”[14] While underlining the appreciation the Air Force has for self-expression it states that all Airmen must still represent the core values of the Air Force, even on the web: “integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all that is done.”[15] This paradox arises across the DOD when it comes to guidance and guidelines of new media usage and the DOD’s unease with the huge cultural shift that new media is inducing from a traditional, vertical communication hierarchy to a more horizontal, atomized and fluid form is abundantly apparent. The reasons for instituting such a change are many, however, and are akin to many of the challenges traditional hierarchical media outlets are facing today.
As Jim Stanton in his article entitled, “The New Media and the US Military” states, “From the front lines of Iraq, where Army Gen. Ray Odierno posts daily updates to his Facebook page, to Fort Huachucha in Sierra Vista, AZ, which posts video greetings to deployed troops, America’s military is infiltrating the world of online social networking.”[16] But why? One perhaps obvious benefit is the leverage it gives friends and families to converse with the deployed soldiers overseas and hear their stories of day-to-day life. As Bonnie Sanders, a mother of two whose husband was deployed, states, “It felt good knowing that he would know we were thinking of him.”[17] Major Samuel House, a public affairs officer for the National Guard, kept track of his three boys when he was in Afghanistan with Skype[18]: “It’s really important…being able to see your children and have your children see you on the other side. It makes everything much easier.”[19] Such social networking sites put a human face on the Army, Air Force, and DOD that people might not otherwise see. At MILBlogging.com[20], a site boasting of over 2,500 military blogs in 43 countries with 8,236 registered members, visitors are given a snapshot of the top miliblogs as well as links to all others aggregated by country.[21] On the right hand side, constantly updated tweets from the miliblogging account at Twitter are featured where family and friends can communicate in real time with friends and relatives based overseas. But as Defense Deputy Chief Information Officer Dave Wennergren states, “We need to look at this as internet-based capabilities rather than just social networking. This is more than just for ‘quality of life’ [for deployed soldiers]. These tools are for a broader use than people realize.”[22] As Wennergren outlines, the successful modernization of federal operations in the digital age hinges on six key points: a) sharing information relentlessly and securely; b) keeping up with technical advances; c) changing the existing model for information sharing; d) recognizing that the future has happened and making full use of the technologies; e) behaving like an enterprise; and f) doing everything possible to be transparent.[23] Such points offer insight into the fact that the military has strategically engaged new media to maintain a presence in the information domain with the goal of horizontally informing the media, the public and each other. But behind such a strategic engagement is a very specific way in which the military has come to perceive new media as a weapon to be used in the virtual arena of war, the war of ideas, or the information battle space. As the last sentence of the introduction to New Media and the Air Force states, “If the Air Force does not tell its story, someone else will.”[24]
“Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department of Defense will fight the net as it would an enemy weapons system.”[25]
The proliferation of information through multiple sources (computers, cell phones, cameras, radios, et al) has, after some trepidation, been fully recognized by the US military as a problem of control and management but also one of great opportunity. The war is now fought on multiple fronts, one of which is the information front. As the Joint Doctrine of Information Operations states, “Information is an instrument of national power and has complex components with no single center of control. Information itself is a strategic resource vital to national security and allows communicators to shape the information battlefield.”[26] Information, it is recognized, has long been an obsession of any nation’s military waging (or thinking of waging) war and to point out this quote is not to presume that something is new about using information for national power. It is, however, to point out that from the Cold War to today, something has changed with regards to how information is viewed and the speed by which it is transmitted and consumed. The technology is smaller, faster, and cheaper and the, “ability to control and verify information is much more limited than in the recent past.”[27] As Dennis M. Murphy states, “The current information environment has leveled the playing field for not only nation states, but non-state actors, multinational corporations and even individuals to affect strategic outcomes with minimal information infrastructure and little capital expenditure.”[28] Recognizing the bureaucratic and legal constraints so endemic to the military, much of the literature being produced by the military or those associated with it has within it a deep unease and recognition that cultural change is absolutely necessary to compete in the ever-changing landscape of information production and consumption. Such recognition is met with resistance from senior war fighters who, “certainly understand its [new media’s] importance but lack the cultural upbringing to see it in the context of current military operations.”[29] Murphy refers to this as the generation gap between “digital immigrants” and “digital natives” and underlines the importance of closing the gap as quickly as possible to manage the information environment most effectively.[30]
In a piece entitled, “Blogs and Military Information Strategy”, James Kinniburgh and Dorothy Denning examine how blogging may be incorporated into military information strategy primarily as a tool for influence operations, a subset of information operations (IO). In their concluding remarks, they stress the need for military use of the blogosphere to focus on foreign blogs, bloggers and audiences and emphasize that it will require a truly integrated inter-agency approach on a national level.[31] Key then, to how the military views information and new media capabilities, is the concept of “Information Operations” (IO). Stated succinctly, information operations involve, “actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one’s own information and information systems…IO capitalizes on the growing sophistication, connectivity, and reliance on information technology.”[32] Quoting such people as Sun Tzu, Mikhail Frunze, Herodotus, and Niccolo Machiavelli and offering images such as the “Increasing Access to Information” figure[33], the “Joint Doctrine for Information Operations” reads eerily like documents similar to the 90-page Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare manual written for the Nicaraguan Contras in 1984 by the CIA. Stated in April of 1992 in the “Conduct of the Persian Gulf War Final Report to Congress”, “…the effective use of information operations by the Coalition to defend against Saddam’s information strategy ensured that Iraq was not only beaten, but also failed to ever seize the initiative.”[34] A key primary goal of the focus on information operations is to not only offensively utilize them as they did in the Persian Gulf War but to defensively use them by knocking down walls between intelligence agencies and increasing the ease of access to information for agents attempting to counter terrorist threats and gather intelligence on the “enemy”.
In early 1994 the CIA created Intelink that allowed any agency to publish a web page or put a document or a database online, secure from the outside world. But as Clive Thompson of The New York Times reports, the volume of material became too massive when paired with shoddy search engines far inferior to publicly available search engines like Google.[35] Over 10 years later in 2005, based largely off of Wikipedia, two members from the office of the director of national intelligence, Thomas Fingar and Mike Wertheimer, joined with CIA wiki experts to build Intellipedia, “a wiki that any intelligence employee with classified clearance could read and contribute to.”[36] By August of 2009, 3,600 members of the intelligence services had contributed a total of 28,000 pages.[37] Once the nine different intelligence agencies saw the benefit of utilizing the new media tool of the wiki, the DOD began training its analysts in the use of blog software and wikis. New media was the new buzzword and was going to be an important tool in fighting “adversaries.” But, as Clay Shirky states, “For the intelligence agencies to benefit from ‘social’ software, they need[ed] to persuade thousands of employees to begin blogging and creating wikis all at once. And that requires a cultural sea change: persuading analysts, who for years have survived by holding their cards tightly to their chests, to begin openly sharing their hands online.”[38] The military, then, faces a real dilemma: on the one hand, many of the agencies within the military have survived by secrecy; on the other, suddenly the military finds itself fighting against an enemy lacking the hierarchical bureaucracies, red tape, and vertical power structures and needs to openly share information to compete. This is a dilemma the military has yet to find a solution to. The “enemy,” however, has no such dilemma.
On November 6th, 2008, it was revealed by the Financial Times that on multiple occasions, Chinese hackers have penetrated the White House computer network and obtained emails from government officials.[39] This is in addition to the large amount of information which was downloaded from the McCain and Obama campaigns by Chinese hackers in the summer of 2008 as well as the 2007 breach of the Pentagon where Chinese hackers breached the same system Robert Gates, the defense secretary at the time, was on.[40] On December 17th, 2009 it was revealed that Iraq insurgents hacked US drones for under $26.00 using off the shelf software programs such as SkyGrabber and downloaded live video feeds from the Predator drones prowling the skies of Iraq.[41] In addition, US troops are continually faced with ever-improving improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan, improving because militants are able to use modern telecommunications networks to exchange info on how to improve them.[42] And as recent as December 19th, 2009, a group calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army hacked into the social network Twitter and diverted anyone trying to visit the site to a page which stated, “USA think [sic] they are controlling and managing internet by their access, but they don’t, we control and manage internet by our power.”[43] Such events speak to the ever-diversifying forms of power new media is allotting to non-state actors with political and social agendas, actors many of whom the US military would deem “enemy combatants.”
