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2012-12-12T12:12:00.005-05:00

it's a pom-pom burlesque show for men.

2010-01-14T01:24:00.003-05:00

A preacher who sexually harasses USF students. He's been there for at least three years. The cops are there every day that he is (which is literally every day) because about a year ago, this man was punched in the face after harassing someone, and then he sued the college. So now they are basically his bodyguards. I shot this video today.

2010-01-05T17:55:00.002-05:00

courtesy of roboshobo

2009-11-06T02:32:00.002-05:00

If the divine is what causes appearances and does not appear itself, then man's inner organs could turn out to be his true divinities.

Hannah Arendt

Gloria Steinem on Why Women Aren't Successful At Brainwashing

2009-10-19T14:32:00.000-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Monkey Children: Biology and Gender Identity

2009-09-28T14:25:00.000-04:00

Astrid, your questions about my last essay on Ma Vie en Rose were really great, thank you so much. I've finally found the time to write some answers.

1. Have you read Julia Serano's 'whipping girl'?

I have read some of Julia Serano's text. Honestly I didn't finish it, because at the time I found it a little hard to read, both in terms of clarity and in terms of the emotional response it evoked in me. Also the cover of the book really turned me off, although I've heard she disliked it herself. I remember singling out a specific line in which she was talking ostensibly scientifically about the relationship between testosterone and aggression. I don't think the best biology we have confirms that there are any such definitive, or even “on average” links between sex hormones and behavior. Have you read Natalie Angier's 'Woman?' I really recommend it. I think it's arguably one of the most important books for feminism since The Second Sex

2. [Whether there is a strong sense in which we can 'know' that we have a continuous identity...”] ...would seem to be another place where faith comes in. or...hmm, that doesn't seem to fully grab it. there does seem to be a point where believing in something (a self, i am thinking here, one's self) can no longer even be described as believing because the conviction is deep enough to warrant feeling a knowing, (cont...)...which translates into a more passionate (read: effective, affecting [?]) action)

I think you're right here, about the faith to knowledge transformation. You make a good point, and it's something I've been thinking about lately with regards to the issue of trusting in other people, temporarily bracketing the question of self-relationship: If we could absolutely guarantee the other person's continued existence, or if there were some definitive plan which could guarantee someone being trustworthy, then “trust” wouldn't be required to begin with.

In a sense I think what is usually called “circular reasoning” is useful here. It does not work on paper, but what works on paper doesn't always work off paper. I think that it is not only true but necessary of identity that it not be knowable in a fixed way – in order for it to really exist and thrive, not in order to discount the idea. The assumption I am making is that we make a provisional leap, a faith, like you're saying, which allows us to perform the action of identification which creates the identity to begin with. I believe that identities (including gender identities) are knowable and real the same way a law is. What is important to me isn't destroying the basis for belief in the self (like you find in Buddhism, say), but on the contrary, simply emphasizing that it is always open in the future to revision, if one should want that revision. Which brings me to the next question.

3.“Even though i realize your discussion involves self-conception, it would be lacking to say that trans people's existences stem solely out of self-conceptions. while i acknowledge that you may not intend to frame things this way, .it seems like your essay implies that the only good that comes out of cross-gender (-sexed? potentially?) identification (not mentioning, that i saw, body modification), is binary-smashin', or rather, moving that we might move again later. this seems like a circular exercise used to get someone out of the habit of stagnation and into a habit of movement, of productivity. it ignores the very specific intents of most trans people, the ends to which are usually personal peace.”

I can't make any claims about what is right or wrong in someone else's identity. “The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have the right to exist! There is yet another world to be discovered—and more than one!” In that sphere, and as I often do, I think an aphorism or two from The Gay Science is helpful --

"One thing is needful.— To "give style" to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added, there a piece of original nature has been removed:—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed, there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views:—it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small: whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose,—if only it was a single taste!— It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relents in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature; even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.— Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned:— they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits—and they may be of the first rank—are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature—wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself—whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art: only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge: and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy."

Also, Astrid, what do you mean more specifically when you say “it would be lacking to say that trans people's existences stem solely out of self-conceptions?” What else do you think is involved?

5. Obviously no individual person is responsible for helping everyone else see the binary smashed through their own personal lifestyle. i just feel like the "can be" above is...dangerously vague. (which may only be because of the slew of feminists that have held trans people, and queer people in general to strict double standards).

Your point about double standards is a good one. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to be honest and possibly politically incorrect here, but I think the result will be helpful, because I think these kinds of dialogues are helpful. I think these double standards against transwomen exist because of a fear of antibiotic-resistant sexism, to put it as simply as I can. It is really, really difficult for a woman to see any woman who lives “the dream” of the 1940's housewife and grant them their “feminist” freedom to determine their own path. And sometimes, I think, in asking themselves questions about their own identity, transwomen, like all women, look to popular culture for images through which to find the identity they feel they share with other women. To begin the long task of finding a self-concept that gives them peace of mind. This is really what my essay was about – the possibility that sometimes trans identity or queer identity can be just as sexist or dangerous as any cissexual or heterosexual identity.

The important thing for me is not to legislate any protocol specifically for trans or queer people. I want to talk openly and calmly about what is a huge question: Do we have the freedom to give up our freedom? When do we stop exercising freedom in choosing an identity (housewife, for example), and start becoming totalized by that identity? To what extent does the totalized/unfree identity of one woman negatively impact those around her? Does that impact mean we have an obligation to be free, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of all women?

There is, and I'll be frank, a fear among many feminists of the transwoman as a “symbol,” in some parts of the feminist community. I need to be clear: I do not think this symbol has anything to do with transwomen at all. It's just as ridiculous as any symbolic image of women -- virgin, whore, and all the rest. However, what I think this specific fear may be growing out of, is the fact that the patriarchy is an “enemy which has outposts in our own minds.”

We live in a society which fetishizes lesbian identity as a trope that exists for male enjoyment, which attempts to reduce female identity to nothing but a conglomeration of sexualized imagery that has very little to do with the interior life of any human being. That reduced female identity is artificial in the narrow sense. It can be taken off and put on easily (as I did in that photo-montage), and in the end, I think, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with women at all. The women we see in mainstream pornography, for example: those are images "of men," in one sense, because misogynistic men are the ones producing the images. In this sense, ironically, I think there is some truth to that lunatic Republican politician's claim that "all pornography is homosexual." Where I disagree with him is that I think mainstream pornography is homosexual in a way that is reserved especially for the sadistic, misogynistic, heterosexual men who produce it -- and NOT the gay community at large.

Because of all this, is a scary symbolic value which I think some feminists mistakenlyattribute to transwomen. To take one example of how this fear can take form –- what if misogynistic men decide that, since they hate women's over-emotional, inferior minds, anyway, transwomen are actually superior to ciswomen, since they have “the mind of a man and the body of a woman?” One person I heard about actually said this. On a more formal level, plenty of historians have tried to suggest that Joan of Arc, who was nearly peerless among women in her time in terms of political resistance, had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. For those historians, this would mean that she was therefore, technically, "really a man," and therefore didn't threaten their concept of the inferiority of women -- although this theory has not been taken very seriously.

Obviously it does both transwomen and ciswomen a disservice to take this stance, because transwomen are women, not men in female bodies. I think that ought to be self-evident to most people, but right now political conditions are such that it generally is not. I think that what happens is that feminist ciswomen feel threatened by this "men in female bodies" possibility, too. I think, actually, they are threatened because of the same old “all women are your jealous competitors for male attention, not your allies, friends or lovers” trope that keeps all women in general from forming effective friendships, sexual relationships, or political alliances very often. The difference is that in this case the jealousy and antipathy and fear is directed at a specific group of women, i.e., transwomen, in a way that undermines their very right to be women, so it becomes the form of transphobia I described in the first essay. It's a painful, serious, and tangled situation that really needs to be remedied. The mortality rates among trans people are absolutely dismal; particularly dismal are the mortality rates as a result of violence.

6.

So, ultimately, my concern is that the re-evaluation of the gender binary that I'm talking about needs, to be consistent, an admission that if gender is performative, no one is --a priori, anyway -- “objectively” any gender at all. They can obviously identify with one very narrow gender identity and it will be quite certain and true that they do so, but this is something they are doing of their own freedom, and not because fate has forced them into it. Related to this "Fate" issue is the argument in pop culture that queer people deserve equal rights because “they can't help being gay, it's genetic.” I think this argument, while it might be politically expedient, is dangerous, because it implies that if they could help it, they would and should. And on some level it might be true that some people would prefer if they themselves were not gay. It's obviously not very easy in this society to be gay. But so long as the question is phrased this way, I think it leaves open the possible interpretation on the part of "well-meaning" moderates or republicans that queer or gender-variant identity is an immoral condition, even if it is not a choice.

On the topic of the gender binary, I want to say that destabilizing the gender binary doesn't mean, for me, that no one can choose to simply identify as 'man,' or 'woman.' The destabilization aims to do something very specific – to create a radical concept of freedom that doesn't destroy these choices, but actually includes them as some choices among many choices. In one sense, the structure of the basic concept of man or woman, in all its fabulous, caricatured glory, fundamentally untouched. The important thing is not whether they are presented as choices at all, but whether they are presented as the only possible choices. If we change that, these binary options lose their power to:

--impose horizons on anyone,
--to conceal their status as just that, an option,
--to thereby in their enforcement (an enforcement that in my opinion, functions and has reality the same way a law does) create a totalitarian effective reality.

7.

The biological question of sex can accommodate this. There is nowhere in biology any rigid, universal and absolute rule by which we have been able to reliably “distinguish between the sexes.” There is intersexuality, and all of the related biological diversities, in our own species. There are frogs that begin as one sex and spontaneously transition to the other over the course of their lives. There are worms for whom the male lives out his life as a small part of the female's digestive system.

We can try to say things about specific cases; we can generalize about numbers of cases that resemble each other. But the fact of the matter is that if you inject a chimpanzee (or preferably, bonobo, since they are the bisexual vegetarian matriarchal pacifist ones) sperm cell into the heart of a human egg cell, you could hypothetically create a viable human-chimpanzee hybrid (not that I am advocating this). We have cloned from single animals, or from two female mice. There is a potential evolutionary future in which we are a parthenogenetic species, as unlikely as it may be. Our biology in the end is as changeable as any “social construct,” and its horizons, as far as I can tell, are determined by the trends in the evolutionary accumulation of the stylistic choices all of us make, over time.

Heteronormativity and Transgendered Identity

2009-09-11T14:19:00.001-04:00

Ma Vie en Rose

Trailer:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0b0F8HAJgI
Relevant Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eINgc4N7JmI

1.
I found this movie, like XXY, to be surprisingly heteronormative. It is sexist in spite of, and not because of, its positive portrayal of a gender-variant character. The film could have been reworked, albeit quite thoroughly, to accommodate a space for thinking about the intersections of all sexism, and not merely transmisogyny. It could have taken an emancipatory theme forall women, and not only transwomen. If a more general and affirmative concept of womanhood, one that includes both transgendered and cisgendered women, isn't articulated in this film or any film with female protagonists, this doesn't merely disadvantage ciswomen. It also leaves transwomen vulnerable to the attack one finds in patriarchal transphobia-- the reading that a transwoman is simply an extreme incarnation of an effeminate homosexual male.

If transwomen cannot ally themselves with cissexual women, if cissexual women cannot ally themselves with transwomen, then the heteronormativity which affects us all -- even the heterosexual, cissexual women who are portrayed so critically in the film -- will still be permitted to reign.Just as feminism needs the support of men to succeed, we also must ensure that even heterosexual ciswomen are aware that they are not, in our current global society, being guaranteed basic human rights because of the same reason that transgendered people are oppressed.

However, we cannot think of oppression as 'being deprived of access to' a certain, unproblematic, unquestioned identity possessed by men, or in this case, ostensibly possessed by ciswomen. I argue that the cissexual woman in a patriarchal society is atno advantage in this regard; is affected just as negatively by patriarchy. This means something positive. It means there is a shared experience, a point of solidarity between transwomen and ciswomen. Any generalized concept of womanhood is always something that is achieved performatively, it is never something you are born with, it is not something you were born lacking – it is always something you become. This partiality is the source of the danger of stereotypes. Yet it is also the frontier of our new, futural identities.

Before I go any further, I need to responsibly to distinguish my criticism of the limited representation of gender-variance in Ma Vie en Rose from transphobia generally, because there are some uncanny similarities. To begin with, I would say that I am only criticizing a specific concept of the transgendered person: one which reincarnates sexist ideals. This is one which puts both the transwoman and the cisgendered woman at a disadvantage. If I don't want to see a transgendered woman feel that her only path to financial stability is through heterosexual marriage, sex work, or otherwise capitalizing on her femininity or her appearance, this is not in order to renounce her femininity as such. It is because all women, not only cisgendered women, are affected by a common kind sexism, although there are clearly additional specific forms it takes.

In fact, I argue that if the media suggests that a transwoman can participate in a heterosexist ideal [of housemaking, marriage, heels, hyperfemininity, et cetera] without being oppressed herself, the media is implicitly suggesting that the transwoman has a special status, which can only be explained by her having been born as a male. The only way a transwoman could find a 'liberation' of her identity in being permitted to participate in a subordinated, if traditionally female role, would be if a transwoman is 'not really a woman.' This is because it is the only way one could be immune to the injustice that oppresses any and every woman who is put in a similar situation. This insults transwomen and all women. We cannot suggest that the problematic stereotype of the transwoman, the "drag queen,*" reincarnating all of the problematic ideals of femininity with jubilance, is accurate. Not without undermining the transwoman's very status as a woman – or without compromising our assertion that we live in a patriarchal society in which women are oppressed, and that women are oppressed in a systematic way by these very stereotypes.

*Note that this is a criticism of the idea of a “drag queen” as a misreading of the transwoman's identity, which is different from renouncing from the lifestyle of an actual drag queen, i.e., a male-identified person who performs femininity.

2.
I want to call to mind the situation where feminists against exploitative pornography and coercive sex trafficking get lumped in with extreme, right-wing, and usually Christian groups. In that case, the right-wingers believe pornography and sex trafficking should be censored because sexuality in general is evil. The feminists, on the other hand, believe that pornography and sex work should be radically re-envisioned becausesexual exploitation, not sexuality in general, is an ethically problematic scenario. Similarly, feminists who criticize any sexist normativity among communities of transwomen can be easily mistaken for patriarchal misogynists -- for, it is true, in each case the critique results from a desire to destroy a certain concept which threatens the strength of one's own self-concept.

However, there is a difference, which I will argue is similar to that between the anti-sex-trafficking feminists and the anti-sex-trafficking Christians. We believe that a concept of transsexuality (broadening the definition here even to include cissexual homosexual men and women who play into sexist butch-femme relationships) which recreates, almost parodically, heteronormative ideals, should be radically redefined (specifically,broadened) because heteronormativity, and gender normativity, amonganyone, is an ethically problematic phenomenon.
So yes, the anxiety that feminists experience in the face of sexism is similar to the anxiety that sexists feel in the face of feminism. Each feels threatened in their own self-concept. However, feminism must work to ensure that its response to this threat, this anxiety, is not to attempt to recover a sense of identity that has been defined on patriarchal terms -- i.e., a fixed, stable identity. As Judith Butler says,every attempt at inhabiting a specific gender fails at least partially, and that is a good thing, because it is what gives us freedom over these ideals – it is what allows us to choose from among the identities we are offered – and what allows us to create new ones if we like none of the options.

As an aside, I believe this is a basic philosophical state of affairs about what it means to be a self, beyond just a question about sex and gender. I don't think there is a strong sense in which we can 'know' that we have a continuous identity. Memory or consciousness, are, of course, part of what allows us to posit the concept of identity to begin with. But it should be noted forgetting is just as important. With an excess of consciousness, or memory, we begin to lose our sense of self again. We have to be willing to 'forget' our mortality and finitude, our smallness re: the rest of the universe, in order for the selective memories we hold on to about our personal identity to make sense.

Although I think this means in some sense there is no static, unchanging, unified 'true self' behind the process of creating and holding onto memories, I don't think that the 'falsehood' of it is a bad thing. I think that it our finitude, what allows us to be incomplete, also makes us open to new experiences, to learning from others, and to a future that we absolutely cannot predict based on our memory of our past self alone. I am pretty sure that if we could have a 'true' concept of the self, and/or know exactly what was going to happen in the future, it would probably mean that we were dead.

3.To speak more specifically of the content of the film -- as I said, there are really no positive portrayals of cissexual women. And while the need to criticize the complicity of cissexual women in patriarchal modes of identity is urgent, the only way the depiction of cissexual women in the film could be consistent would be if Ludovic's dreams about becoming a Barbie-doll housewife were subject to a similar criticism. And they're not. But oh, what befalls the cisgendered women who find her problematic! The very first interaction with a young cisgendered girl we have is when she is jealous of Ludovic for getting the attention of a mutual male friend. (I should note that in the film XXY, the intersexed protagonist was also exclusively attracted to men).The primary ways, from the outset of the film, that we even learn Ludovic is 'gender-variant' is through an over-the-top depiction of her interest in dollhouses and neon pink dresses.

There is also a schema set up where all women, cisgendered or transgendered, primarily exercise power through their ability to manipulate men sexually. The character of the boss' wife is repeatedly subordinated to Ludovic's mother because Ludovic's mother (whom Ludovic herself clearly envies the influence of), is willing to wear short skirts, style her hair, and otherwise sex it up. The stereotype of the frigid, envious, sexless woman watching from the sidelines is so blatant it doesn't really merit analysis. And when Ludovic does receive support from other women in her community, it comes primarily from this strange, drag-queen-esque version of Barbie, who at one point literally ties up Ludovic's mother, and the mother of Ludovic's love interest, so that Ludovic and the Drag Fairy can fly away together to a brightly colored land full of dollhouses, where weddings never end.
It is certainly true that heterosexual women do a lot of the enforcing of gender roles. However, it is not enough to re-create derogatory depictions of sexism as it exists. In order to effect change we need to create new concepts of friendship. We need new kinds of political solidarity. And, I would argue, we need new kinds of sexual relationships between women. Throughout the film, the tired dynamics between sexually jealous women get recycled over and over. Even if the gender-variant version of femininity self-actualizes at the end of the film, without the solidarity of all women, this is not really a success. The demographic of cisgendered women who unabashedly support a critique of gender identity is not represented at all. Even less can we imagine the possibility of lesbian relationships between cisgendered or transgendered women, in any combination, based on the set of premises the film provides us with. And I argue that it is not merely a personal urgency but a serious political urgency that these diverse forms of lesbian identity become widely represented and legitimized.

Instead, the schema we find in the film suggests that perhaps the problem with the social structure Ludovic finds herself in is not with the heteronormativity itself, but merely where she is located in it. The only ally she finds in her peer group is a girl who is similarly interested in transitioning across the binary, but in reverse: into manhood. In this sense, we see that "individualist" questions of personal identity, wherein a transgendered person says they are 'objectively' one sex while being intersubjectively treated as the opposite sex, can be quite dangerous. They allow us to feel successful in a reform of who gets to participate in which heteronormative identity, but it leaves a necessary, revolutionary abolition of the very concept of a normative gender binary untouched.

In the film, for example, we only ever see men using athleticism to relieve stress. Further, Ludovic's ineptitude at sports seems to imply for her something of her 'fatedness' to the status of woman. Again, the problem with this depiction is so obvious it doesn't merit analysis. While at times Ludovic receives good support from her sister, it is fleeting. The real female alliance remains with Pam, the Barbie doll. All other adult women are depicted as varyingly frigid -- even the scene in which Ludovic's mother cut her hair smacked, to me, of the myth of the 'castrating woman.' And lest I be accused of questioning Ludovic's gender identity by saying that, let's not forget that women can be robbed of their sexuality just as well as men through a metaphorical 'castration' -- in fact it is the rule and not the exception in our society, and all too often we all feel 'castrated' by the other women in our lives.

I think that it is to Ludovic's immense credit that, given the pressure to be gender-compliant, she chooses to pursue what feels right to her. The biggest problem, though, which again, only Ludovic seems to recognize, is with patriarchal masculinity, which harms all women – and men. There are scenes where boys fight and she doesn't want to participate. There are scenes where she is beaten up. While these may be pivotal experiences for a transgendered person, it is also important to note that they can have very similar significance for a cisgendered woman, or even a cisgendered man. Together, we are all realizing that something is profoundly wrong with the role that is being forced onto transwomen -- the same role that is forced onto anybody who was raised as a male.

It does not threaten the concept of transgendered identity to suggest that we need to make a decisive critique of this naturalization of male violenceas it is. If Ludovic goes on to "live the fairy tale" and marry a heteronormative man, cisgendered or otherwise, she is highly likely to find herself in the same scenario -- of being adversely affected by the decaying, mythological gender binary as it executes itself through individual human beings. To say that a transwoman would be any less hurt by a fairy tale wedding than a cisgendered woman could only suggest that transwomen aren't 'real' women, and are thus immune to the conditions which have held back all women for millenia. It is not for the sake of delegitimizing the identity of transwomen that we must criticize the limited representations of cissexual women – or of lesbianism – in media that deals with gender-variance. We must criticize these representations because it is only by uncovering and cutting the vast network of roots which anchor the tree -- in all of their intersections -- can we finally reach their source, and fell the blighted forest.

Follow-Up on George Sodini Note Below

2009-08-29T16:03:00.008-04:00

Justin, thanks for your comments. You write:

A. On Schwarzenegger --

I am in broad sympathy with this. Here are a few quick comments and questions. You write, “In cutting all funding for domestic violence shelters [Schwarzenegger] is directly leading to the death of people who did not need to die.” I’m willing to concede this point in a certain sense. But I want to clarify that sense. It is the same sense as the sense in which you and I are responsible for the deaths of who-knows-how-many little boys and girls that we could have sponsored for a dollar a day in Liberia or Bolivia (and practically all of us – even those of us on welfare in this country -- *could* sponsor at least one more child than we presently do [we could move into a single room with 10 other people, invariably rely on free clothes, work three jobs, eat only at soup kitchens, etc.])…
…As Singer or Unger might put it, we have “let such children die” rather than “killed them”. Of course, it could be argued that there is no morally relevant difference between killing and letting die. But that would have to be argued. It isn’t obvious that all of us have the same moral standing as someone who shoots a convenient store clerk in the face merely because we’ve let die more children in Uganda or whatever than we absolutely had to. By the same token, it isn’t obvious that Schwarzenegger is a murderer because he decided to prioritize whatever he decided to prioritize over the possible prevention of certain forms of violence against women (I’m not claiming that you suggested that he is).

First of all, he is the governor of California, and can affect lives in a manner and scale that I cannot replicate, and that it doesn't make sense for everyone to try to replicate. Society can't be composed entirely of politicians, and nor do I have the private wealth that would enable me to undo the effects of his funding decision.

For my part, I do give at least a dollar and usually more, per day, to the homeless people who live on my block. I do this despite not really having an income beyond what I need for rent, food, and basic healthcare. I agree that we could all be doing more in this vein.

Two more interesting points on this topic --

There is a minimum living standard beyond the necessary which I don't think we should ask people to sacrifice. This is the living standard which makes, broadly speaking, civilization possible -- scholarship, art, and other cultural practices arise in part out of leisure and the celebration of leisure. I think we do have an obligation to give when giving makes all of us stronger (and as long as I am able to handle it emotionally I will be volunteering as a rape crisis counselor and hospital advocate). The government of CA, I believe, could certainly find some way to cut other costs besides basic security measures for women. One of the main reasons the cuts are being made to begin with is the fact that Californians, wealthy or otherwise don't like taxes.

There is a fundamental sense in which I think you're right here, and ultimately I can't give a reason that this case of human suffering deserves specific attention over the myriad, equally problematic ones that deserve our care today. I can only say that it is an issue which I am personally highly motivated to impact, and one which I think tends to be under-estimated and under-represented due to a certain backlash against feminism that is happening to day (see Pat Buchanan telling Rachel Maddow that electing Sotomayor meant discriminating against white men, and see also the common argument that women in the United States shouldn't complain, because things are worse elsewhere. Not only are things just as bad for some lower-class women here as they are almost anywhere else, but despite the problem of upper-middle class white entitlement feminism, it doesn't make sense to compare and contrast oppression, any more than it makes sense to stop prosecuting rapists because a rape victim was "lucky he didn't get murdered.")

Lastly, Arnold Schwarzenegger has given women in California no reason to trust his motives. In a much-publicized video, he announced the budget cuts by waving a knife around and suggesting "cuts must be made." He claims it was a joke, but -- whatever his reason for the video or the budget cut itself -- this betrays an incomprehensible level of insensitivity towards the struggles of the women whose lives he is affecting in this budget cut.

B. On Censorship --

You write, “A cursory glance at cable TV, YouTube, or the movie theatre reveals that the mistreatment of women, and quite often their outright rape and murder, gets sexualized…” Is your view that we should censor movies so as to avoid sexualized depictions of violence against women?

I'm not sure why so many people take away from my writing that I want censorship to happen. There are many reasons censorship is a terrible idea, not least of which is that it simply won't work. And yet, one person went so far as to tell me repeatedly that I believe that "pornography is murder and the TV kills people." This is certainly a problem for some feminists. People like Andrea Dworkin do go, in my opinion, a little too far. Even the pornography documentary I linked to in the previous piece, I think, overstates the case by comparing BDSM pornography to waterboarding. My problem isn't even as much with things like BDSM pornography, when it is quite clear that they are participating in a consensual subculture/lifestyle decision, but rather where things like date rape or "raping to seduce" are naturalized into the 'everyday' life of heterosexual and 'vanilla' people. And again, no filmmaker is directly responsible for the actions of their fans. Even an ostensibly feminist depiction of a rape still gets misinterpreted by some people. (http://bitchmagazine.org/post/mad-men-i-love-you-but-your-fans-are-freaking-me-out)

The resemblance to the Christian right among "all intercourse is rape" feminists is uncanny and significant. But it is also important to realize that one of the most common stereotypes against feminists is that they are humorless, frigid shrews, and to avoid giving that stereotype any more attention than it merits.

A few ideas on this topic. I actually have used depictions of sexualized violence against women in my own art. And I enjoy some pieces of art that do the same (Videodrome comes to mind). Think of the song "Strange Fruit" -- we can talk about violence beautifully, and quite powerfully, without thereby encouraging it. Art is, I think the barometer of a culture, and thus it is all the more vital that it not be censored so that we can come to terms with how sexist ours really is. If anything, we should be more transparent about it.

However, I think it is undeniable that there already exists a certain "positive censorship" when our systems and markets are rigged to allow the Judd Apatows of the world to make all the money. Sex sells, right. But undoing this involves undoing discrimination on the level of the industry, in pay gaps, and opportunities for female and feminist filmmakers -- it doesn't involve standing in the way of Judd Apatow (far be it from me). There is also a lack of positive media about women. The onus here is on the feminists to produce a positive result, rather than censor the negative ones. Ultimately we should be able to create a self-regulating system where depictions of Hillary Clinton cackling like a witch, or throwing a "temper tantrum" or having a "gigglefest," are just as rebuked as the watermelon or monkey jokes about Obama (for the record, I don't necessarily support Hillary Clinton's politics, and I think racist jokes about Obama are tolerated too much). But this involves, as I said, positive media, and also education about the historical context which creates the political implications of these depictions (psychiatric diagnoses of female hysteria, Salem witch trials, et cetera).

One more reason censorship is not good -- there is a distinction between a) depictions of sexualized violence that are therapeutic or cathartic for sufferers, b) that which is depicted for pedagogical reasons (to spread awareness), and c) that which is gratuitous or unexamined. There is no way we could create a bureaucracy to distinguish between these, and I don't think we should try. The problem isn't with the inert media itself, but with the lack of an education which would allow people to critically examine their media (in all spheres, not just feminist ones).

C. On Power and Violence --

You write, “Clearly these homicidal actions, like (if not the same as) the violence of the patriarchy itself, like all of the fantasies about violence against women that do exist in media today, stem from a feeling of powerlessness in the face of women.” I wonder what your evidence is for this (it’s not clear to me). Is you view that all violence against X arises from a feeling of powerlessness *in the fact of X* (as opposed to a feeling of powerlessness under God, in the face of one’s boss, etc.)?

Where Mao Tse-tung says "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," Arendt suggests that "power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent." The important thing is that every time a group feels its power decreasing, there is an "open invitation" to violence. I think that any oppressing group does run up against this conundrum when facing its "dependence" on the service of the oppressed group. There is violence against women for many reasons, but I believe one of these reasons is a feeling of powerlessness against women. If we don't have the power to gain non-violent assent from the women we oppress, then the only way to reinstitute the patriarchy is by force. I think similarly of hate crimes against homosexuals -- they are pinpointed because they are seen as a threat. If they really were "less than nothing," it wouldn't be necessary to attack them. And it is a serious and open question why people get killed for "walking like a girl," to use an example of the randomly motivated homicide of a gay teenager that Judith Butler discussed in a documentary I saw recently.

I definitely overstated the point by saying that *all* homicidal fantasies against women stem *directly and only* from a feeling of powerlessness in the face of women. Obviously it happens for many reasons. The reason I thought it was important to highlight this specific cause is for the sake of women readers --- instrumental to taking back power over oneself is realizing that one has it to begin with. Instrumental to that is realizing that every enemy pays a compliment to the person he attacks by suggesting that this enemy is worth attacking.

George Sodini

2009-08-14T16:01:00.003-04:00

As someone who has survived serious sexual violence on a few different occasions, I live with a fair amount of hypervigilance and fear for my safety. On the street I very routinely get harassed (not just like "take care of those gorgeous legs baby," which doesn't really bother me, but things like "I had better put my eyes back in my head because I am going to get arrested for what I am thinking about you right now." this would be a direct quote). Now, the fact that all of these men are not psychotic or homicidal is precisely the point. Rather than speculate about whether George Sodini was insane, (he clearly was) or even whether he should have gotten a long prison sentence (in a world of ideal penal reform he probably should have, but I am undecided here), the only responsible thing to do is to think about how to prevent this violence.