In Lebanon for 34 days in the summer of 2006, an asymmetrical war erupted between Israel (a state) and Hezbollah (a “state within a state”), a group which has been characterized as a, “militant, secretive, religiously fundamentalist sect or faction.”[44] And unlike any other war before[45], this war was “live”, networks projecting in real time the grim reality of advancing or retreating Israeli troops in southern Lebanon including the destroyed homes and villages, Israeli airplanes attacking Beirut airport, and Hezbollah rockets striking northern Israel and Haifa.[46] To do this, journalists utilized the camera and the computer. As Kalb and Saivetz state, “The camera and the computer have become weapons of war.”[47] New technology makes real-time coverage feasible[48]. The images had a powerful influence on public opinion and Hezbollah, a largely closed society, was able to greatly exploit the media through projecting a, “narrative that depicted a selfless movement touched by God and blessed by a religious fervor and determination to resist the enemy and achieve a ‘divine victory’”.[49] Hezbollah, like Hamas and al-Qaeda, utilized the information battlefield to control its image and sway world public opinion against Israel who, as a more “open” society, had to deal with leaked Israeli secrets, rumors and widespread misinformation. As Steve Fondacaro states, “A revolution happened without us knowing or paying attention. Perception truly now is reality and our enemies know it.”[50] After 2006, it became increasingly acceptable for journalists to be activist players in the field providing dramatic and at times, incendiary, coverage simply to garner ratings in the 24/7 cable news barrage of information. As Edward S. Herman states, “they [the media] serve mainly as a supportive arm of the state and dominant elites, focusing heavily on themes serviceable to them, and debating and exposing within accepted frames of reference.”[51] UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) had been stationed on the Lebanese border since 1976 and during the 2006 war, published information regularly on its official website about Israeli troop movements in an effort to be “impartial and objective.”[52] Because of Hezbollah’s closed nature, no information was posted about their movements and although it is unknown as to whether or not Hezbollah utilized the easily-accessible information, with a computer and internet connection they very well could have. An asymmetric guerilla information war was waged and Hezbollah won, utilizing favorable coverage from news networks such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, tightly controlling images and information (rarely was a Hezbollah guerilla shown), creating pro-Hezbollah blogs which fought for public opinion with pro-Israeli blogs and swaying hungry new media-driven, 24/7 journalists looking for a story by inviting them into the closed Hezbollah society only to feed them a well-scripted story of resistance against the Israelis. As Ivan Segal[53] recently stated in a talk given at The New School in New York City, the, “media no longer has a functional relationship to conflict; it doesn’t report on conflict anymore, it’s actually a part of it.”[54]
In the case of the Battle of Jenin in 2002, Israel attempted to root out Hamas terrorists in the West Bank of the Palestinian occupied territories, banning all media from entering the city. Due to this restriction, the information battle space was abrogated to the militants.[55] Photos quickly leaked out of homes being demolished by Israeli bulldozers and cell phones allowed for phone interviews with Jenin residents. Jenin quickly became a symbol of Israeli ruthlessness against Palestinians.[56] As Murphy states, “The lesson of Jenin is that the military may be able to dominate the information environment in a localized geographical area for a limited period of time but these wildcards, utilizing new media capabilities, become that limiting factor.”[57] The role of cell phones in movements cannot be understated. Whether it is Afghanistan or Somalia, Pakistan or Jordan, states across the globe are quickly adopting digital media. “Mobile is pervasive in the third world. 97% of Tanzanians have access to mobile phones. Mobile coverage exists throughout Uganda. There are 100 million handsets in Sub-Saharan Africa…59% of mobile phones are in the developing world—over seven million mobile subscribers in Kenya alone.”[58] Cell phones in Kenya can be used as credit cards, farmers in China can receive crop market prices from the Chinese government via text messaging, and as the recent political unrest in Iran shows, cell phones can be strategically used and exploited for great political gains.[59] As Ivan Segal points out, Pakistan (a country where 60% of the population is under 25) has roughly 100 million cell phone users quickly obtaining access to 3G networks, a boom in satellite television (50 satellite television stations, 10 of which are 24-hour news channels), and increased internet usage and radio coverage. Such statistics point to the fact that more and more people across the globe are obtaining access to real-time information.
The last case worth exploring of “enemy” combatants utilizing new media is that of the “insurgent” movement whereby the internet is used to post, “influential information items which include extremist training materials, an ideological rationale for actions, instructional manuals plus propaganda and agitation materials.”[60] Through the use of the internet and cell phones, “insurgents” are able to respond to unfolding events before coalition forces have a chance or opportunity to because of their, “lengthy chain of command approval process that takes hours or days to grant approval.”[61] Iraqi al-Qaeda leader Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi often used the internet to speak about US casualties, the Iraqi elections, Israel and other issues. Similarly, the Mujahideen Army posted a video entitled “The Sniper of al-Fallujah.” Thomas, in his piece on “Cyber Mobilization”, points to both of these examples as moments when ideological or religious fence-sitters adopt “extremist” causes.[62] The nature of war has changed. By initiating a physical action such as the detonation of an improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq and Afghanistan and then immediately cyber responding by cell phone, internet or some other device, the message will reach a wide audience quickly and can offer such non-state individual’s or groups influence and support in their movement. US Army Col. Rob Baker offers an example of when a suicide bomber’s belt was detonated too early in Iraq and accidentally killed a number of innocent Iraqis.[63] Insurgents immediately utilized cyber devices to state that the US had launched a missile strike on the population and within minutes, an anti-American crowd had gathered.
It is worth briefly mentioning too the insurgent’s utilization of jihadi websites which, “enable insurgents to discuss their tradecraft and to exchange justifications for actions, both accomplished and planned.”[64] Websites have allowed for targeting information to be spread (for example, embassy and living quarters of US and British sites in Kuwait and Qatar) and can also serve as intelligence and reconnaissance assets to extremists, Al-Mohagar al-Islami (“The Islamic Immigrant”) recently publishing a 40-page pamphlet on the art of kidnapping online. In 2006, the Al-Rashedeen Army posted an open letter to President Bush on the internet, suggesting he think over the fact that, “God is on our side and always will be.”[65] In these ways, “insurgents” are attempting to shape and influence local and global popular opinion much like the US military is in Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem is that the war has changed to a “molecular civil war,” one where the insurgents quickly adapt, move fluidly due to moveable and readily-available technologies and antiquated, fossilized bureaucracies cannot fare well in the virtual battle space of the 21st century.
New media has greatly altered the landscape of warfare. Reminiscent of the guerilla warfare tactics outlined in Ernesto Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare and those actions practiced by the Vietcong in Vietnam, today’s “insurgents” have taken to their cell phones, their computers, and their cameras to thwart the US military in the increasingly important “war of ideas”. And while clearly the US military recognizes this, the question remains: can a traditionally hierarchical bureaucracy such as the US military adapt quickly enough to meet the fluid and ever-adapting nature of the insurgency in the information battlefield? In an organization that once prized itself on control of private information, can the DOD now adapt to the new information landscape offered by new media, one that has democratized the means to create, disseminate and consume information and made public much of the information that they once cherished as private?[66] The US military is today quickly outpaced by an increasingly complex, technologically-adept “enemy.” To catch up, the US military must institute an overhaul of its culture and ways of thinking about the world and while they may have made steps in the right direction, the rest of the world has made leaps and bounds.
[Click on links to see image files in appendixes]
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Appendix 4
[1] Guevara, Ernesto Che. Guerilla Warfare. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, 107.
[2] Collings, Deirdre and Rafal Rohozinski. “Shifting Fire: Information Effects in Counterinsurgency and Stability Operations”. U.S. Army War College. 2006. December 21st, 2009, i.x. http://www.csl.army.mil/usacsl/publications/ShiftingFireMenu.pdf.
[3] Zaharna, R.S. “American Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World: A Strategic Communication Analysis”. American University. 2001. December 21st, 2009. http://www.fpif.org/pdf/reports/communication.pdf.
[4] Kalb, Marvin and Carol Saivetz. “The Israel-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict”. U.S.-Islamic World Forum. 2007. December 21st, 2009. http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/events/2007/0217islamic%20world/2007islamforum_israel%20hezb%20war.pdf.
[5] Murphy, Dennis M. “New Media and the Warfighter: Workshop Initial Impressions”. Center for Strategic Leadership. Vol. 3 No. 8 (2008), 2.
[6] Collings and Rohozinski, 9.
[7] For some fascinating visuals on the state of new media across the world, please see Appendix 4.
[8] All statistics in this section are as of December 20th, 2009.
[9] http://www.defense.gov/Registeredsites/socialmediasites.aspx
[10] http://www.af.mil/socialmedia.asp
[11] http://www.army.mil/media/socialmedia
[12] See Appendix 1
[13] Corrin, Amber. “DOD Social-Media Policy Still in Limbo”. December 1st, 2009. December 21st, 2009. http://www.fcw.com/Articles/2009/12/01/DOD-social-media-policy-Wennergren-comments.aspx
[14] Air Force Public Affairs Agency Emerging Technology Division. “New Media and the Air Force”. 2009. December 21st, 2009, 7 http://www.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090406-036.pdf.
[15] Ibid., 7.
[16] Stanton, Jim. “The New Media and the U.S. Military”. Web 2.0 Convergence. May 11th, 2009. December 21st, 2009. http://www.digitalcommunitiesblogs.com/web_20_convergence/2009/05/the-new-media-and-the-us-milit.php.
[17] Ibid.
[18] http://www.skype.com/
[19] Gray, Kristy. “Technology Allows Guard Members, Families to Stay Connected”. Trib.com. November 28th, 2009. December 21st, 2009. http://www.trib.com/news/state-and-regional/article_ef56add0-0940-5239-b019-ae3284c63e21.html.
[20] See Appendix 1
[21] Miliblogs by country: U.S. (1,747), Iraq (441), Afghanistan (90), Germany (46), Canada (25), U.K. (24), Kuwait (13), South Korea (13), et al.
[22] Corrin, Amber.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Air Force Public Affairs Agency Emerging Technology Division, 1.
[25] Brookes, Adam. “US Plans to ‘Fight the Net’ Revealed”. BBC. January 27th, 2006. December 21st, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm
[26] Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Joint Doctrine for Information Operations, Joint Pub 3-13”. October 1998. December, 21st, 2009, 1. www.c4i.org/jp3_13.pdf
[27] Murphy, Dennis M. “Fighting Back: New Media and Military Operations”. U.S. Army War College. 2008. December 21st, 2009, 4. http://www.carlisle.army.mil/DIME/documents/Fighting%20Back%20(Murphy).pdf
[28] Ibid., 5.
[29] Ibid., 14.
[30] Ibid., 15.
[31] Denning, Dorothy and James Kinniburgh. “Blogs and Military Information Strategy.” Joint Special Operations University. 2006. December 21st, 2009. www.au.af.mil/info-ops/jsou/blogbook06june.pdf.
[32] Joint Chiefs of Staff, vii.
[33] See Appendix 2
[34] Joint Chiefs of Staff, vii.
[35] Thompson, Clive. “Open-Source Spying.” The New York Times. December 3rd, 2006. December 21st, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html
[36] Ibid. Also please see Appendix 3.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Sevastopulo, Demetri. “Chinese Hack Into White House Network”. Financial Times. November 6th, 2008. December 21st, 2009. http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto110620081938360726&page=2
[40] Ibid.
[41] Gorman, Siobhan, Yochi J. Dreazen and August Cole. “Insurgents Hack US Drones”. Wall Street Journal. December 17th, 2009. December 21st, 2009. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Stafford, Patrick. “Twitter Hacked by Iranian Protestors”. Smart Company. December 21st, 2009. December 21st, 2009. http://www.smartcompany.com.au/internet/20091221-twitter-hacked-by-iranian-protestors.html.
[44] Kalb, Marvin and Carol Saivetz, 3.
[45] Depending on what literature one reads, the Persian Gulf War is sometimes considered the first “live” war. For the purposes of this paper and in the viewpoint of Kalb and Saivetz and others, the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006 was the first “live” war.
[46] Kalb, Marvin and Carol Saivetz, 4.
[47] Ibid., 4.
[48] Seib, Philip. “Politics of the Fourth Estate: The Interplay of Media and Politics in Foreign Policy”. Harvard International Review. Fall (2000), 62.
[49] Kalb, Marvin and Carol Saivetz , 5.
[50] Packer, George. “Knowing the Enemy”. The New Yorker. December 18th, 2006. December 21st, 2009. 65-66. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/12/18/061218fa_fact2
[51] Herman, Edward S. “The Media’s Role in U.S. Foreign Policy”. Journal of International Affairs. Vol. 47, No. 1 (1993), 25.
[52] Kalb, Marvin and Carol Saivetz, 14.
[53] Executive Director of Global Voices http://www.globalvoices.org/.
[54] Segal, Ivan. “Digital Media in Conflict-Prone Societies”. New York City: The New School, November 12th, 2009.
[55] Murphy, Dennis M. “Fighting Back: New Media and Military Operations”, 10.
[56] Ibid., 10.
[57] Ibid., 10.
[58] Ibid., 7.
[59] One must also think of the WTO protests in December of 1999 in Seattle WA.
[60] Thomas, Timothy L. “Cyber Mobilization: A Growing Counterinsurgency Campaign”. ISphere. 2006. December 21st, 2009, 1. www.au.af.mil/info-ops/iosphere/iosphere_summer06_thomas.pdf.
[61] Ibid., 1.
[62] Ibid., 2.
[63] Crawley, Jeff. “Proponent Hosts Info Ops Gathering”. The Lamp. December 22nd, 2005. December 21st, 2009. ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/ist/docs/fet/strat-1.pdf.
[64] Thomas, Timothy L., 3.
[65] “Al-Rashedeen Army Presents”. Site Institute. March 26th, 2005. December 21st, 2009. http://siteinstitute.org/bin/articles.cgi?ID=publications160306&category=publicationsandsubcategory_0
[66] Armstrong, Matt. “New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization and Facilitation”. Mountainrunner.us. August 5th, 2008. December 21st, 2009.
[67] http://www.americasarmy.com/
[68] iTunes Pentagon Channel page
[69] http://www.pentagonchannel.mil/
[70] http://www.milblogging.com/
[71] All figures in appendix 2 are taken from the Joint Doctrine for Information Operations 3-13 which can be found here: www.c4i.org/jp3_13.pdf
[72] This pops up every time one visits the intellipedia login screen. https://www.intelink.gov/wiki
[73] https://www.intelink.gov/wiki
[74] http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/more-truth-about-twitter/
[75] http://www.vincos.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/wmsn-12-09.png
[76] http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-4-final-beta/
[77] http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyecube/3302969531/sizes/m/
[78] http://www.flickr.com/photos/metrobest/3485574749/sizes/o/in/set-72157617478192160/
[79] http://theconversationprism.com/1024/
[80] http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/mg20227062.200/mg20227062.200-6_1000.jpg
Hazy Localities: Corporate Structures of Sentiment (Cubicle) (Version 2)
December 22, 2009
**The formatting is slightly off re: pictures and text.
Note: The form that this paper has taken attempts to mirror the structure of the corporate job and cubicle existence while simultaneously leading the reader through a partial exploration of the murky, historical narratives of the sentiments of anger and alienation.
Hazy Localities: Corporate Structures of Sentiment
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
-Langston Hughes, A Dream Deferred[1]
I. Cubicle: Introduction to the Haze
The “haze” returns to the 32nd floor of the World Financial Center near the frothy waters of the Hudson. Outside, seen through the double-paned, tinted windows lining the walls thirty feet away, it seems frigid, maybe warm, fairly sunny but maybe not. It doesn’t matter and the feeling is back, the ebbing pressure of, “Why am I here?”, “What am I doing with my life?”, “What is this all about?” The curled fibers of the tightly-wound carpet with carefully-planned color tiles specifically laid out to denote direction and lead people to the nearest emergency exit feels hard under my wingtip shoes. My cubicle walls rise 5’ above, cutting me off from any of my fellow co-workers and boss in sight but I can feel their presence, hear their chatter. I stand up to stretch my legs, see only the tips of individual’s heads, see someone from my “team” (a co-worker under the jurisdiction of the same boss) walking down the hall and the “haze” is in his eyes, within his slow-moving gait and delayed bodily movements. He says, “Hello,” continues on his way. I sit back down, hear the rumble of the sanitized air vents overhead, their quiet presence and white noise unnerves me. The clock strikes 9:00 a.m., the day has just begun and the “haze” has settled in to stay.