If it turns out that a culture of sexism encourages the likelihood that crazy people will kill women, it is irresponsible not to examine that. The psychological and physical well being of the women being victimized is just as important as that of any man -- and I have an inkling that the feeling of persecution straight men may get from this critical examination is not as serious as the situation for women in California, who, for example, recently had all funding for domestic violence shelters -- all of it -- cut by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who again is not a psychopath. But indirectly, in cutting all funding for domestic violence shelters he is leading to the death of people who did not need to die.

A cursory glance at cable TV, YouTube, or the movie theatre reveals that the mistreatment of women, and quite often their outright rape and murder, gets sexualized (in everything from Judd Apatow films [he blames anti-semitism for the criticism that Knocked Up is sexist], to the treatment of Hillary Clinton's recent trip to the Congo to talk about her $17 million dollar program to keep women from being raped with the barrels of guns, to basically every horror film ever, except perhaps this... http://www.teethmovie.com/ ).

The naturalization of male violence is not backed up by scientific evidence (see Pulitzer-prize winning biologist Natalie Angier's text 'Woman') . Recognizing this is good for both men and women, because it means men don't have to be violent. What it also means is they have effective free will, or at least a serious obligation to continue assuming they have free will. And when we realize how extensive the positive depictions of the rape of and violence against women are in our culture, it is obviously more important to subject "their" media to critical examination than to blindly disavow any possible linkage whatsoever and thus save face.

You do not need to say that any man is directly responsible for George Sodini's actions other than himself to say that critical examination of media is called for. And by the way, I don't think that these straight men you are talking about should have any sort of monopoly over "their" media, as you say. The lines are not so clean. The pornography industry is responsible for all kinds of violence against women and their economic oppression. One of the main men in the pornography industry today is also a major movie producer and has ties to the KKK ( http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=235&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html)

This doesn't mean that pornography viewers are murderers any more than casual cocaine users directly cause the guerilla warfare which they support with their purchase, but it does mean there is a linkage.

Furthermore, mental illness doesn't happen in a vacuum. Nor is it a necessary fact. If it is remotely possible that we can create a culture that doesn't encourage men to think of violent or hyperaggressive behavior against women as sexy -- which is a situation that hurts plenty of men too, by pressuring them to demonstrate their "straight male" macho-ness in a way that leaves millions deeply emotionally and psychologically wounded (http://community.feministing.com/2009/07/why-pornography-hurts-men-repo.html) --if we can help to prevent people like George Sodini from feeling so boxed-in by this caricature of masculinity that he suffers a mental breakdown and commits heinous acts of murder against innocent people, I think we have a huge obligation to critically examine whether it is possible. It makes just as much sense to deny that as it does to say that a man who murdered a black man after watching casual racism in some movie over and over doesn't obligate the filmmaker to even ask himself once how he could have depicted race differently. We will save so much more time, money, angst, and innocent life if we do this than if we wait for psychiatric "cures" and prison sentences after the fact. The "after the fact" concern only helps George Sodini -- it doesn't help the women he killed.

The one point where I do agree with you, Steve, is in saying that people like George Sodini need help. Psychiatric help, but not only psychiatric help -- also help through cultural education. As Hannah Arendt says, violence can only exist in the absence of power, and power is precisely the ability to effect change without stooping to the use of force. Clearly these homicidal actions, like (if not the same as) the violence of the patriarchy itself, like all of the fantasies about violence against women that do exist in media today, stem from a feeling of powerlessness in the face of women. Women, after all, are these "inferior" beings upon whom even sexist men inevitably have to depend in order to, at the very least, perpetuate the species. And no man was always independent of his mother.

It's funny, because in creating a caricature of women who use sex, not violence, to effect the changes they want to see in the world, the patriarchal media has, like Midas, unwittingly projected into women a weird cartoon version of what they wanted all along: the power to impact the world without being so desperate as to stoop to anger, or force.

Thought Of The Day

2009-08-04T14:48:00.006-04:00

I recently read that a woman is unlikely to orgasm during intercourse unless the distance between her clit and her vag is less than one inch. In that case, it is more likely that she will not be able to comfortably accomodate the average-sized wang. This is certainly not true for all women but the majority.

Some evolutionary biologists contend that the clitoral orgasm (despite being, strictly speaking, the only orgasm that exists*) is an evolutionary "holdover" that serves no discernable purpose and is on its way out. However, given the clit-vag distance conundrum, in addition to the fact that, strictly speaking, male orgasm is no more necessary for reproduction than female orgasm -- cf. preseminal fluid -- I am forced to conclude that, unfortunately, it is not the clit but the vag which is the gracious holdover of the female body which, all things told, would do perfectly well for itself reproducing parthenogenetically.

*There has been much 'scientific' debate about whether there is a "vaginal orgasm" in addition to the clitoral one. However, a simple look at female anatomy shows us that the average clitoris** is actually 7.5 inches long and wraps in two prongs around the pelvic bone and hence the vagina. This is clearly the source of female pleasure during intercourse, and allows us to conclude that female pleasure is female pleasure -- which, biologically speaking, develops out of exactly the same erectile tissues as male pleasure.

**For a sweet picture of a giant mothership vagina and also one that looks suspiciously like the virgin mary please consult Wikipedia.

to see mad tom of bedlam

2009-07-28T07:00:00.002-04:00

i give so much money to the birds and the cats and the homeless people who live behind the whole foods by my house. really, we are becoming friends. there have never been homeless so regular as to provide me with the rare opportunity of saying i have made their acquaintance. i want to be able to say i know what their lives are like in the form that they will share it to me. but not yet. right now all i know is that they tell me i have nice shoes, that i can't help but give them five, one hundred dollars whenever i see them.

i haven't opened a philosophy book in too long. simultaneously afraid of and nostalgic for nietzsche, like a father. like a father equally as angry and tyrannical and influential as my own. my paintings are the only ones with whom i have improved my relationship since i left new college, a newfound patience and trust in the internal logic of the images which i couldn't have anticipated and cannot thank enough for the existence of -- particularly for the fear that the discussion of them will make them vanish into the night, a cadmium will-o-wisp. i loved those when i was little.

i was unabashedly un-urban when i was young. i gardened not because it was the proper actiivity for women but because i could lord over a world there, create things that inspired my own attention, find privacy that is rare here. i am glad i didn't get to work on the farm in massachussetts because the multiple emergency root canals which several years of white person poverty created in the recesses of my teeth, but the privacy is still waiting for me. there is a zen monastery here waiting for me to build sheds for them, live off lentil soup. there is a world waiting for me to be its exhibitionist, its subject of controversy and disconcertment. fashionable dismissal.

to see mad tom of bedlam ten thousand miles i'll travel.

Sex Tourism in Thailand

2009-06-20T03:20:00.010-04:00

I recently had an exchange with a friend of mine about the conditions faced by sex workers in Thailand. I was quite surprised by the casual acceptance of the situation that this friend expressed, along with being greatly misinformed about the extent of the problem. I think lack of information about the experiences of those whose lives are radically incommensurable with our own privileged experiences is the main reason people don't feel compelled to alter the situation both internationally and locally. I have been reading reviews of the recent book by Richard Bernstein on this subject, "The East, West, and Sex," and am realizing that people on a large scale seem to think about the issue in a similar way to my friend. So thought I would transcribe the correspondence below. I have cited the articles I consulted at the end, and there is also a blind five-year-old Korean girl playing "Für Elise." Enjoy.

My friend writes:

I was thinking more of how laid back, socially accepted, and relatively healthy the flesh trade is. There is an open recognition of a dividing line between women who market their sexuality and those who don't, and those who do are more or less all considered "bar-girls". They're not hookers, per se. It's more of a lifestyle. They're loose girls who hang at a certain bar and will sleep with you if 1) they like you and 2) you give 'em some money.

Of course, the dregs of desperation arise there as they do in any field, but for the most part there is no stigma. No one looks down on them, although few young ladies aspire to be a bar girls, admittedly.

As often as not, they land a white whale with the grisly, poison barbed harpoon of marriage, get them to pay for a village and transfer their money into a Thai bank account, then empty the account and disappear to live as upper class ladies. That's how a good number of Thai families make their upwards economic transition.

When the potential for exploitation is even on both sides, I think it's just called... business. Or politics.

My response--

I do see your side of the matter regarding this. I think that decriminalizing and destigmatizing sex work internationally is a huge part of solving one of the many problems that exist in sexual culture globally, along with the problems of women's rights. However, I don't think that either of us really can claim to know what the life of the average sex worker in Thailand is like. I grew up in a working class family. My father painted houses. When I moved out of the house at fifteen, my parents, who have two other children, weren't able to provide me with financial support, and I really struggled a lot of the time, especially when I left school. I pitied myself and felt plenty desperate about my economic situation, but I have never experienced the situation in question here, because I have never been faced with a choice between death and sex work.

Unfortunately, that is commonly the case globally and domestically when it comes to sex trafficking. I have linked you to two articles. In the first one, you will see that in Appendix I there is a list of trafficking incidents in the US (which is not comprehensive, it goes from 1999-2001 and only refers to those that police actually busted. In about half of these cases, each of which sometimes involves 700+ women and children being forced to pay off 'immigration debts' of $40,000 or more, the women originated from Thailand, or Laos. No other country contributed as often.

Here is some analysis I have done with information from the first article. The article suggests that there are 50,000 women annually trafficked into the US., and 12,000 into Thailand. However, the population of Thailand is one-fifth that of the United states. So this means that 1 out of 5,000 women in Thailand is trafficked. In the U.S. the number is 1 out of 60,000. This means 12 times as many women per capita are trafficked into Thailand, leaving aside the number of women who are already imprisoned or who are being trafficked internally.A 2004 estimate by Dr. Nitet Tinnakul from Chulalongkorn University gives a total of 2.8 million sex workers in Thailand, including 2 million women, 20,000 adult males and 800,000 minors under the age of 18. This means that about 2,800,000 women and children, out of a total population of a little more than 30 million Thai women, are involved in sex work. This is nearly 1 in 10. Studies (done, yes, prior to concerted public health efforts on the part of the Thai government) have suggested that 44% of Thai sex workers are HIV positive. The majority of Thailand’s HIV infections (around 80%) occur through heterosexual sex. HIV prevalence among pregnant women, which reached a peak of 2.35% in 1995, had fallen to 1.18% by 2003. Studies have shown that men in Thailand and the United states will consistently pay more money for sex without a condom than with one. Nearly 50% of the time they pressure women not to use one.

Most of the women who are trafficked into Thailand come from Myanmar. They are either forced by crime rings, lured by the promise of legitimate employment -- or they are fleeing one of the worst absolute military dictatorships in the world. They do not usually work in places that Westerners frequent, so you probably would not have seen them were you to visit. However, most of the criminal organizations which control sex trafficking also run larger rings of prostitution. Most women who are in sex work or trafficking are undoubtedly almost never there because of their own volition. They are there because of their pimps, US military servicemen and tourists (who often marry Thai women, and bring them back to the United States in order to force them into prostitution here) or pressure from their families, as you said, to become economically upwardly mobile. Again, the sex trade is ubiquitous, diffuse throughout the entire country -- every major city and province in the country -- not merely large cities like Bangkok, Pattaya, and Phuket. So, while some women in larger cities may indeed be willingly working at bars, this is by no means the rule, but the exception. And even then, willing dancers and bar-girls usually only get 2-3 days off per month.

Thai elites tend to be polygamists, and men are considered to have a right to as many mistresses as they like. My close family friend, Mrs. Cho, is originally from Myanmar. While in Myanmar she was forced to have an abortion by her family while drugged because she had run off with an impoverished Buddhist man she wanted to marry, rather than the extravagantly wealthy Muslim one they had arranged for her. As you said, she is not by any means considered a sex worker. However, she remains with the wealthy man in the United States and is not permitted to even go out to dinner without his permission. And he does not grant that permission. As you can see, the cultural lines between sex work and "legitimate" marriage are not always so clean. There are usually no other "employment" opportunities save marriage or sex work for large numbers of uneducated rural women -- who deserve other options.

You are totally right. Some forms of acceptance of and honesty about the sex trade are a huge improvement upon the Ted Haggard style sexual hypocrisy that reigns supreme in the United States. It is certainly good to not blame a woman for taking the best available economic opportunity. But there is no reason for this to extend to not blaming the customers for continually creating the demand that permits this economic stranglehold to remain the status quo. Western customers are encouraged -- by the government -- to visit Thailand and pursue sex workers and slaves, because such a huge portion of the Thai economy has come to rely upon sex work after various forms of economic depression (including opium suppression programs). It is not at all clear to me that this is a good thing. There is no simple or moralistic solution to the problem -- it is cultural and economic, and yes, a large portion of the work must be done by the women themselves.

However, among trafficking victims the women never even see the money they make. The Yakuza consistently deceives women -- mostly Thai -- into coming to Japanese brothels, either under the guise of legitimate work or at least sex work under humane conditions. There have been reports there of wealthy Western businessmen paying to rape and kill young children. There have been reports in the U.S. and abroad of women being locked in hotel rooms, drugged intravenously, and having their clothing stolen from them so that they cannot leave their hotel room. They are then forced to service men indefinitely for artificially low prices in order to pay off an arbitrarily defined "debt." This is all recounted in the last article below.

In the United States, thousands upon thousands of Asian "massage parlours" operate, staffed by illegal immigrants who are strictly forbidden to provide sexual services to any non-Asian men who frequent them so as not to blow their cover. People who think they are being hired for legitimate secratarial, au pair, or even stripping gigs arrive illegally, illiterate or at least not speaking the language, totally dependent upon their traffickers, only to get raped and beaten. 52% cannot speak English. In Thailand, women have reported being kept by armed guards in squalid conditions at their brothels. They have, in both Thailand and the United States, sought help from the police only to find that the police force is one of the main customer bases for the pimps, who then bring them back to their brothels. Or they have been considered hysterical since they arrive half-dressed and cannot speak English, and end up in psychiatric wards. While they are enslaved, these women are shipped from city to city continually, sleeping on concrete floors in the backs of massage parlours and often being woken up at four in the morning with no warning, and forced to other sides of the country -- lest any given customer base lose interest in a parlour for its lack of variety of women.

Sex trafficking always operates through the front of a legitimate business, such as these bars you mention. Even if all bars are not involved in sex trafficking, all sex trafficking tends to operate either as a legitimate bar, strip club, or massage parlor, or an organized criminal network with governmental collusion. The burden of proof should not be upon those who feel that the two (sex work and sex trafficking) are related, but those who feel that they are not.