The “haze” is the sneaking suspicion that one is no longer who one purported oneself to be, the sense of alienation that exists amongst the rubble of stifled desires, deferred dreams. It is the act of mentally checking out of a situation deemed abominable just to get through the day. People wear it in the firmly-pressed creases of their baby-blue shirts, their tightly-woven hair, downward sloping mouths, and violently-sketched makeup. It leaks through the air vents in syncopated motions, nestles itself into the gray fibers of the cubicle walls and glaring florescent lighting overhead. The numbness can be felt walking down the quiet hallways, along the sterilized countertops near the water cooler, and the lack of noise, jovial conversation, of any conversation, echoes in glass-shattering screams. It drips from the mahogany walls of the conference rooms, shoots spears of poisoned countenance from newly-bought projectors onto bone-white screens. The “haze” is that desperate sadness and longing to escape that presses down on your neck, twists your spine, climbs up to your skull and starts pounding, making you question your sanity, wonder what is wrong with everyone else. The, “Why are we all zombies?” or “Humans aren’t meant to spend eight hours a day like this, are they?” kinds of questions. And once these questions-internalized go unanswered, this sense of alienation turns inwards and implodes into momentary bouts of an anger that is at once diffuse and solid, fragmentary and whole. It ebbs and flows in a waltz with sadness and fear, hope and feelings of despair. It falls in upon itself into a sense of alienation, a creeping feeling of powerlessness and pervasive mistrust. There is a feeling that things should change but they don’t and the anger steps to the background, lodges itself within the deep grooves under one’s eyes, rambles in the back of one’s brain, makes one tired after a full-night’s sleep. The “haze” sneaks in and I have momentarily resigned myself to its presence.
This paper is about tracing the complex sentiments of alienation and anger (as well as their partner emotions) through a specific location and time. This is not a sequential tracing, not intended to imply that one sentiment leads to another. They are such complex sentiments precisely because so often they are experienced simultaneously. The organization in which I worked within the Three World Financial Center in the financial district of New York City from 2007-2009 bespeaks of heavily-managed and maintained physical and sentimental structures, constantly in negotiation between the physical spaces of the office building and the workers within, as well as between the individuals themselves. My approach will be to trace these sentiments through the physically and historically-sedimented layers of a cubicle on the 32nd floor of Three Word Financial Center.
The cubicle entails a number of complexities including, but not limited to, the affect of physical space tightly-managed, the negotiated emotional responses between co-workers, the external and internal control and management of body and emotion (what to say, how, when, and to whom one should express particular emotions and how one should appear to others), and the pervasive locations of silence which were at times sought after, at others painfully endured, and yet at others, internalized and incorporated into the ebb and flow of the sentiment-laden “haze”.
Within this paper, I will firstly explore the alienation and anger that working in a cubicle engenders, draw comparisons to the anger and alienation of Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes From Underground, the worker in Marx’s Capital, Sartre’s Nausea and Benjamin’s notion of “numbness”. Secondly, I will drudge up the moral history of how the cubicle came to be such a pervasive piece of “systems furniture”. And lastly, I will speak to the external and internal modes of affective control and management that the cubicle breeds and sustains. While there are multiple fruitful spaces which once could use to explore these concepts (i.e. conference room, bathroom, elevator, cafeteria, lobby), for our purposes here and now, none is more suited than the reviled space of the cubicle.
II. Cubicle: Moral Beginnings
[2]
[4]
1968 and Max De Pree, then CEO of Herman Miller Inc., and Robert Propst, a successful and young designer at the time, create, market and sell a piece of furniture that would forever change the face of the workplace: the reviled cubicle. Faced with the failed transplants of the open, bullpen style offices of newspapers to other facets of corporate life, Propst created a box he called the “Action Office” whose initial underpinnings were primarily moral in nature[5]. Propst wanted to open up conversation, create a free, egalitarian flow of information and battle the staunch bureaucracies, the immovable hierarchies, the solid walls of offices. The cubicle was his solution: movable walls, no roof to allow for easily passed information, an open-air feeling to increase the well-being of its occupants, the easy-to-use walls where one could pin up any information they were currently working on. All managers and workers would have cubicles and every cubicle had an open door.
The cubicle, as Frantz states, “had its roots in the cybernetic school of thought that arose in the middle of last [20th] century.”[6] This cybernetic idea of, “seeing the world in terms of information flows grew out of government-sponsored World War II military research and into the information technology industry of Silicon Valley.”[7] In the 1960’s and 1970’s, cybernetic ideas brought, “groups of military-funded computer researchers together with Deadheads, radical environmentalists, and art communards in the San Francisco Bay area” and they began to think of everything from, “bee behavior to dance parties to computer programming as information processes.”[8] In what was seen as a liberation from the grips of the military-industrial complex[9], the images of the computer and information were joined with a new, moral vision of egalitarianism, communal networks and democratic “people power”. [10] In a matter of years, from the architecture textbooks and journals of the 1960’s and 1970’s, cybernetic conceptions of the office began to emerge and cubicle workstations became the new way of thinking about the traditional office.[11]
Intel of Silicon Valley was the first organization to implement widespread changes to their office space, soon acting as the poster-child for the cubicle revolution. Once other corporations started to run the numbers, it was more economical for them to rid of the extra-large offices and cram as many employees into cubes as possible. At first, people really seemed to be sold on the idea of an open office, advertisements and testimonials from workers in the early stages of implementation revealed that people were talking to co-workers more, reaching over to grab paperwork, yelling over rows of cubes to get the next estimate on the cost of Project X. But it didn’t take people long to realize that they missed the privacy of an open office and it was not uncommon for individuals to raid storage closets for pieces of cardboard, plastic, anything that they could either place over the roof of their cube or fill in the gap where a door used to be. People began to hate the cube and it hated them right back, slowly eating away at their sense of self, alienating them from an already alienating job where no one really knew why they were there or how their superiors made fistfuls of money.
The traditional manager that sat in the office at the end of the hall disappeared for many corporations that had adopted the cubicle as their new form of organization but, as Foucault[12] spoke to at great length around the same time as the cubicle revolution, the greatest managerial possibility encased in the cubicle was the creation of a culture in which workers would feel obliged to manage themselves.[13] “Observation, evaluation, encouraging the proper attitude and habits in other employees…these obligations go beyond the management of work to the management of self.”[14] The intended equalizing, moral effects of the transition to cubicles was met with the economic reality of corporate life and cubicle farms began to sprout up all across America. As Julie Schlosser writes, “Reviled by workers, demonized by designers, disowned by its very creator, it [the cubicle] still claims the largest share of office furniture sales–$3 billion or so a year—and has outlived every ‘office of the future’ meant to replace it.”[15]
III. Cubicle: Anger and Alienation (Walls)
My job is stupid, my day’s a bore,
Inside this office from eight to four,
Nothin’ ever happens, my life is pretty plain,
Pretending that I’m working, pray I don’t get canned.
My cubicle, my cubicle,
It’s one of sixty-two,
It’s my small space in a crowded place,
Just a six-by-six board booth,
And I hate it that’s the truth.
-Vocalist: Jym Britton, My Cubicle[19]
“In the depths of my soul I really didn’t believe I was suffering; there was a stir of mockery, but suffer I did, and in a genuine, normal way at that…I was beside myself with anger…And all as a result of boredom; I was overcome by inertia.”[20]
“…within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker…they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine.”[21]
“They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws…They are peaceful, a little morose, they think about Tomorrow, that is to say, simply a new today; cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same.”[22]
“Its [the systems] goal is to numb the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory: the cognitive system of synaesthetics has become, rather, one of anesthetics.”[23]
The calculated temperance of my cubicle is standard for my rank and position of executive administrative assistant.[24] Twenty square feet of space, ten of which was covered by a desk, ten of which opened to a neatly-woven Berber carpet, gray in color. Two-foot long cabinets adorn one side of the cube, each one foot wide and one foot deep. A standard, well-used, black ergonomically-correct chair and one black garbage can. The cube is a standardized prison, far from the windows, well cordoned off from other individuals to increase productivity and decrease talking, and placed strategically in front of my boss’ office, the panopticon, the baron’s lounge. Directly above the cube, an air vent fervently regulates the temperature, in the hall one of the many white noise machines drones on. The hallways between cubes have widths particular to the floor’s duties, finance floor’s hallways smaller (so that more people can be fit in) than those of the graphic designers. The colors on the floor in identical squares are representative of which corner of the building one is in (a post 9-11 development to aid in evacuations). Those that are lower in rank such as myself are placed in the middle of the floor, far away from the windows. The harder one worked, the more dedication one showed to the company, the more one navigates the managed channels of speech and sentiment, the closer one gets to the windows. In essence, one can not imagine a more controlled setting, save some of the trading floors a few blocks away on Wall Street. What does this do to an individual working within it? What sentiments do such surroundings elicit and disparage? What role does the regulated airflow and calculated proportions of the cube in which 40-50 hours of one’s life per week are spent, play in producing a deep sense of anger and alienation?
I look up from my keyboard to the walls in front of me. Its gray fibers are numerous and identical, its walls high but not high enough. Everything has been taken off of them, there is no sign of the personal. This is a place of work, a place of death, this is a place of anger and alienation where my sense of the “authentic” self, my identity, is checked at the marble-lined doors, the gold-plated doorways to Three World Financial Center.
“I realize that I am not the person that I have to be at work and I am not enjoying it. I would definitely say that Y-International has separated me from my personality. Maybe not changing it but certainly forcing me to be two people at the expense of my happiness if you like”.[25]
From over my five-foot walls, I hear the white noise machines droning on, the quiet chatter of a manager down the hallway. Slowly, I stand to walk to the tinted windows lining the director’s cubes, look down to the busy streets below. People of all shapes and sizes walk past hurriedly. I wonder where they go, why they are in such a hurry, watch as the Hudson waters lap upon the mossy walls of the harbor. They move to the beats of a well-oiled machine and I am observer, at once separate from them, at once composed of each and every one of them. I return to my cube.
“Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that—in the space between building fronts—experiences, learns, understands and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls.”[26]
One hour passes since I have arrived but already I feel tired. My computer screen remains static, the florescent lighting above beams down in slicing regularity, nothing moves. I trace the lines of the plastic frames of the cubicle walls, searching for any irregularities and find a black spot where the paint has been chipped off. For the next ten minutes, I will contemplate this anomaly.
“There is a line where you have to realize that there are certain responsibilities in a professional environment and the actual nature of work it is very dry material [sic] and you actually have to approach it in a clinical, professional mindset, you can’t be necessarily creative and artistic and philosophical about it.”[27]
The days at the organization bleed into every aspect of my life, expand beyond the walls of my cubicle into the streets below and my inner domain. My only sanctuary, that of my mind, is assaulted by the dissonance between who I think myself to be and what I am massaged into being within the work setting. The chasms between my “authentic” self and work self becomes a painful reminder of what I am not and anger percolates, the feeling of alienation begins to seep in.
“A critical subset of prescribed emotion involves the socialization of role occupants to mask felt emotions that may disrupt role performance. For example, executives were taught to appear calm and rational by peers who would discourage emotional outbursts by instructing one another to ‘get back to the facts’ or to ‘keep personalities out of this’…”[28]
I begin to distance this sense of “self”, tuck it away safely within the hidden recesses of my mind where it will remain until the day when I can happily reclaim that part of “me” but the realization that I have lost something never goes away, seeps into my facial expressions and I wear it tightly in my workday presentation of self. I begin to wonder: is it not the very organization itself, in its clinical, heavily-managed setting that has caused me to create a more rigid sense of the “authentic” self? Am “I” a creation of the mechanistic organization, a reversal to its planned and orchestrated movements, a reactionary figure?
The anger is complex. It is not simply enough to state, “I am angry”. It ebbs and flows with momentary feelings of calm and temporary bouts of debilitating rage. It is the rapid tapping of the foot, the increased heart rate, the manic rambling through the mental landscape in search of sustenance. It is resistance to the sedated state of the corporate drone. It becomes common to long for more work simply to avoid having the time to think about one’s situation. The feelings of peace and anger, calm and rage, safety and unease, are often simultaneously experienced, leaving one feeling momentarily torn between two or more seemingly opposed sentiments. The very people one can speak to about the shared experience of anger are externally and internally silenced by the historical labor of emotion tightly-managed.
Anger is, as Merriam Webster defines it, a strong feeling of antagonism and displeasure.[29] It is also invoked by perceived misdeeds, “when others fail to confirm their identities or expected meanings in interaction, violate cultural norms, deny them their perceived due status, or treat them unfairly or disrespectfully”.[30] However, anger too is located not only physiologically within parts of the individual’s body (i.e. the wrenching stomach, the increased heart rate, the clenched fists) but is physically embedded in the object of the cubicle as energetic traces and also in the very form of the cube itself, in the very form of the organization in which it sits. The shape of angularity such as the square or rectangular cubicle if often psychologically read as pertaining to order, logic, containment, security, conflict, sharpness, abruptness, and choppiness.[31] The gray color of the drab cubicle walls denote a, “dull, moody environment”, a depressing atmosphere.[32]
The tightly-knit fibers of the cubicle walls, the rigidity of the desk which has been bolted to the floor, the immoveable filing cabinets, the open ceiling, and the harsh florescent lighting pouring in from above. I take my index finger, reach forward and push it into the fabric in the wall in front of me. I trail it along the walls, feel the ribs of the metallic skeleton, the vertebrae of my prison walls, the fortified cage of my work experience.
“We’ve all become so estranged from life, we’ve all become cripples, everyone of us, more or less. We’ve become so estranged that at times we feel some kind of revulsion for genuine ‘real life’, and therefore we can’t bear to be reminded of it. Why, we’ve reached a point where we almost regard ‘real life’ as hard work, a job…”[33]
Mabry and Kiecolt, in their piece on race, alienation and anger, focus on two aspects of alienation that influence anger: sense of control (the opposite of powerlessness) and mistrust of other people.[34] A person’s sense of control directly relates to their belief that they have the means (resources and opportunities) to achieve their aims.
I grab my stapler, move it to the left, place it neatly in its spot. The tape dispenser, the paperclip bowl, the pen holder—all are strategically re-arranged on my desktop. The control within my cube is temporary, lasting only as long as I remain conscious of moving said objects from point A to point B. I think of moving up in the hierarchy, long to be a manager or perhaps a director simply for the change and the pay raise but the path to these positions is murky and it is unclear how such a move is accomplished. I talk to co-workers and through a gossamer of well-countenanced and heavily-sedated semantics, they coach me in the ways in which to present myself and my desires to those in the upper echelons of the organization, state that it will take time, that I must put in my dues. Two days later, they are making a move, climbing the corporate ladder, applying for the very position I expressed an interest in. “Hard work and time,” I say to myself but the days have turned to weeks, the weeks to months, and the leaves on that tree have changed from green to brown. I move the stapler to another spot on the desk. This will have to suffice.
The emotions of anger and alienation as found within the office space are not new by any means. Their sordid histories can be traced through centuries of men and women faced with the seemingly pointless, methodical, repetitive, and nuanced machinations of the transition to industrial society. What of Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes From Underground, a man faced with the banality of the civil service, trolling the depths of misery, anger, alienation, and the nauseous: “On the whole, I was always alone…I still longed to be active; and suddenly I sank into dark, subterranean, loathsome depravity…constant, morbid irritability…there was nothing to respect in my surroundings, nothing to attract me.”[35] The isolating sensations of his surroundings drive him deeper into despair, longing for something, anything really, to interrupt the daily drudgery of his existence: “I believed that some radical change in my life was imminent and was sure to occur that very day…I went off to work as usual…”[36] But no change occurs. “Reality is now looming,” he states but “reality” never comes or when it does, it is viewed from a self-mediated distance of a thousand scarred battlefields-internalized, the hazy separation from reality engendered by day after day of repetitive nonsense, loneliness, anger repressed and the unknown purpose of one’s labor, of an alienation driven-deep. “Why, we don’t even know where this ‘real life’ lives nowadays, what it really is, and what it’s called.”[37] His desire to escape the morbidity of his mindset seems inescapable, he attempts to reach out to others to make friends but the relations are cold and strained. The overwhelming feeling of lacking control over his life, his desired aims, dragging him through fatalism face-first, leads him to attempt exercises of control: “Once I even had a friend of sorts. But I was already a despot at heart; I wanted to exercise unlimited power over his soul; I wanted to instill in him contempt for his surroundings; and I demanded from him a disdainful and definitive break with those surroundings.”[38] The subjugated through complex abatements and swells becomes subjugator.