Child sex tourism is a multi-billion dollar industry currently enslaving 2 million children under the age of 18.* Thailand is widely known in the United States as the prime location for this practice. There are frequent stories of pedophiles and traffickers fleeing the United States to seek "asylum" (a phrase not without some irony here) in Thailand, which again shows that being content to remove the social stigma from sex work can have terrible repercussions. Bangkok is one of the primary destinations along the main smuggling route for Asian sex traffickers. Further, no trafficking organizations internationally, except possibly some in Russia, can compare to those in Asia with respect to scale, scope, and sophistication. In the U.S., trafficking operations are usually limited to one- or two-man operations. Most of these traffickers also traffic general male and female laborers into conditions of slavery which are every bit as significant as sexual slavery. We have heard at New College, for example, from the Hispanic, Haitian, and Mayan Indian Immokalee workers in Florida (www.ciw-online.org). In the city where I live, San Francisco, the "yellow slave trade" has been around at least since the 1800's and possibly longer.

I really think it makes no sense to suggest that the potential for exploitation is even on both sides. Although there are isolated cases of sex workers or pimps robbing Western tourists, there is absolutely no ring of Thai women who traffic pudgy white men internationally in order to sap their bank accounts through forced and repeated Cartier gifting. Poor and uneducated Thai women, kathoeys, adolescents, and children really do not have the ability to, via their sex appeal alone, force Asian or Western men to sign away the deed to their house and their children's college funds.

Force is a strong word, and it means something very specific here -- that there is a threat of death through violence, lack of healthcare, starvation, botched abortion, insufficient care during childbirth, or disease. Even if a woman is "successful," and independent, and perhaps persuades multiple johns to support her, there is no reason for any woman's best economic option to put her at a huge (44%) risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, not to mention the risk of violence, kidnapping, or perhaps a simple desire not to sleep with 7-45 men a day (on average). No matter how maligned men who have stupidly involved themselves in sexually dissatisfying marriages, or who have come to Thailand seeking a solution to an Orientalist fetish, may be, there is not even the weakest case to suggest that the disadvantage their blue balls put them at compares to the situation on the end of the sex workers they purchase.

I can envision, and hope we can achieve, a society in which sex work will a healthy part of the cultural life of a country. But the work required to get there should not be under-estimated. It will require radical re-structuring on the level of kinship, global economics, and moral culture -- and would not be quite recognizable in comparison to the world we live in today.

*Here are two obvious, publicly-available examples of girls who have clearly been sold into marriage while under 18. The makers of this website (lifepartnermatchmaker.com) brag that the dock from which their brides (complete with certificate of virginity) leave Vietnam is unowned property so you do not have to worry about being caught.
http://70.85.180.226/~evacom/photo/displayimage.php?album=4&pos=33
http://70.85.180.226/~evacom/photo/displayimage.php?album=4&pos=12

Here is a five-year old blind girl who was adopted out of who knows what conditions, and can play piano by ear. I am well aware that I sound like a late night celebrity voice-over for a Feed the Children infomercial, but I think it is clear that these girls deserve greater opportunities.

If you are interested in reading more, here are my sources:

Article on the trafficking of women and girls from Myanmar into Thailand

Wikipedia article on sex work in Thailand

A wonderful, comprehensive, 141 page report by professors at University of Massachussetts, Amherst and University of Rhode Island on sex trafficking in the U.S. as it compares to the international situation

2009-02-19T06:29:00.003-05:00

*In short, parrhesia, the act of truth, requires: first, the manifestation of a fundamental bond between the truth spoken and the thought of the perso who spoke it; [second], a challenge to the bond between the two interlocutors (the person who speaks the truth and the person to whom this truth is addressed). Hence this new feature of parrhesia: it involves some form of courage, the minimal form of which consists in the parrhesiast taking the risk of breaking and ending the relationship to the other person which was precisely what made his discourse possible. In a way, the parrhesiast always risks undermining that relationship which is the condition of the possibility of his discourse. This is very clear in parrhesia as spiritual guidance, for example, which can only exist if there is friendship, and where the employment of truth in this spiritual guidance is precisely in danger of bringing into question and breaking the relationship which made this discourse of truth possible.

But in some cases this courage may also take a maximal form when one has to accept that, if one is to tell the truth, not only may one's personal, friendly relationship with the person to whom one is speaking be brought into question, but one may even be risking one's life. When Plato goes to see Dionysius the Elder -- this is recounted in Plutarch -- he tells him truths which so offend the tyrant that he conceives the plan, which in fact he does not put into execution, of killing Plato. But Plato fundamentally knew and accepted this risk. Parrhesia therefore not only puts the relationship between the person who speaks and the person to whom he addresses the truth at risk, but it may go so far as to put the very life of the person who speaks at risk, at least if his interlocutor has power over him and cannot bear being told the truth.

Thus the true game of parrhesia will be established on the basis of this kind of pact which means that if the parrhesiast demonstrates his courage by telling the truth despite and regardless of everything, the person to whom this parrhesia is addressed will have to demonstrate his greatness of soul by accepting being told the truth. This kind of pact, between the person who takes the risk of telling the truth and the person who agrees to listen to it, is at the heart of what could be called the parrhesiastic game. So, in two words, parrhesia is the courage of truth in the person who speaks and who, regardless of everything, takes the risk of telling the whole truth that he thinks, but it is also the interlocutor's courage in agreeing to accept the hurtful truth that he hears.

Now parrhesia contrasts with these different characteristics of prophetic truth-telling in each of these prcise respects. You can see then that the parrhesiast is the opposite of the prophet in that the prophet does not speak for himself, but in the name of someone else, and he articulates a voice which is not his own. In contrast, the parrhesiast, by definition, speaks in his own name. It is essential that he expresses his own opinion, thought and conviction. He must put his name to his words; this is the price of his frankness. The prophet does not have to be frank, even when he tells the truth. Second, the parrhesiast does not foretell the future. Certainly, he reveals and discloses what people's blindness prevents them from seeing, but he does not unveil the future. He unveils what is. The parrhesiast does not help people somehow to step beyond some threshold in the ontological structure of the human being and of time which separates them from their future. He helps them in their blindness, but their blindness about what they are, about themselves, and so not the blindness due to an ontological structure, but due to some moral fault, distraction, or lack of discipline, the consequence of inattention, laxity, or weakness. It is in this interplay between human beings and their blindness due to inattention, complacency, weakness, and moral distraction that the parrhesiast performs his role, which, as you can see, is consequently a revelatory role very different from that of the prophet, who stands at the point where human finitude and the structure of time are conjoined. Third, the parrhesiast, again by definition, and unlike the prophet, does not speak in riddles. On the contrary, he says things as clearly and directly as possible, without any disguise or rhetorical embellishment, so that his words may immediately be given their prescriptive value. The parrhesiast leaves nothing to interpretation. Certainly, he leaves something to be done: he leaves the person he addresses with the tough task of having the courage to accept this truth, to recognize it, and to make it a principle of conduct. He leaves this moral task, but, unlike the prophet, he does not leave the difficult duty of interpretation.
--Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth

/////

So you see, the parrhesiastes is someone who takes a risk. Of course, this risk is not always a risk of life. When, for example, you see a friend doing something wrong and you risk incurring his anger by telling him he is wrong, you are acting as a parrhesiastes. In such a case, you do not risk your life, but you may hurt him by your remarks, and your friendship may consequently suffer for it. If, in a political debate, an orator risks losing his popularity because his opinions are contrary to the majority's opinion, or his opinions may usher in a political scandal, he uses parrhesia. Parrhesia, then, is linked to courage in the face of danger: it demands the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the "game" of life or death.

To summarize the foregoing, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.

the beastly, the black, the sinful, the irrational, the sexual, the necessary, or the mortal

2009-02-17T16:27:00.004-05:00

I have posted this essay in other forums, but I just wanted to repost it here because I like it. It's the spiel I was going to give prior to introducing Dr. Kwasi Wiredu at the African Philosophy talk I organized; at Dr. Edidin's suggestion I cut it down to a paragraph or so. But the full version is reprinted here.

Something which is becoming significant to me, which is also becoming significant to others in the pursuit of philosophy -- it could be called an issue in linguistics or philosophy of language, but in fact, I think it has roots to which those titles confer nothing except a technical gloss. This issue is one of personhood, but first and foremost, it is a question. The question is -- what is language? Letting the many other questions encapsulated there flake away -- is language first an alphabet, a grammar, a syntactic structure? Is it first a context-specific language, so that French and Japanese, as soon as they come into existence, change the very definition of what a language can be? Is language a symbol, a tool, a weapon, an anesthetic, a lesson, a game, a home, a gesture? Yes.

Language in some situations is a weapon -- albeit a symbolic one, still a weapon which causes very real bloodshed, which even gives us a certain power in constructing and destructing what is real at all. Language becomes a weapon, for one, by systematically distributing itself to controlled populations. Language can do this this by forcing certain kinds of vocabularies on some groups of people, denying that vocabulary to others, privileging still more with another kind of language altogether. Language can do this by erasing parts of itself -- erasing entire languages, cultures, and thus the people who speak it.

For example -- the English we speak is not the English you will hear in low-income neighborhoods down the street. It can sound completely different, be used completely differently, serve a completely different purpose and have a completely different level of priority in life -- and yet they are both called English. In both cases the language provides listeners with a sign to interpret, a password -- but in each case, the password provides, or forces, access to a different society. Whereas some dialects signify entrance into certain types of poverty, ours happens to appeal to a certain elite, academic, liberal-democratic demographic of people -- and thus gives us an entry into an extremely privileged society.

Upward mobility is the work of language as much as of anything. So say that we were entirely selfish and, rather than worry about those folks who are excluded by our language, we were to simply congratulate ourselves on learning it. Even in this case, there would still be a valid criticism of the scenario as it exists. Because -- isn't there still something missing? Isn't this specific language, the academic language, so dry and arcane, so fluffy and cumbersome -- completely unintelligible to most people -- isn't it lacking something? bell hooks, a prominent African-American writer and radical feminist, says that a great secret white supremacist capitalist patriarchy keeps from those who can't or don't read much is that all of the really powerful information is kept hidden away, in books. If you watch television instead -- well, pray to the gods that you will be able to afford cable if you hope to find anything worth talking about at all.

But does this have to be? Why should encode all of our most valuable information solely into written languages? Does this have to be the authority? Although I couldn't possibly memorize what the New College library contains, I could certainly spend some time telling you about things in there which are most relevant to my life. Why do we trust the internet more than our own memory, and how much sheer information do we really need? How do we ourselves benefit? Isn't this, at worst, suffocating more relevant experiences we could have here? Isn't this, at best, just boring?

Nietzsche said he knew of few things worse than rising early in the morning, when the light and air are bright and electric, only to go hide in a dusty room and squint at the yellowed pages of some book. So how did we come to think that language works best when it is written out? Maybe we were really proud of our ability to use tools, like the hallowed calligraphy pen. Maybe we were afraid of public speaking. Maybe we were really ugly, or had ugly shoes, and thought that people would take us more seriously if they never had to be in the same room with us. This is the best explanation I have been able to come up with. Armed with this excuse, we can now employ our dusty paper weapons against the uncivilized world. And anything which we hear, which we don't like, we can simply mistranslate, or refuse to write down. Which is what "anthropologists" visiting Ghana in the 1850's did with the entirety of Akan culture and philosophy.

Yet if we are quiet for a moment -- and ask ourselves why we use language, in any form, to begin with -- the meaning language has in our lives is not itself written down. I think language justify itself almost entirely in our desire to remember and give ecstatic descriptions of the world, of ourselves, of others -- to others. Don't the roots of language itself run straight under our skin, deeper than any book? Don't these roots spring from the desire to affirm everything that exists in this world, and not in books? Language can be a weapon, but it can also be a gift, which gathers together everything in the world, and gives everything, named, back to that world. Books help with all this, certainly -- but so do crutches, if your legs are broken. This distinction -- between written language and speech -- is what is becoming significant.

I am irreverent because I think what is at stake when writing, which originated out of speech and gesture, tyrannizes them, is the very way we inhabit our own bodies, our own mouths, our own voices. Also, our relationship to the bodies, mouths, and voices of the world we encounter. This prioritizing goes right along with a Cartesian mind-body dualism which subordinates the body to a supra-natural mind. Why have we inherited a tradition which mistrusts the respectability of any language that first explodes outward, like dynamite, from a tongue between two lips, or in the gestures of two hands? It seems that such a mistrust amounts to nothing more profound than a mistrust of the body and, to again defer to Nietzsche -- maybe all of Western philosophy has been a misunderstanding of the body. Maybe historically, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy -- forming the writers and readers of most canonical Western science and literature -- has endeavoured quite nerdily to use writing in order to free a certain privileged population from the terrible burden that is having a body. Hence the body is labeled the beastly, the black, the sinful, the irrational, the sexual, the necessary, or the mortal -- and history's wives, slaves, and serfs are burdened --not with bodies, which they had always already had -- but with that rejection of the body, and those labels.

What was the goal behind this trend? To leave our bodies and go to heaven? We simply wanted to die? A question for the audience -- how do you feel about that? I, for one, don't dislike myself nearly that much. For to free someone from the body would be, I think, to free them from themselves. Admittedly, there is ultimately something uncanny about the way language, as speech, possesses the space around it like lightning. It strikes and individualizes the speaker, illuminating his world, and illuminating he, himself, to the world. If you don't like the sound of your own voice, the anonymity of the page will be preferable. However -- if you find you can sing --

"All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them. An as yet hidden history still keeps secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives. Thinking entered into literature. And literature has decided the fate of Western science."

-- Martin Heidegger, What Calls For Thinking?

Dream Log

2009-02-05T21:15:00.003-05:00

I gave Kim Jong-Il a handjob for $$$.

Dream Log

2009-02-02T10:58:00.008-05:00

I am standing in a health food store, filled for some occasion by New College students -- Lea, Zachariah. Everybody European cheek-kissing. Wandering the aisles. A male in a hooded sweatshirt begins bordering the crowd, quiet. I somehow become aware that his plan is to leave the gathering for a while, then reappear, taking the group hostage, going on a shooting spree. Somehow he makes this obvious, somehow we all know, but no one moves to lift a finger. He leaves.

He returns, wrapped in cellophane, standing next to me. I consult a few guys who are leaving the party -- fraternity boys, not who I have any desire to spend my time with, except out of desperation. They live high up, high above the store, almost in the mountains, but they allow me to flee with them. We climb a tree-ladder, almost like the bamboo rungs that took me once to the roof of Pei. Then I go upstairs in their house, which is full of mahogany wooden paneling -- and the boys are gone. Only downstairs, the lumbering of wide grizzly bears, the same color as the mahogany. Rummaging in the fridge, on the kitchen counter.

Somehow I escape through the roof -- but there was no roof, only an opening. To a fenced area, where I can look down to see a procession of people leaving the store, in single file. Everyone was safe, but I don't think the killer was arrested. Lea was there. Then we are driving away, I am following he down a hill, but I can't drive. I am only keeping my car in the lane by leaping up intermittently and holding onto the traffic-lights until the car is re-aligned. But Lea turns on the highway and I know that I can't be carried by momentum in the same way there, so I tumble out the side door before the car hits the highway.

Suddenly I am barefoot and half-dressed on the side of the road, clamoring for help. A man in something like a UPS truck stops. He speaks English, but it is not my language. He doesn't understand, but takes me to the yard of a church, where an older blond woman with leathery skin and powder-blue eye make-up stands in the fading light. She tells me I am in trouble, that I had better stick my chest out and pull my stomach in for The Lord, "not sexually or anything, but, you know."