“For example, it has been suggested that as large corporations encourage forms of social alienation, greed, and class distinctions, they create oppressive cultures that motivate aggressive behaviors driven by economic needs or reactions to alienation and injustice.”[39]
I reach under the desk, feel the grainy texture of the cheap plywood underbelly. It is riddled with pieces of gum large and small, hardened fast, past pieces of chewed resistance. My feet move silently along the aggressively knit, industrial Berber carpet, cold and gray. I raise my eyes slowly. I have received an email, click on it and begin to read. Another meeting to set up and I don’t know why.
“…they [the bourgeoisie] destroy the actual content of his [the worker’s] labor by turning it into a torment,; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process…they deform the conditions under which he works…they transform his life-time into working-time…”[40]
1859 and Marx writes of the alienating design of the capitalist system. Workers are alienated from the products of their labor, enslaved to the labor process without ever enjoying the fruits of said labor. Workers as well as managers are molded into objects of the capitalist production system whose absolute motive and content of its activity is the creation of surplus-value in pursuit of growth. Before the worker enters the process of capitalist production, “his own labor has been alienated from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to him.”[41]
I have scheduled the meeting, look again at my inbox and see that I have received five new messages, all requesting further meetings. My stomach drops, my head pounds, I nostalgically think back to other times in my life when I was not here, in a cubicle, in a corporation, completing menial tasks whose purpose was lost on me. “Perhaps there isn’t a purpose to these tasks,” I think to myself. My only consolation is that one day it will end and the paycheck will arrive at the end of the week.
“Nothing seemed true; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could quickly be removed. The world was waiting, holding its breath, making itself small—it was waiting for its convulsion, its Nausea…”[42]
I am angry at myself, angry for not leaving as soon as these feelings of weighty nausea arose, angry at myself for not having the courage to make a change. “What am I afraid of?” I think to myself and I curl up tighter into the black, pungent fabric of my adjustable office chair.
What is Sartre’s Nausea? Is it the recognition that a change is imminent, that the life one has led will no longer suffice, that the unknown beckons to be explored? Is it the culmination of weeks turned to years of anger-internalized, the blossoming of a sense of alienation now corrupt? As Sartre states, “I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.”[43] The revolution as overthrow of one’s life as it has stood for quite some time induces fear and anxiety in the face of the unknown. When anger and alienation have become commonplace, what lies outside their walls? “I’m afraid of what will be born and take possession of me—and drag me—where?…Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken, deceived, in the midst of new ruins?”[44] [In a longer piece I would love to explore this idea of ruins further in the context of the organization] The fear becomes overwhelming. It is safer to remain enraged and obscure, safer to let the cubicle walls coo me into a fitful sleep.
“The technical apparatus of the camera, incapable of ‘returning our gaze’, catches the deadness of the eyes that confront the machine—eyes that have lost their ability to look.’”[45]
Perception and the body are framed within walls of restrictive limitations. It is the gradual process of a 3’ x 3’ cube internalized. Anesthesia is administered through regulated pulsings of air flow, the managed noise levels through built-in white noise machines lining the ceilings, readily available anti-depressants covered by the organization’s health coverage, the scripted tempo of the days as they all bleed into one: “When you work late every night, so you work, go home, go straight to bed and then you get up and go straight to work, the week merges into one…I feel then when it comes to socializing that I do not have anything interesting to talk about, because I have not done anything other than work for the last weeks.”[46] It is, as Benjamin states, a, “crisis in perception,” a question of restoring “perceptibility”.[47] Does the fury encased in stillness then erupt from a desire to see, a desire to experience, to break through the haze? Is it a reclamation of self that one longs to perform that sends sparks through the synaptic minefield of our minds? Perhaps it is simply the desire to once again feel something other than anger and alienation?
“The factory system, injuring every one of the human senses, paralyzes the imagination of the worker. His or her work is ‘sealed off from experience’: memory is replaced by conditioned response, learning by ‘drill’, skill by repetition: ‘practice counts for nothing.’”[48]
There is a pain in my left leg. I feel as if my body, through inertia, is disintegrating. The pain increases, pulsing through my nerves, down along my shins. It is almost lunch but I must stand at once, my body must move. Like a phoenix I rise off of my molded chair, through the sterile air, swim through the steady currents of dust particles and germs above the cubicle walls. I turn my head to the left where immediately I see my boss’ office, large glass windows and she inside on the phone, looking out. I turn my head to the right, catch a glimpse of a woman in a cubicle three rows down but quickly she ducks. I am alone and yet, I am watched.
“ESTRAGON: (giving up again) Nothing to be done.
VLADIMIR: (advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All life I’ve tried to put it from me…”[49]
III. Cubicle: Control and Management (“Open” Spaces)
A director of the team emerges from around the corner. We nod and smile at one another and as he walks closer, he asks my how my day is going and my stomach knots up in a bout of dread. The question is as disingenuous as our smiles, I say I am fine and he stops at my cube. Although he is four feet away, I feel anxious, take a step back in my cubicle. “What are you up to?” he asks. His words rise at the ends of his sentences and he peers over my cubicle walls to my desk, scans my computer screen and performs a posture of nonchalance. I am being surveilled.
Our boss’ door opens, he stands straighter and smiles grotesquely as she walks out and towards my cube. “Hi there,” she says in a jovial manner. I look into her eyes, portals to another story of sadness and frustration, anger and alienation that she cannot speak of here and now. I do not feel sorry for her: she makes over $150,000 a year for doing something that no one can quite put a finger on. This is nearly three times what I make as her assistant, as the person she relies upon to know what she is doing, where and with whom every day of her working life is spent. She makes a joke and in the same breath asks me if I wouldn’t mind going downstairs to buy her lunch. I nod my head and I am furious. I smile.
“The change in habitus characteristic of a civilizing process is subject to a quite specific order and direction, although it was not planned by individual people or produced by ‘reasonable’, purposive measures. Civilization is not ‘reasonable’, not ‘rational’, any more than it is irrational. It is set in motion blindly, and kept in motion by the autonomous dynamics of a web of relationships, by specific changes in the way people are bound to live together.”[53]
What is external control? Is it the camera on the street corner, the boss sitting across the hall, the teacher at the head of the class? Is it truly the external body of another individual or a system of surveillance that we know connects to a human being somewhere, somehow, that is watching? While, “organizational structures and management processes can determine what is required of employees,”[54] regimes and forms of socially-structured control range from the, “control of the body such as the display of social interaction,”[55] to the explicit and implicit regulatory regimes of physical and ideational control.”[56] Where and how people work, what emotions they express and how they express them are woven through a wider, complex system of interactions between people and their fellow co-workers as well as between people and inanimate objects such as the cubicle. The objects tell us things, they speak to us through the ruins of our lives and the past labor of those no longer with us. The cubicle is at once moveable, rearrangeable, and open yet simultaneously, is well-known to rarely, if ever, move, change, and often feels more like a cage than an open-air retreat from the traditional closed office. It’s color is drab and dreary, its textures tightly-woven and stony, its furniture pre-arranged and often bolted to the frame of the cube. This is the workspace afforded to the worker, the space which the individuals in the upper echelons of the organization have deemed appropriate for a human being to spend eight hours of their day in. Space becomes synonymous with freedom, lack of space denotes captivity and the only clear way of escaping the stifling space of the cubicle while keeping one’s job is to gain the trust of the organization and climb the corporate ladder to the position of Vice President where finally one can enjoy the luxury of a private office.