The New World

2009-02-02T10:47:00.007-05:00

In his first TV interview with al-Arabiya, President Obama suggested, by way of reconciliation, that the Muslim world remember that "America was not born as a colonial power," that the war in Iraq was an exception to the 'rule' of the Revolutionary United States. Ultimately, this amounts to the same defense as McCain's of himself: that America was the underdog. Indeed, we were fleeing an oppressive regime in Great Britain. Could Obama have forgotten that as we fled one regime, we instituted our own?

The most effective ethnic cleansing is the one that is totally forgotten.

2009-01-29T04:25:00.002-05:00

In theory, if we who presently claim to be human were to forget our efforts to find the traces of divine movements in our own actions, our fate should be something like the people in Popol Vuh. For them, the forgotten force of divinity reasserted itself by inhabiting their own tools and utensils, which rose up against them and drove them from their homes.
Today they are swinging through the trees.

--Dennis Tedlock

Space Moms

2009-01-26T04:30:00.004-05:00

i love you because

2009-01-19T23:05:00.002-05:00

when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop

lolz

2009-01-18T06:22:00.006-05:00

"Criticizing pornography doesn't mean you're anti-sex
any more than criticizing McDonald's means you're anti-food."

--Gail Dines

Break Bread.

2009-01-04T18:58:00.001-05:00

Painting is the residue of
chasing after something else.

Motto for Painters.

I do what I do and you do what you can do about it.

2008-12-28T08:06:00.010-05:00

Hypatia rebuffed a suitor by showing him her menstrual rags, claiming they demonstrated that there was "nothing beautiful" about carnal desires.[13]

Britney Spears - "Circus": "Circus"

like a killer whale trapped in a bay

2008-12-28T06:13:00.005-05:00

the black man
operates garbage truck
the white man
trims his own leaves

i smoke
one cigarette and
watch the boy
polishing in the morning
his own mercedes
near the ocean.

Gardener and garden.-- Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!

from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 382, R.J. Hollingdale transl

In this time of excess and recess

2008-12-23T03:12:00.022-05:00

Everybody everwhere needs to listen to Kaki King. Last November, I left a friend waiting in a park for several hours. I also ignored a hangover and braved expensive cabfares. All just to see her with The Mountain Goats in Manhattan, at Webster Hall. John Darnielle started out Way Back When by repping her on his own blog when people hated on her whispery singing style. Her singing has since improved. And at this concert, it became clear that John and his bandmates had been doing their best to emulate her stringed-instrument technique. I'm glad he knows when to stand down.

Listen to Kaki King's new album, Dreaming of Revenge, while avoiding painting an oil portrait of your father. Kaki King. I would in all likelihood be willing to have a few of her children. I would also, for the first time (that's a lie), be interested in purchasing the ipod vibrator in order to listen to her. She is one of the best guitarists around, period. She is a gorgeous person. And, she has good taste in art (above by Marcel Dzama).

Consolidate your student loans, people.

Sleep Log

2008-12-21T14:40:00.007-05:00

I had a dream that I lived in a prison that was ten-stories high, and every room was a closet, that opened onto another closet. There was a middle aged man above me, who was in for murder, and he kept pounding on his closet doors speaking in his broken English. He was Chinese. The entire facility was. Down in the kitchen there was an old man, and I was there with a little baby, who I think was my sister Nicolette, but as an infant. I was feeding her long, pale blue cellophane noodles. The old man watched a woman learning her craft and became visibly concerned I was going to feed her too much. He didn't speak, though, for so long I didn't think he could. He saw me shaking and realized I was frightened because of the man upstairs.

He smiled and said, "we are actually lucky to have such a sadistic prison warden," Laughing. "Because it means this man would never get free before being punished, severely. You have nothing to worry about."

Just as he said that, I started walking away from the prison, towards the parking lot of a store selling Lebanese food. I suppose I had the privileges to leave intending to return. I was about to close the door when I saw the angry man driving his dusty turquoise Cadillac towards the door. He did not have those privileges, but I realized I would rather have him escape than live next to me any longer. So I left the closet door open. The old man gaping, horrified, and the baby forgotten, the murderer drove through the wide closet doors. I ran, quicker and quicker, wearing high khaki wooden heels, wearing a sparkling blue high-waisted skirt, realizing that because of these things, he might chase me.

The man sped down the street, screaming hoarsely, over his thick Chinese accent,

"AMERICA.
AMERICA.
AMERICA."

Then, as I suspected, his car pulled into the darkened parking lot where I was, leaving no chance of escape -- except waking up. So I woke up.

Although, the celebratory shouting of the name of my country continued to reverberate in my ears, even then.

This followed the cycle of being woken up by a nightmare to return to happier dreams. Later, my brother was accidentally spilling personalized greeting cards he had bought for my mother, with her name misspelled on them the way the electric company misspells it; "LAURIE BROWN."

There was another Sesame-Street style speculation, complete with diagrams of receding roots, that made very real the tradeoff that animals make, between having roots and having mobility. Watching housewives strike deep taproot. Thinking, we really could turn back into plants if we wanted. It would take several million years. But life really is that malleable.

2008-12-18T18:53:00.001-05:00

What I Am Learning

2008-12-17T23:44:00.003-05:00

All things, even mundane things, are very difficult, if you do them right.

2008-07-26T03:52:00.004-04:00

In India they wished I would visit and
I felt sad to leave them by waking up.
We shot black snakes of coal in the
dirt and sparks in the air.
My sister was there.
Hovering, hot no mosquitos touched
no hovering, hot

In India Hxxxxx Sxxxxx grew up in the
Himalayas. He thinks art is crazy
and that he must be crazy because
he likes art. When he was small
he was in the snow. When he was old
his parents made him be
an engineer
So now he tries to buy
my wanting

He can't win

We are warm in our hidden room down here

2008-07-14T16:13:00.003-04:00

Water massages as a treatment for hysteria c. 1860.

Kate: I wrote this partially in response to this blogpost you wrote back in mid-June.

No one worth their salt should be suggesting that to be female means being 'effeminate' or, strictly speaking, 'unreasonable.' But I am not sure in your post you go far enough. I think that any necessary association between 'femininity' as it identifies a class of people and any property, whether it be good or bad, is already misguided -- and I even go as far here as to problematize the equation between bodily anatomy and, not just gender, but physical sex.

And while I agree that no one should force the equation "femininity = unreason" on anyone, I also don't think that the correct response to that is to enforce the claim that "femininity = reason." I guess what I'm saying is that you don't seem to question the normative assertion that unreason is a bad thing. And I actually think that the extent to which our society accords respect to mechanical rationality at the neglect of 'barely-clothed embodiment,' as you call it, is a pervasive tendency which I think is at root of most, if not all, of the worst things about Western society. This is important for feminism because it is important to remember that, while we need to cast off demeaning aspects of feminine stereotypes, we also need to be able to re-evaluate potentially liberatory aspects of those same old categories of femininity.

Example -- my grandmother is dying. She is, in each admittance to the hospital, informed that there is only one specific reason for her maladies -- first it was dangerously low blood pressure, and currently it is a fracture of the third and fourth vertebrae of her neck. They give her surgery, steroids, and Dilaudid. They assess whether she has what her living will calls "a reasonable expectation of recovery," based on the outcome of these treatments. And yet.

My grandmother received a pacemaker two weeks before her neck spontaneously fractured due to osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a degenerative disease affecting one's entire bone structure. Her living will says that unless there is a reasonable expectation of recovery, she does not want measures employed to rescussitate her, and "artificially prolong the process of her dying." But because it does not specify whether there needs to be reasonable expectation of her recovery generally or from one specific ailment, she continues "living" -- on steroids, in a neck brace, on intravenous Dilaudid, not walking, eating through a tube, for two weeks. She weighs 90 pounds. Her neck brace is gruesome. Her skull has had holes drilled into it and screws inserted because she cannot hold her own head up without her neck fracturing. She has a spine built out of metal, an artificial heart. She is making the hospital huge amounts of money. She is on so many drugs for Parkinson's, anxiety, pain, that she can barely give consent and when she is home and sober she says she wants to die. My grandmother worked as a R.N. in a retirement home for 30 years. She knew then what the elderly go through and was adamant enough about avoiding that scenario that she went to a lawyer and wrote a living will.

That she is still alive is to the immense benefit of her hospital, her rheumatologist, her cardiologist, her neurologist, her multiple surgeons, her pharmacist. It is to the immense benefit of the standing Christian norm of the 'sanctity of life.' The more cattle are alive and calving, the more prosperous the farmer.

That she is still alive is to the detriment of her dignity and, more to the point, her capacity to die a free death. Strict logical analysis of the situation gives us a medical reason to expect her recovery from any one specific ailment, but says nothing of her quality of life generally. Economically it is easy to see why keeping her alive in this state is "the right thing to do." Legally, medically, we have reason explaining how this is true, why this is true, but offering little by way of a justification for whether it is right or wrong. How do we rationally answer the question of whether she would be happier if she were allowed to die? Or the question of whether the hospital wants her to stay alive for the same reasons that we do? It is difficult to use symbolic logic to explain why it is not enough that the material end -- in this case my grandmother's continued existence -- is the same.

April Flakne used to suggest that ethics happens in a sphere where we do not say "A light switch is turned on because of electrical currents," but "A light switch is turned on because I want to see your beautiful face." She did not say it exactly like that, but the highlight of that wanting, what Nietzsche called the will to power, is distinctly bodily. It is important to be able to recover the primeval and creative aspect --the physical aspect -- of thought, and language, to be capable of undoing the damage wrought on this planet when language is capable of calcifying, like steel screws, slowly replacing organic bone, a bone which heaves and disintegrates not because of a malfunction or a failure but because it must disintegrate, it loves disintegration, it craves renewal, not rescussitation. Language can recover the creative and physical potency which I am tracking here, but not if we cling to an idea that persists residually in the assumption that, say, all efforts that seem unreasonable, or all traits that valorize sexuality or the body are inherently going to be oppressive to women. The problem is not solved by making women 'rational.' Reason, whether of God or man, is the guiding force behind white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

To assert that to aspire to become a beautiful body is necessarily to become oppressed is another essentialism redoubling over the original, problematic one. It cancels out the exact same thing that Sex and the City does. In both cases, language is enforcing only one interpretation and only one. One type of beautiful clothing, as much as one type of death -- is the only type that is beautiful, or the only type of illness from which she may die. The problem is one of hermeneutics. My grandmother's death is not a single fact, but multiple events, each with possible interpretations but no necessary interpretations. Health then incorporates an ethos where the rational individual is not liberated, but submissive -- originally a trait 'enforced' in women, except in this case what is submissive is submissive to that which is greater, if indemonstrable -- to the primeval self-becoming which rational science covers with the mask of Being. That is to say, the mask is submissive to the actor.

All the girls are sitting on a pile of gold.

2008-07-14T03:35:00.001-04:00

I should be sleeping. I woke up at midnight to N asking me to call AAA while he was stranded on the side of a Bradenton road with a dead battery and no gas. I am singing there is one singing in the back of a U-Haul truck to an appreciative crowd and a quick tempo. Talked to a lady at a Racetrack gas station at 5:30 in the morning who wanted $3.00 for milk to give her youngest child -- she said wouldn't have been there if it weren't that he wouldn't stop crying. She asked me if I wanted one of her children.

I am hovering My grandmother has been sedated on a ventilator in the hospital for about a week. I am not sure whether the medical procedures being performed on her are in accordance with her living will, which asks that we not needlessly, "artificially extend the process of her dying." I have thoughts that I can't articulate about biopolitics here. Tell my mother that we all have a right to life because the live-stock farmer makes more money with every calf born. I can't help it if my father has a high school education and that in this country mind is only exercised ex officio. But I can help it if I stay up all night drawing a mural and making powerful friends who will help me find as many loopholes out of poverty as are there, waiting, risky, unexamined. Charity and self-interest are coextensive. I don't want to stand above morality with the anxious stiffness of someone who fears falling -- I want to float.

Poverty
is a pretense, as is
wealth.

A painting that has dried has a primeval person in it. She is on yellow, offering darkened grapes to a black horse. Old roommates spent nine dollars on each bottle of foul-smelling beer. I am awed at the horrible insignificance of it and admire their dance.

Q spoke to me for three hours on the phone and told me to keep my mouth shut. She says that women infuriate her husband by propositioning him at the drive-thru of one of their dry-cleaning franchises which are not flourishing in Tampa. "Shy Rose Cleaners." Q says that she is a mother to X, the boy she calls my boyfriend, now that his own mother has died. Q says that the government in the United States is like the government in Myanmar. We have no reason to trust it.

In Myanmar, Q was drugged and given an abortion without consent. Q recommends that any woman receiving an engagement ring of any import take it privately to a jeweler's and have it checked for authenticity. She says the problem of the Cubix Zirconium is one problem they didn't have in Myanmar.

Q says I should be making powerful friends and finding ways to set myself up with an apartment in New York. X and I speak early in the morning 12 hours apart, laughing incessantly whenever English fails us. He doesn't mention my visit. Q says that he doesn't want me to visit him in Singapore yet because he is not sure what his roommates will do to me. We will wait until they move out or find girlfriends. He says nothing to me about this, but sends me messages which say -- "i remember u." I have not yet met X but he still sends kind words on the day my grandmother has several screws deadbolted into her third and fourth vertebrae.

Y grew up in the Himalayas and tells me that Americans don't understand friendship.

For Langston Hughes and Nancy Brown.

2008-06-09T22:04:00.002-04:00

The dog that walks

has a leash.

The cardinal on my chair

sings.

"I have been a hard-working person

all my life -- strong

and look at me now."

The dog that walks

has a leash.

The cardinal on my chair

sings.

I vomited my meal into

my hands.

My mother consulted with

homicide.

Tampa is a place where I brew

green tea and take

calls for Nelson Brown.

The number is wrong.

The number

sings.

Grandma, laugh.

Man can laugh louder but

I can

I can

I can

I can

I can

310 - The Gay Science

2007-10-29T22:54:00.002-04:00

Will and wave.-- How greedily this wave approaches, as if it were after something! How it crawls with terrifying haste into the inmost nooks of this labrynthine cliff! It seems that it is trying to anticipate someone; it seems that something of value, high value, must be hidden there.--And now it comes back, a little more slowly but still quite white with excitement; is it disappointed? Has it found what it looked for? Does it pretend to be disappointed?--But already another wave is approaching, still more greedily and savagely than the first, and its soul too, seems to be full of secrets and the lust to dig up treasures. Thus live waves--thus live we who will--more I shall not say.

So? You mistrust me? You are angry with me, you beautiful monsters? Are you afraid that I might give away your whole secret? Well, be angry with me, arch your dangerous green bodies as high as you can, raise a wall between me and the sun--as you are doing now! Truly, even now nothing remains of the world but green twilight and green lightning. Carry on as you like, roaring with overweening pleasure and malice--or dive again, pouring your emeralds down into the deepest depths, and throw your infinite white mane of foam and spray over them: Everything suits me, for everything suits you so well, and I am so well-disposed toward you for everything; how could I think of betraying you? For--mark my word!--I know you and your secret, I know your kind! You and I--are we not of one kind?--You and I--do we not have one secret?