“Perhaps even more significant in our time, when millions of American workers spend most of their working day in an office, is the sense that the organizational technologies of office life provide a kind of moral education, that offices shape character, that they create a certain type of person.”[57]
My teeth are clenched as I hand my boss the lunch I have retrieved for her. She smiles and says thank you, I leave and she quickly closes the door behind me. Upon returning to my cubicle, I see I have missed four calls and received ten emails. This will take me at least thirty minutes to clean up and I will not leave my cube again for the rest of the day. While retrieving the voicemails and reading the emails, my feet are tight against the floor, my fingers tap wildly upon the desk—I am anxious that I have missed an important message about my boss’ schedule and angry at myself for caring.
“Supervision is made more efficient: with no walls to hide behind, slackers have to work or at least imitate work in a convincing way.”[58]
While the minimal architecture eliminated the physical walls of the traditional bureaucracy in search of a more egalitarian, free-flow of ideas, it allowed for a, “management by walking around,” an anxiety-inducing form of managerial surveillance where the worker is never quite sure when the boss will appear or a co-worker will pop through the open door of the cubicle. On constant alert, the often prescribed way of battling such anxiety is to either truly work hard or do one’s best at appearing as if that is the case. Anxiety, then, finds its homes within the open spaces of the cubicle originally intended to be sites of egalitarian freedom.
“The totalitarian learning organization exerting complete surveillance over unwitting employees has been labeled as fantasy because there is simply no organization that does not have members smart enough to develop equally subtle forms of resistance as well as claim organizational parts that remain uncontrolled.”[59]
I watch myself become embroiled in bouts of anger. “Why was I here?”, “Why was I so quick to jump when my boss asked me to?”, “Why did I exert so much energy pretending that there was actually enough work to keep me busy?”, “Was I to remain a paper-pushing corporate drone for the rest of my life?” Anger rises up inside of me, presses down right below my sternum until I began to feel nauseous. I snap at a co-worker blathering on in “corporate-speak” about a project he is completing when I have had enough and make it clear that I no longer want to hear what he has to say. He immediately stops speaking and leaves. I take a deep breath, feel overwhelmingly relieved and begin from that day forth to externalize my anger and frustration. I discover a form of resistance to what I had for so long believed to be a totalitarian specter of surveillance.
Anger as an “extreme” emotion, has long been considered a “bad” or “irrational” emotion in need of regulation and control. Ashforth and Humphrey, in their study of emotion in the workplace, outline four means that have evolved for regulating the experience and expression of emotions (particularly “bad” emotions) in work settings: neutralizing, buffering, prescribing, and normalizing.[60] As they state, organizations may invoke and institutionalize norms of rationality to prevent the emergence of emotion (neutralization), use procedures that attempt to compartmentalize emotionality and rationality (buffering), the creation of “feeling rules” or norms that specify the range, intensity, duration, and object of private emotions that should be experienced (prescribing), or diffuse or lessen unacceptable emotions or reframe the meaning of the emotions (normalizing).[61]
Fineman and Sturdy, in their study of industrial operators, found that, “extreme feelings, such as anger, rage, or fear…were deemed deserving of harsh treatment,” while “’good’, productive [, and rational] emotions—such as the smiling ones” were much better received.[62] Such emotional controls are historically, socially, culturally, and economically situated. As Fineman and Sturdy state, “feelings and actions are legally, hierarchically and materially framed…the immediate, localized outcomes of control attempts are part of broader patterns of capitalism and consumerism…explicit in the emotions of ideology, for example, beliefs about keeping industry profitable…”[63]
Norbert Elias, in his lengthy work, The Civilizing Process, details the nuanced ways in which affect expressions slowly gravitated towards a middle line with smaller peaks and abysses and changes less abrupt.[64] “Pacified spaces” are bred, drives and affects are tempered (particularly from a young age), and restraint and foresight are promoted as a means to inhibit affective outbursts.[65]
Weeks pass. My anger and frustration have become public emotions, “openly” shared through calculated expressions: I share only with those of the same band level or those of other teams that I feel will not damage my chances of keeping the job which I despise. To the rest, I let my anger and frustration be known with short, clipped sentences, abrupt interactions, unpleasant facial expressions but never do I say something which could later be used to fire me. My anger has become politicized further than it already was. I am still alienated from my “authentic” self as I have not quit but I am now faced with the challenging situation of being further alienated from my co-workers. My private alienation has now become public as well. I begin to feel that my expression of anger has caused others to deem me dangerous, that for those interested in climbing the corporate ladder, associating with me becomes detrimental to their pursuits. No one says anything directly to me but I see it in people’s eyes, in the shaking of my boss’ head, in the fact that people four cubes down now call me instead of walking over. My anger implodes. I have no one at work to speak to about our shared experience. I do not know what to do.
“Can you imagine? I really felt I could buck this machine. When I began, I was sure I could win. I no longer have that confidence. What’s happening is so extraordinary. It’s so much bigger than I am. I’m just trying to go along for the ride. I have little to do with it.”[66]
IV. Cubicle: Control and Management (Self)
Expressed anger has a minimal shelf-life before the individual expressing such anger is alienated from the “group”, marked as a person of “negative affectivity”,[70] or simply fired. When it becomes abundantly clear that one has been clearly separated from the group and is in danger of being fired and one is interested in keeping their job, the anger is forcibly returned to the interior. The battlefield, as Elias states, is moved within: “Part of the tensions and passions that were earlier directly released in the struggle of man and man, must now be worked out within the human being…an individualized pattern of near-automatic habits is established and consolidated, a specific ‘super-ego’ which endeavors to control, transform or suppress his of her affects in keeping with the social structure.”[71] Whereas previous in human existence, anger or other “strong” emotions could be more widely voiced or enacted, they now become privy to further, almost paranoid, calculation of expression, maintenance, control and repression: a “social apparatus is established in which the constraints between people are lastingly transformed into self-constraints”.[72]
My head aches. I am frustrated and angry and I have a meeting with my boss in 15 minutes. I feel like punching down the cubicle walls, running a rake over the florescent lighting, leaving this place and never coming back. I want things to change, want to express my feelings to my boss to aid her in enacting change. Do I tell her that I am feeling frustrated or angry? Is she in a good mood today, what meetings has she had, when is the last vacation that she has taken? I decide after much deliberation to tell her that I feel I am not being properly utilized, that the company could better benefit from having me in a position more challenging. While I say it, I know that all I will feel like doing is screaming at the top of my lungs but I tamp those feelings down, coat them over with a glossy smile and “corporate speak”[73], know that the more pleasing and “civil” I can be while trying to get my anger and frustration and anger across, the more likely something good will happen. My foot is pounding against the floor, my fists are clenched. I am ready for the performance to begin.
“In some cases they [affective constraints] lead to perpetual restlessness and dissatisfaction, precisely because the person affected can only gratify a part of his or her inclinations and impulses in modified form, for example in fantasy, in looking-on and overhearing…sometimes the habituation to affect-inhibition goes so far…that the individual is no longer capable of any form of fearless expression of the modified affects, or of direct gratification of the repressed drives.”[74]
Affective control and management, external and internally located (more often than not, simultaneously experienced), is a deeply complex, historical and often site-specific process. To dispense of the exploration of how such control and management (particularly internal control and management) is exercised here and now would be naive and irresponsible of me as a writer. When we begin to really think deeply about what control and management mean, what, in the end, do we surmise they may be? Do we know any more than when we began or do we simply more fully understand that we know very little? The process and enactment is multi-faceted. It is historical. By this, I simply mean that it comes from somewhere, not in a linear, teleological fashion but rather, the dialogue of affective control and management is an ebb and flow, a give and take. It is a constant conversation between present, past, and future, between worker and co-workers, worker and manager, manager and CEO, CEO with shareholders. It is a conversation between students and teachers, the man selling hot dogs on the streets of NYC and his vendors, the interplays between a child and parent, between good friends and strangers. The conversation leaves traces, reformulates our presents, informs our futures. It is at once everywhere and nowhere in particular. The control and management of affect is simultaneously physiologically located and coursing through sentiment-laden objects which animate our thoughts, actions, and importantly, our emotional experiences in this world. Many calls have been made to destroy the cubicle and yet, while perhaps worthy of disdain, perhaps the cubicle is not our source of anger, our well-spring of alienation and unhappiness. Perhaps the organization is stifling in its control and management of the individual but never is the organization totalitarian. There remain veins of possible resistance that run voraciously under the tightly-woven Berber carpets, through the transformative gaps between the cubicle walls, through the ceilings of metal frames and porous fiberboard. Through the assault of the organization, economically-social, the individual faces a challenge of perceiving and, in the end, reclaiming a sense of self. To perceive is to see with ones physical and mental eyes that all is not lost, that the “self” endures in recessed, fragmentary caverns, beneath the rubble of a corporate-speak-imposed, in the many spaces left untouched by the surveillance of many. To perceive is to see that the self as one once thought of as “authentic” was perhaps predicated on the very stifling order and civility that one came to despise so much. Does the common rage that arises from being subjected to the physical cubicle spring from the recognition that so much of our lives have become the cubicle-internalized?
I am still here. One more hour and I will exit this cube. Someone is spraying a can of condensed air into their computers four rows down. I open the drawer to my left, pull out the small, square mirror and hold it up to my face. I see my left eye, dark lines underneath. I have not been sleeping well. I put the mirror back and when I open the drawer again, I see the yellow notepad, It has a smiley face on it in purple ink. When I quit, I will pin it to my bare cubicle wall and walk out. Today is not that day.
V. Cubicle: Concluding Openings
The haze then, is not congealed nor is it hegemonic. The individual battles with it, at times internally, at others externally. It lies within the confining physical spaces of the cubicle, the imagined spaces of the corporeal organization, the interaction between co-workers. It is amorphous, utterly complex, at once definable and lacking all definition. It is a “crisis in perception”, a writhing sense of anger, an alienation from one’s “authentic” self and the creeping, rage-inducing suspicion that one is becoming the corporate drone so despised. It is sadness and fear, anxiety and hope for a better life, a better job, a sense of worthwhile work. It is the feeling of being thrown under the juggernaut of capitalist production,[75] the longing for forgetting. It is to be oppressed and in so being, longing to oppress. Through a feeling of powerlessness it is the search for the means to gain control and power over one’s environment, other people and one’s own life. Physiologically, it is the erupting stomach, the twisting intestines, the bunched-up neck. It is the foggy eyes, the clenched teeth, the ripped-out hair. It is the pounding head, the scarred face where one has continually picked at small protrusions on the skin. It is the cubicle, the dreaded sameness, the sentiment-laden, well-countenanced physical spaces of the corporate life. It is everything and nothing all at once and deserves a more thorough exploration than was offered here for the experience of the haze may not properly be confined to a few pages while it mangles the bodies of thousands wandering blind.
[1] Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage, 1995.
[2] http://www.pureextracts.us/disp_product.php?id=72
[3] http://www.hermanmiller.com/DotCom/jsp/designResources/imgSearchResults.jsp?prodId=222
[4] http://www.innovativelearning.com/educational_psychology/cognitivism/index.htm
[5] Franz, David. “The Moral Life of Cubicles: The Utopian Origins of Dilbert’s Workspace.” The New Atlantis. Winter, 2008, 133.
[6] Ibid., 133.
[7] Ibid., 133.
[8] Ibid., 133-134.
[9] “The Military-Industrial Complex is a phrase used to signify a comfortable relationship between parties that are charged to manage wars (the military, the presidential administration and congress) and companies that produce weapons and equipment for war (industry). To put it simply, the Military-Industrial Complex is described as an all-too friendly relationship that may develop between defense contractors and government forces, where both sides receive what they are perceivably looking for: a successful military engagement for war planners and financial profit for those manning the corporate boardrooms. It can be viewed as a “war for profit” theory.” From “What is the Military-Industrial Complex” http://www.militaryindustrialcomplex.com/what-is-the-military-industrial-complex.asp.
[10] Franz, David, 134.
[11] For an in-depth analysis of some of the major organizational changes taking place in the 1960’s and 1970’s, see: Martin, Reinhold. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
[12] See: Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.
[13] Frantz, David, 138.
[14] Ibid., 139.
[15] Schlosser, Julie. “Cubicles: The Great Mistake.” Fortune Magazine. 22 March, 2006 http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/09/magazines/fortune/cubicle_howiwork_fortune/index.htm.
[16] http://www.greenlightcommunity.com/group/cubicledwellers
[17] http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/supernova514/
[18] http://timslogos.wordpress.com/
[19] http://tenacioust.wordpress.com/2006/06/18/my-cubicle/.
[20] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. New York: Norton and Company, 1989, 12.
[21] Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. New York: Vintage, 1977, 799.
[22] Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. New York: New Directions, 1964, 158.
[23] Buck-Morss, Susan. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” MIT Press, Vol. 62 (1992): 18.
[24] It is standard to issue a numerical rank to all employees ranging from 25 to 70. This directly corresponds to the existing hierarchy within the corporate structure.
[25] Costas, Jana and Peter Fleming. “Beyond Dis-Indentification: A Discursive Approach to Self-Alienation in Contemporary Organizations”. Human Relations, Vol. 62 (2009): 366.
[26] Ibid., 423.
[27] Costas and Fleming, 367.
[28] Ashforth, Blake E. and Ronald H. Humphrey. “Emotion in the Workplace: A Reappraisal”. Human Relations. Vol. 48 (1995): 107.
[29] www.meriam-webster.com/dictionary.com
[30] Kiecolt, Jill K. and Beth J. Mabry. “Anger in Black and White: Race, Alienation and Anger”. Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Vol. 46, No. 1 (2005): 87.
[31] Scmitt, Bernd H. and Alex Simonson. Marketing Aesthetics. New York: Free Press, 2009.
[32] Paterson, Ian. A Dictionary of Color: A Lexicon of the Language of Color. London: Thorogood Publishing Ltd., 2003.
[33] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. New York: Norton and Company, 1989, 89.
[34] Kiecolt, Jill K. and Beth J. Mabry. 87.
[35] Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 33.
[36] Ibid., 47.
[37] Ibid., 89.
[38] Ibid., 47.
[39] Silberman, C. Criminal Violence and Criminal Justice. New York: Vintage, 1978.
[40] Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I, 799.
[41] Ibid., 716.
[42] Sartre, Jean-Paul, 77.
[43] Ibid., 5.
[44] Ibid., 6.
[45] Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006, 147-149.
[46] Costas, Jana and Peter Fleming, 366.
[47] Buck-Morss, Susan, 18.
[48] Ibid., 17.
[49] Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press, 1954.
[50] http://stanandergo.wordpress.com/2007/12/
[51] http://jurmo.us/2007/03/04/work-20-the-empty-cubicle/
[52] http://www.marieclaire.com/career-money/advice/tips/work-office-career-quiz
[53] Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000, 367.
[54] Fineman, Stephen and Andrew Sturdy. “The Emotions of Control: A Qualitative Exploration of Environmental Regulation”. Human Relations, Vol. 52 (1999): 633.
[55] Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1967, 112.
[56] Fineman and Sturdy, 633.
[57] Frantz, David, 132.
[58] Ibid., 133,
[59] Gabriel, Y. “Beyond Happy Families: A Critical Reevaluation of the control-resistance identity triangle. Human Relations, Vol. 52 (1999): 185.
[60] Ashforth, Blake E. and Ronald H. Humphrey. “Emotion in the Workplace: A Reappraisal”. Human Relations, Vol. 48 (1995): 104.
[61] Ibid., 104-108.
[62] Fineman and Sturdy, 635.
[63] Ibid., 659.
[64] Elias, Norbert, 372.
[65] Ibid., 374.
[66] Terkel, Studs. Working. New York: New York Press, 1972, 339.
[67] http://www.self-esteem-enhances-life.com/self-management.html
[68] http://www.mckpeople.com.au/Content_Common/pg-Outstanding-Sales-People-Skills.seo
[69] http://www.unitten.org/CASEYVILLE/Teacher%20Web%20Pages/Bauer1Page.htm
[70] Aquino, Karl, Steven L. Grover, Murray Bradfield, David G. Allen. “The Effects of Negative Affectivity, Hierarchical Status, and Self-Determination on Workplace Victimization”. The Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 42 (1999): 261-262.
[71] Elias, Norbert, 375.
[72] Ibid., 375.
[73] For a lexicon of such “corporate speak”, see Beckwith, Lois. The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit: An A to Z Lexicon of Empty, Enraging, and Just Plain Stupid Office Talk. New York: Broadway Press, 2006.
[74] Elias, Norbert, 399.
[75] Marx, Karl, 799.