On Pornography and Prostitution

2007-04-22T23:00:00.003-04:00

Erotic dancers expose themselves and simulate sexual behavior. The term 'simulate' is crucial, because prostitutes allegedly differ insofar as they engage in actual sexual behavior. In order to know whether this distinction is accurate, we need to examine the definition we have of sexual behavior. We tend to publicly say that sexual behavior needs to be reciprocal and consensual. However, the popular construction of this notion tends to orient around male orgasm from the viewpoint of a masculinized consciousness. To establish this we can consider that women often fake orgasm, as the textbook reports – because if women were included in the privileged viewpoint around which our concept of sexual behavior revolves, faking orgasm would make no sense. Certainly men only do so rarely. This is because the male's physiological pleasure is central to our notion of what constitutes sexuality. This indicates to me that engaging in sexual behavior, under the rule of popular culture, does not necessarily imply reciprocal enjoyment at all. If this is so, then we've got some ethical problems on our hands. However, considering the world in which reciprocity is necessary has more value given my argument. A prostitute, who behaves as she does strictly in order to get money, does not have sex with her customers because doing so is pleasurable in-itself. Thus, if we think (as I think we should) that an agent can only be sexual when she acts out of sexual desire, then what a prostitute does, in a sense, is simulate sexual behavior. I do not think that we should consider either pornography or prostitution to be 'trafficking in bodies,' per se, if only out of my semantic desire to recover some of the body's dignity, a dignity which our culture seems to have so tirelessly worked to destroy. If we reject a Cartesian view, i.e., one which states that the mind and body are separate entities, then trafficking in 'bodies' could only be trafficking in human selves for us: we say that a person can only exist if a person is embodied. But we will help no prostitute recover to tell her that she has absolutely surrendered her selfhood in her prostitution. This does seem to be the grounds of the cultural and moral attitude toward people we call 'whores.' This is an ideology which only serves to reinforce permanently the temporary subjugation which happens when somebody sells sexual performance in exchange for money, because it makes the action a performative statement about this person's identity. This is part of the reason I have for believing that our culture overemphasizes the cruciality of sexual behavior in constructing identity. Surely sexuality is crucial to our species, but our cultural identity is something we construct after our species has already survived. It is not sexual.

Similarly to any other 'sexual transgression' which would only be encouraged by its prohibition, this is a case in which the relationship between the crime and the law is more complicated than the simple one of inferiority and superiority. In a sense the laws against prostitution depend on the act of prostitution for their efficacy. But laws regulating prostitution would as well, and given that the laws so often tend to prohibit something which is going to exist anyway, one wonders how this law could work in favor of the people which it alleges to morally correct. There are good reasons why these judgments only entrench our culture more deeply in its implicit advocacy of rape, prostitution and pornography, or explicit advocacy of rape-like, prostitution-like, and pornographic behaviors. The key issue is that it advocates sexual behavior rather than sexual action. One would only truly compromise oneself if in fact what one was doing in the simulation of sex was selling one's self. But as mentioned, if sexuality is not the crucial determining factor in our identity, it only becomes so when it is treated as such. A body, then, is required for all human performance. What is exploitative about both pornographic media and about prostitution, then, is the totalizing moral context and attitude which inevitably goes with these things – when an event's meaning is already predetermined by someone other than the participant, this event leaves the realm of action and enters the one of behavior. Action creates new meaning. We believe that behaving in a way that commercializes sex once, or as an entire livelihood, will automatically prevent one from respecting oneself, or ever being able to act. These expectations inform the opportunities available to actors in pornographic films, and prostitutes, and even rape victims – and really, any person who alienates themselves from their sexuality.

Anyone who simulates sexual behavior rather than acting, sexually or otherwise, is being controlled by this attitude. To explain the socioeconomic forces which produce such behavior in people despite the fact that it is not in their best interests, Simone De Beauvoir tells us that as long as there is poverty there will be a market for this very lucrative field. We need not wonder at the supply of sex workers which male demand creates. A glance at Time Magazine indicates this. In Time Magazine's “Time 100” list of the one hundred most influential people who lived in the last century, Marilyn Monroe was listed next to Einstein. Women, we believe, become powerful not by performing powerful actions – but by providing simulated sexual gratification to powerful men. The official cause of Marilyn Monroe's death was drug overdose and probable suicide. There is debate over whether the cause of death was murder or suicide – but it's hard to imagine how it could not be suicide. I imagine that popular culture still fails to realize that Marilyn Monroe could not be happy as Marilyn Monroe. 'Marilyn Monroe,' you see, truly is merely an object, working in fact to make popular culture happy. Undoubtedly it will neither help nor hurt her to treat her as such. Norma Jean Baker*, though, is fucked. She's the one with everything to lose, in fact has long since lost it.

*Norma Jean Baker died of a drug overdose, potentially suicide, 1962.**

**What.

2007-04-19T23:00:00.000-04:00

In a dream, a camera came upon the man, who is short, who, additionally, is heavier than is necessary. He wears a black suit over a white oxford, an oxford which gleams dully gold, due to a particular ambience in the bathroom which is to be described in the ensuing text. The man stands in a long bathroom combing his short hair. He bends over the counter into the mirror. The mirror is framed with an ornate gold and floral gild, which extends beyond the gold of the frame of the mirror and into the air around it. The gold frame appears to inform the wallpaper, regarding its ideal condition. The entire bathroom is encrusted with such a dialogue, regarding golden gold.

The man's chin, it seems, is coated with what might, normally, be a fine white lather; however in this bathroom white light in fact turns gold when it reflects off itself qua. the walls and onto his jaw. He scrapes, slowly, at this lather; he does so with a straight razor, a razor which is burnished on its handle with a dull gold. The man slowly turns the tap and begins rinsing his face. It is now revealed that in the yellow light against the golden sink the water shines with gold. It has not yet been determined, nor ought it be determined, whether flecks of gold in fact run through this water. I believe there is a cinnamon liqueur which contains such a gold; but as stated, that is not for us to decide here.

He rinses the fine lather from his face. He turns out and looks again into the lens.

"Yes," gruffly. "Yes indeed," slowly. "I in fact have heard about all those people out there, without bathrooms. Indeed, it's terrible. How is one to function without a bathroom?" His jawline, which previously had small hairs protruding from it, no longer has any, unless perhaps his shaving-project is incomplete. But that is not to be demonstrated now.

"Truly. Such a condition would be unbearable. It's absolutely unthinkable." The man begins attending to his reflection anew. What appears to be the case is that the light, which as established burns with a low, hyperbolic gold, has caused his flesh to lapse into a sort of hysteria in the angelic clutches of which it itself resembles gold. The man reaches out, and determines that what is now crucial is to stroke the face as it appears so in the mirror. He raises his fingers, the skin of which makes contact with a cold glass that would otherwise appear to be silver. He moves his fingers vertically, whispering in a low tone of barely a carat.

"Appalling. No bathrooms."

He offers his visage a conciliatory slap, the sound of which sounds harmonically through the golden air. Satisfiedly, this man angles his face so that he is able to glance backward at the lens and return to himself.

He begins to smooth his hair to the side.

Lipstick I'd wear for 1 million years.

2007-02-26T23:43:00.000-05:00

I haven't stopped writing in the time since I've been out of New College, and that means something to me. We are the products of our situations and my situation is that I am the daughter of an alcoholic and I am learning over decadent Italian dinners and good generic gin just how it is that my grandmother is the mother of my mother. How they refuse to throw away books, art supplies, long past the time when they read or use either. How my grandmother did yoga every day of her youth. And these actions mean something, these things which are not given to us by incident. Thing which arise after and apart from the day shifts drinking Coca-Cola and the evenings eating Kraft --

My French teacher hates Godard.

I did not recently return from any exotic locale or any interesting discussion. I had been giving my thoughts away in the healthy appropriate way and it gave me nothing to write home about. Nonetheless I will write. Because home is here, in my head. I am losing it here but I am not going to lose it. In a classroom where skin is darkened more than just one hue, Kwasi Wiredu with his PhD. in philosophy from Oxford, B.A. from University of Ghana, pacing the front, voice a slow deep synthetic one, sounding all at once of polished glass tables in Victorian London and simultaneously of the jungle, not the way Herzog describes it but the way it really is -- peopled. The rainforests are peopled, sweaty Mbuti pygmies in straw tutus, bodies constellated in white circles of paint, being forced by the virtue of their situation to take temp jobs as loggers deforesting the forest which birthed them. A foreign tragedy, but the only really foreign quality is the setting. I myself have borrowed paintbrushes from my grandmother, painted on her canvas, my hands losing their circulated blood. Harish says I must paint through the mud, but days are so long here, and I am so distracted by the men in pageboy caps preaching the gospel outside my USF classroom, yelling and leaping, satyric, to us, over morning dew and artificially green grass. Jesus thinks we are all sorority sluts, us -- us fornicators and breast-fondlers and breast-fondlees. Sunglasses editing out our faces like porn stars. I am burdened with a Krsna telling me that I am a special soul, like I want his flattery, like I want the threat of reincarnation, all the cows I ate as a child growing human arms and chopping me into pieces. Rawls had his own doctrine of reincarnation, in a less whimsical form, and I don't know that I want that either. I also don't know that I don't. And just that -- I can't tell if it's the philosophy or the financial stability that is draining the color from my flesh. I am so pampered here, making good on what I was denied, what everyone else had and I was allegedly deprived of but what maybe I don't want.

The will to self-destruction is so strong yet, not asceticism but obliteration. And the feeling that I am missing something if I don't post on here, not wanting you to read it and compliment me but clearly begging for it anyway, just so I don't have to define the social sphere in which I dwell in terms of the place I'm at, in Tampa, which consists of being childlike following ducks or driven followed by ducklings. The lines between public and private -- something I've never delineated. Like in Ancient Athens. A Hegelian necessity for society. And society is Dr. Wiredu right now, a synthetic human being who by his very eccentricity in my own society makes clear the synthetic nature of any personality at all. It is simply that his is never recognized in the local media, culture. How his very voice is marked by the historical violence of his people. The British accent he uses so proudly a bloody reminder of incessant European colonization of Africa, as he describes disunity, degradation, and stunted growth. But the problem is not even simple disunity and degradation but also the failure to recognize such disunity. Africa is not one continent full of a single tribe called "the Africans." They are precisely not recognized as diverse in themselves when they all fall under the category of non-white, very non-white. My young sister watching childrens' Tarzan movies where instead of any representation of the actual human beings who populate Africa, she is presented with a British gorilla.

You owe your audience an orchestrated duet of apologies, please, applied like henna equally to the palms of all past and future oppressed peoples and oppressors, equally to young blonde children with pale flesh, Starburst candy after dinner, blue eyes. Don't lie. Like you are incapable of understanding how African-Americans today could feel justified in asking for reimbursement for the long ancestral hours in cotton plantations, slavery -- slavery is not gone categorically, but only decaying by degree of explicity.Slaves organizing civil war revolts by playing war drums to strangers, across plantations in the sun. Their hearts pounding, dropping bushels of cotton which puff in great heaves and running, full of hope older than imprisonment, chronologically prior by thousands of years, but still a hope that had become dustier than its fresh bloodshed, dustier than salt tears and dustier than the slow, dark yield to their suffering. In African thought the soul is in the blood, and in modern genetics blood type is determined by ancestor. The very thing that justifies my gratitude for not being a woman born in the Victorian age, or to a country who still practices female circumcision, keeps me entitled to the demand of empathy that cannot be a plea but a statement. Having entered myself into society, my identity has become swallowed irrevocably. And this society is silent, in its flouted indebtedness, to the bodies it demarcates with its language.

As a child, I contested this factory farm application of history written by technologically superior victors. This was of course indicated by my passionate interest in being appropriated by Native American culture, reading fables, wandering Floridian swamplands behind middle class housing lots, bloodlessly observing venomous snakes, sheltering myself from the rain by lean-to shelters built with my eleven-year old hands. Kant said that the only people less worthy of his respect than the Africans were the Native Americans. And is that simply because they lost the wars against Caucasian imperialism in such a more permanent way? Alexander: to the victors go the history books, I tell you this over and over, unborn paintings forming themselves in my half-forgotten dreams. Africa is being born as a false unity, and as a wound on the surface of the political globe, visible, uncomfortable to regard. Native America exists, then, in suffocated drug overdoses on the wet floors of Seminole Casino bathroom stalls, annual festivals marked by frybread and venison, people whose skin is tanned to leather either by their indigenous history or by their addiction to methamphetamines. The scientific names we give these races and their cultural products to cleave them from the threads of our empathic intentionality once we have deprived them of their humanity. An "indigenous" people, producing "ethnophilosophy," and providing us with the opportunity to be open-minded about a music that formed the very basis for modern rap, jazz, blues -- by studying "ethnomusicology." Etymologically, from the Greek word ethnos: the study of music made by pagans and heathens. How very generous of Uganda. Oh, I'm not racist: I celebrate MLK Day and intentionally befriend people who are black. It's there if you look for it, and if you look you see the jungle, decaying, but filled with no more fornication than the halls of Kappa Dee at the University of South Florida. Perhaps less.

It is not clear to me that the entire six billion of us have evolved from the same species of hominid. Can we, or need we, yet evolve into one? Our desires farmed into horizontal planes of mud, stamped by the roots of giant trees, held down by lightly stepping, lightly chained feet. Where we stave off the slavery of being hired to destroy our own forests by building leaf-huts above the trunks we will tomorrow incise. We have never met a Nigerian but will be depicted on American television as one and the same people, even homogenous with the people who set the prices of our indebtedness, so long as history of colonization and history of denying Egypt's possession of Egyptian civilization has sufficiently purpled our flesh. By the evening we know, we will never either of us meet the Mayans. We will only smoke marijuana joints rolled with flat leaves for our fatigue, humming rhythmic hymns to the concept of darkness as we press, otherwise burdened, nomadic and hushed, into its trees, singing: anything you bring us cannot be wrong.

A newborn child has no teeth.

2006-12-30T23:50:00.002-05:00

THE LETTING GO: How One's Passion Sets In Motion The Passion Of Others

2006-10-28T14:24:00.001-04:00

"The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existent truth but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being. No explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it."
--M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

Above: David Audet in Ybor Square Space

When I was eight years old, I was young,
and I was shy. On the last day of school
I asked my art teacher to sign my yearbook,
standing out among the live oak trees,
out where we had spun clay until
our hands were dry and chalky
like the hands of gymnasts.

David pressed hard with my neon pen, leaving bold-faced
indentions upon the glossy paper. He haphazardly
scribbled and handed it over, and of course
I eagerly flipped around to find his signature before walking away.
He had given himself a beard and mustache
in his photograph. He had written

YOU'VE GOT IT / IF YOU WANT IT.

While I was reading before him
David verbally reiterated his note,
eyes catching me instructively,
holding me for a moment.
I understood, right?

I HAVE IT IF I WANT IT. BUT
I HAVE TO WANT IT.

And yes, I said of course.
Yes of course.

David Audet is the best art teacher
I think I've ever had. He had eyes
disproportionately keener than the rest of his body,
which was husky, unshaven, unkempt.
He arranged art galleries exhibiting
stale Cuban sandwiches. He constantly reeked
of body odor. He had built a deck, gingerly, around
the old oak trees to hold classes. He would simply
sit in the center of this deck with us circled around
him, and play guitar while the peacocks screamed
in circles, around us. He would have us draw him
in bursts of sixty seconds and then have us rotate,
cyclical, around one another to capture all angles.

When it rained we cried out and ran inside.
We would go into small unused rooms, smelling him
and listening to him telling us how the government had
assassinated John Lennon until the situation was too
repugnant for there to be room in it for our juvenile art.
David was prone to bursts of violent rage at his young
students. Eventually the school dismissed him, hired him
back, and dismissed him again. One wants to attribute this
either to his memories of the Vietnam War or to his
perennial occupational overexposure to paint thinner.

David Audet loved to eat avocado sandwiches and
in class he would eat them as he taught us to cast
pottery in the traditional Raku style. Sen-No-Rikyu.
David was too big in himself to fit neatly anywhere.
Even Lee Academy was too much for him. The school,
which it would admittedly be quite an understatement
to say was not the most oppressive I've encountered,
could not contain the firing glazes which interested him,
and glittered.

YOU'VE GOT IT / IF YOU WANT IT.

If his note in my yearbook had read
IF YOU WANT IT / YOU'VE GOT IT,
David would have entered the fallible
sphere of logic which his statement preexists.
But no -- his area of expertise was precisely
the precognitive moment of inspiration where the question is not,
"How best can we analyze this?"
no -- David asks, in true form for the visual artist,

"WHY WOULD ONE WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE
THE EXISTENCE OF OBJECTS WORTH ANALYSIS, AT ALL?"

The realm where possibility is made actual
does not rest in the dry and stiffened fingertips
of some absolute objective truth which existed fully formed
thousands of years ago as it stands dusty, before me now --
no. "The only pre-existent Logos is the world itself."
This sphere begins entirely frothing in liquid slip, fires precisely
in the lowest temperatures of my immediate,
glittering desire. Here the genesis of meaning --
And here the condemnation of meaning,
Fissures caused by air and water in the clay,
As banal and violent as an act validated in its own performance.
Upon the littlest effort it takes for my fingers to wield their water
over the indentions in lumps of pliable earth, fanning and smoothing the
Thing into Being -- upon this depends the very being of the tradition itself.

Soren Kierkegaard says: life is lived forwards but
understood backwards. I had always contested this.
But what if memory were found to be like the heat left in an object
long after the fire has gone -- the residual glow of ceramic sake-cups
and pitchers, indelibly, only there after they have left the kiln.
Then we could only understand the past. David Audet's influence was to
plunge us all the more, in spite of history, into the
establishing values for the future. He became our personal history so that
when we were adults, then we might turn our heads
over our shoulders
like someone who just saw a friend walk past in a crowd.

I could not have fathomed it then, age seven,
face covered in white paint, hands covered in dust
and chalky like the hands of gymnasts.
Only over time did the man grow to glow
with a phenomenological heat. Only now I begin
chipping slow flecks off the marble
of what I learned there, still covered in paint,
David still living by the lake in a trailer next door.

A PRELUDE TO THE LETTING GO

2006-10-25T01:07:00.002-04:00

Though you wipe your hands and brush off the dust and dirt from the vessels, what is the use of all this fuss if the heart is still impure?

Sen-No-Rikyu

| re: machines rendering manual labor unnecessary - the difference is that the upper classes always gained reactive identity by way of a condescension toward those who did their bodily labor, be they african-american slaves, the proletariat, or women. one cannot in the same way condescend to a machine, and thus the reactivity by which we tried to assert our detached superiority over the body disappears, for it no longer has a subject-as-object upon which to displace/inflict its gaze -- only mere objects -- indeed the objects for which the oppressed classes have, throughout history, shed inexhaustible torrents of blood.

| re: what happens when the detachment from modes of power which is necessary for any true criticism & radical rennovation of values to take place does not coincide the establishment and affirmation of positive alternative values -- those who would be radicals are powerless, and become rematriculated into original power structures as members of lowest, most oppressed class; they go to jail, they become impoverished and marginalized. thus we reject the ascetic denial of power. BUT the most radical revolutionary will be a conservative the day after the revolution.

Though you wipe your hands and brush off the dust and dirt from the vessels, what is the use of all this fuss if the heart is still impure?

Sen-No-Rikyu

What's going to be the death of me? Static electricity.

2006-10-13T23:28:00.001-04:00

Why does a house cat, when it is left outside, invariably come back to its master? Cats do not think of us as a part of their "pack" -- they are, allegedly, "not social animals." Even when they do stay with us their independence, to say nothing of the real neuroses some domesticated animals (caged birds...) display, assures us that it is only out of a lack of alternatives. That is precisely it. A cat who escapes comes back when it realizes that it prefers regular meals, albeit regular meals in servitude. It does not want the freedom to starve, and the ones who do -- well, they drop off our radar. And thusly do we construct the universality of our sovereignty.

Thusly do women remain oppressed. There are other options, of course -- last time I checked, women did have the option to get paid for their jobs. And last time I checked women get paid on average half what men do for comparable work. We will continue to accept the dinner offers of traditional gentlemen so long as that is the most certain way to ensure a regular meal. Men don't have the option of such dependence at all, but women -- well, it's unfortunate, but you know how things are. These days, nobody much looks out for the strays.

Miss Madonna, won't you give me a kiss.

2006-10-10T01:18:00.001-04:00

i. days need yet to begin

as life begins, unconscious,

so that waking is intuitive

and shortly after the day's light -- discrete

from the clock-tick of day.

this day has yet begun as

a weathered and phlegmatic exhale

after the exhaustion that results,

incomparably,

from a day full, without exertion.

ii. If we do not know ourselves to have a culture on par with Ancient Greece, if we cannot properly revel in our passions in the sphere of some ideal, then it is because the Greeks, and the ideal, have already been historicized. All understanding moves against the current in this way, and before we ever had occasion to claim lack, this responsibility should have been obvious. Since, by looking at our demographic's deep dissatisfation with the current state of American culture, we know that it was not, we have occasion to identify yet another failure of modernization, of the democratic state, of the herd. The failing is precisely when our ignorance of our own power becomes, effectively, the lack of power. Like the joke about red ink in the Zizek film -- we have all become culturally indolent by way of the formative effects of totalizing homogenization in media. If some cultural practice has not been presented to us, prefabricated and preordained, by some media, well then we imagine at the very least that it must be strictly taboo -- or, most often, that it does not exist at all. This betrays a fundamental existential ignorance, or a similarly fundamental laziness -- either way, an irresponsibility toward the care of the self. The next question that we ask -- well, what does historicizing do, anyway, so that we might ourselves? What is recollection in its transfigurative power, and how does one seize it as one chooses and acts? This question is not asking for proof of possibility, for it already has that powdering its very bones. Rather, it asks for the greatest absurdity when we are working in such a general & abstract conceptual framework -- it asks for self-disclosure to come from an outside source.

iii. "You are standing as if on the summit of the Mount of Transfiguration and must depart -- but then all the little demands of finitude and the petty debts owed the greengrocer, the shoemaker, and the tailor take hold of you and the final result is that you remain earthbound and you are not transfigured, but the Mount of the Transfiguration is transfigured and becomes a dunghill." / "Close air always becomes noxious."

2006-09-24T17:01:00.002-04:00

They're perfect.

God is love. I do not love. God is love. I do not love.

2006-09-23T18:27:00.001-04:00

I have to get rid of all my art directly after I make it these days; if I don't purge it I can't stop looking at it and it immediately falls apart. I give it to people and it's alleged to be my gift to them, my narcissism, and they thank me. Why do they thank me? They are taking my monsters and housing them in the cupboards of their viscera and their intentions and their vulnerabilities. Those things get locked in. Why do they thank me? I just lose respect for what hangs around too long.

I slept through ballet because I was up at four in the morning fretting and drinking wine and reading the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception; every once in a while I would encounter a phrase or two that would cause this high laugh to issue from the top of my throat, and I had the feeling of a gradual recovery of this thing I had in my heart at all times as a child, methodical now, reimbursed by my attempts to decide whether or not this thing I was reading could possibly be about science. And I was stretched out on this hardwood floor that never fails to give me splinters and I was knowing I was going to sleep through ballet and the train horns kept sounding through long sheets of rain, passing through the open windows or closed Venetian blinds, drops in the slits perpetuating themselves, polyethylene.

Last night I didn't think that aliens or cyberstalkers were going to come find me in my sleep; all superstitions were sleeping and I wasn't sleeping and I was stretched out across the hardwood floor feeling a hysterical silence awaken and reposition itself behind my eyes, perfect and sensible like a system of wires. I know that there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance, and instead of a therapist and instead of humanism I just have this very old phenomenologist with blue eyes and white eyebrows like Santa Claus, an old man with a PhD whose job it is to tell me every Wednesday that I'm not mindful enough to be a philosopher. He yelled about Myspace and I deleted my account.

I slept through ballet because it isn't what I want, lying in the dark on the hardwood floors feeling that it is my duty and my privilege to be as feminine as is possible, friends with women who follow their boyfriends to New Haven. Jobless and hopeful women, pink subjugated bodies watching their men mill through the law programme at Yale. Women who wait to exhale, women who want to birth your children but not mine -- mine much too pure, undiscovered in peapods, in snow. What if my Freudian envy is not of the phallus but of possessing the love of another woman? Then the fault of Freud is not in his biology, and not in me, but in the very perpetuation of his idea. I slept through ballet because when I was younger I was a Tai Chi master, fasting and walking alone through forests and making effortless motions of knowledge in solitude.

I was never a woman. Nobody ever was. It has always been a lie, and nobody has clean hands. Nobody. And nobody is willing to discuss it for long, to lose blood or relearn old movements. And in the seeds of these images new answers are formulating, new answers to all those old questions about tigers, all those questions John Roewert asked me about phenomenology, on the staircase one night, doubtful and intrigued. When I find these answers unfurling themsleves they will all be running in a stampede across wet green fields, bodies oiled like Spartans, and I will run with them. We will adjust to changing air and the scent of paint and plants, and will retire to respective attics, at all times with the windows open allowing in all noise and ice. And I am going to exhale. I am going to exhale and white air will rush out.

Last night I grew desperate and teary and wanted to move in with my homophobic sexist racist Catholic capitalist Republican Grandparents in Tampa, because of the guarantee there that I would have health insurance for when breathing grows more difficult. I would have a private world and somebody would come in and order me to wake up every morning. Because I wanted to remain the product of that same old sad situation, stealing Xanax. Because I thought about how we ally ourselves with people who share values, sometimes whether they treat us well or not, because we want uniform ideologies, scarcity and necessity. Here it would arrogantly and falsely be about myself, about the sciences. But the real goal here is not myself. The real goal involves Sparta; has more to do with facticity and with overpainted walls in empty rooms, with clean strange basslines and sore sore bones. We are adapting despite fantasies and we are amalgamating disinterested vocabularies, and we are honing our intentions into the slackening threads that connect us to the world, slacken in wonder.

Some fifteen-year-old somewhere in the world.

2006-09-19T22:05:00.001-04:00

All I can bring myself to talk about is art.

1. At the end of this video there is a performance of "Baboon," from JD's The Coroner's Gambit, that everyone everywhere should see.

2. It is my contention that John's song "Wild Sage" (from newest album Get Lonely; lyrics here ) is narrated by an anonymous one of the mental patients he worked with as a psychiatric nurse in California. The "wild sage growing in the weeds" is a metaphoric reference to the population of the insane, entangled in the panopticon beneath the grit of its institutional power, and despite their status as self-aware individuals capable of complicated thought and emotion, etc etc etc. In other news, I hate interpretation of art.

3. It seems that this is the state of things.

And all the ceilings in New York have come down.

2006-09-11T21:47:00.005-04:00

"Boredom is the root of all evil."
[S. Kierkegaard]

I had my first kiss on September 11th, five years ago today. I remember this now, of course, because it is ominous -- this boy would later sleep with sex workers at age fourteen or fifteen, sleep with my closest friend at the time. He would attempt suicide with broken beer bottles to the wrist -- because I didn't return his phone calls. By seeing him as often as I did, I would come to witness a drug war waged with frames of doors ripped off their walls, with rusty nails and gasoline fires. In the depths of rage after an argument which itself would have directly followed a passionate kiss, he punched me in the face until I was bleeding. He once attempted to run me over with his car.

People ask all the time -- why didn't U.S. intelligence intervene in what they knew looked suspicious until it was too late? What should be a simpler question -- why did I keep seeing this boy? I thought I loved him -- what I loved was being ignorant to the fact that some human actions are absolutely intolerable. If I always tolerated him, then he became the limit to my moral world and to my freedom. We would be rendered free of judgment by any greater society. I wanted to live in a world where everything was forgivable, even unrepentant violence -- for in such a world, how could my relatively naive and gentle nature not appear saintly?

When what we want does not fall neatly into our hands, insidiously, we imagine fate edging us along. Rather than admit the necessary fact that we lack, we craft false respite from our striving with illogicality, with superstitions. This abusive relationship I was in could never truly be forged in commitment or freedom; and so we would ask fate to forge it for us. By September 11, 2002, we had broken up, but we remembered our anniversary -- not because it was ominous, but as the first of an indefinite and increasing number of reconciliations. The reconciliations happened just as the worst Hollywood film would have done them. These were the ethics of adolescence, truly, but we were and are living in a cultural atmosphere where immaturity is constantly being mistaken for vitality.

We went to dinner at a restaurant we could walk to from our high school -- he paid for everything, of course. A year after our first embrace, we spoke plainly. He let me know that he "wanted me back." We knew that we could not help but fall back into one another's arms, and so we did, our depravity teetering obscenely between hypocrisy and idealism. And I know that even now, I still want to accord these passions some dignity. Whether I want this out of a desire to redeem our ignorance, or because a part of me still wants to live in that wonderland of universal validities, amoral and boundless -- that is harder to discern.

a

THE INDENTIONS OF YOUR OVERTONES; THEIR RECOVERY*

2006-09-08T03:09:00.001-04:00

when the dipping of the sun is less
a finished gift, more an organ embarassed
to have been, a seeing which draws color
to itself looking less murderous, more opaque
bruise-purple weather to me, seeping
consistent and banal through all diaries

when mornings warp awfully, running water etching
new preludes for a decade which is running
its fingers between my legs despite protest
giving mercy its name, and moving through
radio darkness gritting dirt into dark skins
hovering above that clay, grounding toothless hat-dippers
who forget the grinding of their teeth

when footsteps fall away from paged-novel pulses
and rush plagues, waking, into reclaimed water, fingering
mildew over three stacked nickels, dousing names
that exhibit their bodies in saltwater, schools of public transit
arranging in old teams; they drink the smoke of my tobacco
packed in highways and reclaiming old loyalties, harvested
like laundry stains, extending bloodless legs in broadcast
i change my position

*This is an impenetrable poem which summons up an impenetrable landscape in order to avoid actually explaining how the notion of going home is always the death of ambition

A, "On Nothing In Particular"

2006-09-03T22:01:00.001-04:00

"We never saw one another directly, of course; instead we always looked -- as any individual will always look at any other individual -- indirectly. This means that whatever we saw when we tried to look at one another was entirely mediated by the standards of an instantiated third gaze, which, we imagined, constituted the rest of society."

And now here's Soledad Brian.

2006-08-29T21:43:00.001-04:00

I know that none of my blog audience watches the news, or at least the important news, and I'm concerned for your ability to stay on top of the important issues of our day. So here they are exactly as I found them*, but conveniently abbreviated entirely into the digest-headline form you find below. Guess which headline is fake**, and remember that brevity is... wit.

a) Man Accused of Killing 7 Prostitutes
b) Jessica Simpson Loses Voice
c) Kids Watch Clown Crushed To Death
d) Virgin Mary Found On Turtle
e) Woman Has 14-Pound Baby Girl
f) Widely Publicized Child Sex-Object Murder Case, Due To Wide Publication, Gets Attention From Pathologically Lying Child-Sex Aficionados Who Then Must Necessarly Get Widely Publicized Themselves

*Well, I wasn't actually able to quote headline f verbatum as, I'll be darned, you just aren't able to find any articles on it anymore. Guess the news doesn't like to sensationalize particularly sensitive and singular court cases for too long or anything, especially when the coverage necessarily includes graphic descriptions of violence, sexuality, and/or social taboo. But I remember back in the day, when our tabloids still cared about JonBenet Ramsey. And this is more or less how they read.
**None

And ballet slippers will hurt my feet

2006-08-29T14:47:00.001-04:00

...the way your ideals of beauty are a suspension of your own image, a projection of it out into the world, as a general framework within which you wait, until you encounter and incarnate beauty -- and precisely then you run the risk of ruining it. you yourself change from the suffering of this loss, and the ideal necessarily changes with you, moving close beneath your own flesh until the moment your consciousness lapses entirely, until the moment you die...

the appreciation of childhood, nostalgic or otherwise, then arises from precisely a desire to evade death and finitude yourself -- one seeks redemption and self-verification in the respite of possession, and especially here through possession of an object "childhood" one seeks to perpetuate one's own life, "in the abundance of its fertility," indefinitely. and at once excessive fixation on being-towards death is necessarily a pathos, necessarily pathological, for in thinking of mortality consciousness conceives of itself as dying. in pursuit of beauty we seek respite FROM mortality, and yet it is through thorough engagement with life that one is aware of oneself as beginning to age.

we can then explain at once why we find a conjunction of fertility and childishness, of sexuality and the youthful image, in popular media and popular ideals of the beautiful. a woman is sexually attractive, generally speaking, when she has disproportionately large eyes, or is from the waist-down tiny as a six-year old and from the waist up, pregnant. and it is through appreciating youth and fertility as beauty in a woman that man precisely can HAVE a child, recreate himself THROUGH their child, precisely distance himself from the imminence of his finitude -- though he also admits of this limitation IN the need to give himself sexually and emotionally to youthfulness as an OTHER in the woman and ultimately, also the child. age truly begins to decline once even one's children are grown. death awaits beyond self-fulfillment in this way. though in a patriarchal society this standard would apply only to women as objects of sexual desire, i should note that to the extent that when ANYONE finds this youth-oriented concept of beauty sexually attractive, they are likely facing the finitude of their own status, historically or personally, and attempting to surmount their own impotence in the same way men of a patriarchal society do -- thus particularly fitting is DeBeauvoir's questionably-phrased call for a "brotherhood" of men and women.

an ideal of beauty which fulfilled no more than the desperate need to affirm one's own virility and youth in the face of one's own weakness cannot be of any solace here, can it? and this is why it develops. but ultimately an ideal of beauty can only perhaps be of partial solace. the greater question is how to balance the corruptive force of power with the subjugative force of powerlessness in oneself -- for one is deceiving oneself to say that the appeal of the childish other, the innocent other, is not contingent on the perceived powerlessness of that childishness -- an attempt to gain immortality through projecting nostalgia for youth outward into an object of consumption. and if it is not possible to make oneself the object of one's own desires, through vagaries like the notion of self-realization (that is always also a disunification from the immediate self), we could then only explore the potential of an ascetic relinquishment of any attachment to the movement of desiring itself.

I forgot the password.

2006-08-27T01:29:00.002-04:00

I've this summer, in my desperation, ended up watching both the Derrida documentary and the Zizek documentary, both productions of "Zeitgeist" films. I'm not going to apologize for this desperation -- it raises some interesting issues, and even allows me to better comment on the film. Precisely the only thing keeping me from exhibiting desperation would be this attempt at concealing the distaste I had for my surroundings all summer, in the name of maintenance of a public image. Rather than do that I find it interesting to think about the way Derrida and Zizek each reacted to the possibility of fetishization as it works through the public image which is being projected when something vaguely resembling a biographical film is made about you.

Both men seem to be aware of the constraints such a concern places on a sort of enlightenment-style disregard for style -- an emphasis on Derrida or Zizek's "style" taking priority over their "actual theoretical ideas," a distinction which Zizek at least thinks can be strictly maintained. But at the same time his thought seems to me to preclude such a distinction in some ways. Okay, so Derrida at first requested that no images be published of him, ever. This makes it seem as if he already had the problems that go along with having a public image in mind, and wished to avoid them entirely -- and indeed, a lot of what he says in the film seems to be predominantly concerned with the qeustion of tension between theory and praxis -- to a point he agrees with Heidegger, who agrees with Aristotle, that a philosopher is born, thinks, and dies. The preemptive rejection of a philosopher as a knowable human being, and the identification of a knowable human being with "style," surreptitiously sets you up to want to know more about the secret life of the philosopher, and the documentary tries to taunt you with this -- filming Derrida very ambiguously explaining his behavior is in many ways completely artificial because of the fact that he is being filmed, and so on. On the otehr hand, Zizek's reaction to the cult of personality forming around him is a blunt cry of "Confound it, you idiots!" which means not that you shouldn't want to know about a philosopher, lest you embarass him by emphasizing personal style, but more -- why are you not able to think about a philosopher as a living person without turning her into a caricature of herself?

Precisely what he is trying to avoid here appears in his other talk about surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment having the homology of desire -- precisely the problem he has with public images is the emphasis it places on philosophy without philosophy, precisely the way one seeks cybersex as sex without the sex-act. His realization, unlike Derrida's, admits its contingency on the reaction, admits that he didn't originally think it would even be necessary. His role as a philosopher, when he sees people coming to him as a brilliant thinker who will tell leftists finally "what to do," he sees as to react by making these people ask themselves to what extent such requests are even legitimate, why they might have such needs to begin with. His public image complements this with a public suicide, and an artificial image of himself on the ground after having leapt a flight of stairs. The image of his playing dead is not the black nothingness of a prohibitive warning, as in Derrida, but rather as the aftereffect of an insult, a rejection of flattery. The absence of an image still by its very being named can't deny its status of existing as an image for others, not the same as this image of something - of suicide. In fact it's more insulting to have nothing.

Ultimately, though, both Derrida and Zizek share animosity towards the idea of the passing fad, the ironic sitcom of the real. What we are lacking in popular culture is the ability to take anything seriously. We are afraid of the implications behind any move we might make and so we choose, in the name of not tarnishing reputations, not to say anything at all. Rather than what we fear as weight we prefer cartoons of weight, and to make our impotence more palatable we express it as a joke, as if self-awareness already is articulated freedom. But one cannot have chosen not to be in freedom, and so we still fail to say anything meaningdul when we make a joke of discrimination, of class oppression, in order to give the appearance that we are able to somehow disengage from our conditions simply by having a basic awareness of them. We replace any decisive action with ironic remarks and with style -- I still don't know if I understand how style can possibly have weight so long as it is measured against a distinction from underpinning theoretical content (Nietzsche, anyone?). And irony is so pervasive that even the deepest suffering can become a trinket of its amusement. We think that we bequeath fair treatment to the suffering person so long as she is able to address us colloquially with an affirmation of her satirization. In this way we miss the point of the morbid, as an impetus to challenge whatever conditions result in it. More important and less understood than the sheer morbidity is the reasoning behind its appearance in art. Why does the Zizek film end with him throwing himself down a flight of stairs? Well, his other option was what, to end his talk on the artificiality and insincerity of public image by waving goodbye? Sorry adoring fans, I'll deproblematize your adoration some other time. For now I have to go enjoy my champagne and the idle preening of small talk with the film producers. Life goes on.

The problem is that this fear of weight does not itself even indicate any real object around which the satire orients itself -- the elementary definition of the real, for Zizek, is "death which resists symbolization," the negative that resists symbolization -- and that, stated as such, is absolutely meaningless. For example, there is no "real difference" between the liberal and conservative camps insofar as there is not a definition of that difference which does not already originate from the liberal or conservative side; at most, positively, there is a "difference from." And yet this "difference from," weightless as it is, carries even greater and more insidious forms of the weight which is barring free possibilities for change -- because we do not have the trite but firmly established vocabulary for change that we do for the status quo, and the status quo is becoming global capitalism. Still we claim a so-called society of tolerance and free choice, and still we enforce the injunction to ENJOY which is even more pervasive than the injunction simply to DO. The alleged postmodern individual appeals to a basic humanity which has been recovered after a loss of the meaning, a loss of the real, but these appeals carry all the same and even further restrictions on our behavior -- we must tolerate even the petty sitcoms which ease their nausea lest we risk social alienation. This constitutes an authority which precisely disallows any opposition in its denial that it itself is even an authority. It denies that real radical change, expansion of vocabularies for articulating lack of freedom, and indeed real social tolerance would require us to make any compromises in our comfortable patterns of etiquette, even the etiquette of ironic self-abnegation!, at all.

God will come and wash away our tattoos and all the cocaine

2006-08-25T19:41:00.001-04:00

Woke up in Pittsburgh early this morning after twelve hours of sleep. Breathed in air. Attic windows illuminate brick houses, metal roofing washed iridescent with rust and rain. Houses crowded so elegantly, distant pines spread across the distant mountains walling us into Sharpesburg. Tea outside for breakfast, the Zenith for lunch. My cousin Brian suggesting the city is "paradise, under deconstruction," noting how the poorest parts of the town lack a single grocery store, yet never are wanting for the spires of Catholic churches. And men who bartend and hunt deer will refuse neat scotch to dirty niggers, and angsty chickenwire art spins slowly, suspended from the ceilings of antique shops. All the architecture has always already been defaced by graffiti here, dust ignited neon under bridges, and everywhere an unfaded revelry of names humming in cacophonous blue and red beneath the traffic, indicating a population forged entirely in neglect like steel. I alternate between reading Machiavelli's "The Prince" and de Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince." I befriend a girl with a pink mohawk and a jump rope. I run my fingers along our halls of stained glass and peeled wallpaper, stucco Greek doorways, dried flowers pinned everywhere. In the evening we sit outside on concrete stairs, overdressed for the poor part of town. And I start drinking blueberry Stolichnaya and I grow aware that the heart may yet awaken from its sleeping.

Agemo's Hoops

2006-08-21T05:46:00.001-04:00

Ed is a 34-year old man who lives in La Mirada, CA. Originally from Taipei, Ed is an unemployed market/financial analyst. His interests include high fidelity audio, the San Francisco Giants, epistemology, and Tao. Ed enjoys reading Murakami, Hume, Merleau-Ponty, Mencius, LaoTzu, SunTzu, Magazines about gadgets/cars/stereos. Friends are pressuring him to marry his current girlfriend. Ed has been viewing my Friendster profile.

I find the prospect of knowing who looks at my Friendster profile, when and how often they do so, pretty creepy. This is part of the reasoning behind my overall conclusion -- Friendster (and to a slightly lesser extent, Myspace & Facebook) is/are combining with 4:00 AM to destroy something essential to the fabric of the universe. And yet I continue to make use of these websites' services, while Rupert Murdoch looks on.

How could I let this happen? I think the problem here is aptly summed up in a selection from this "Ed" character's profile. Given that, by posting his information on Friendster, Ed effectively makes the information public knowledge, I do not have any internal qualms about reproducing said information here in order to make my point. As usual, the only part that really terrifies me is the way his beautiful, white-stockinged girlfriend is awkward, immobile beneath his embrace, which holds as one would a treasured thing that otherwise evades us entirely.

ABOUT ME:

Pensive, introspective, uncaring, aloof, unpolished, sleepy, uninterested, deductive, accurate, debilitated, meandering, not to the point, day dreaming, holistic, Chinese, noodle lover, insatiable appetite, always broke, anti-social, hates phones, love etnie sandals, cold, starved, spoiled, dejected, rejected, humiliated, objectified, assumed, senile, no flavor, anti-authoritative, anti-establishment, anti-religion, anti-affiliation, anti-sensationalistic, bilingual, chaotic, deprived, sentimental, regretful, strategic, anti-hand lotion, anti-beauty products, anti-art for art's sake, epistomlogical, phenomenological, humanistic, stubborn, insightful, uncommunicative, unexpressive, uncontrollable, unmotivated, undomesticated, under educated, not pliable, unmaleable, unassimliated, reductionistic, underappreciated, underrated, under dog, prefers boxers, hates sox, hates suits, hates ties, hates saturated oil, likes oil paintings, dislike oil spills, environmentally minded but not environmentally active, semi political, semi libertarian, semi leftist, pro choice, pro education, no war, screw social security, universal sufferage, uninitiative, plays fair, drives fast, speaks slow, bad penmanship, fast typer, eloquent writer, disdainful, hates euphemisms, hates to make promises, black sheep, scape goat, misunderstood, misinterpreted, emphasizes fundamentals, existential, nihilistic, never used drugs, (seeks) humility,

Even though no one has ever asked

2006-08-11T14:45:00.001-04:00

I can swim like the others only I have a better memory than
the others. I have not forgotten my former inability to swim.
But since I have not forgotten it my ability to swim is of no
avail and I cannot swim after all.

Kafka

Medicine bottle collection on the windowsill --

2006-08-11T01:12:00.001-04:00

LEVINAS: One has to respond to one's right to be, not by referring to some abstract and anonymous law, or judicial entity, but because of one's fear for the Other. My being-in-the-world or my 'place in the sun,' my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing? Pascal's 'my place in the sun' marks the beginning of the image of the usurpation of the whole earth. A fear for all the violence and murder my existing might generate, in spite of its conscious and intentional innocence. A fear which reaches back past my 'self-consciousness' in spite of whatever moves are made towards a bonne conscience by a pure perseverance in being. It is the fear of occupying someone else's place with the Da of my Dasein; it is the inability to occupy a place, a profound utopia.

DEBEAUVOIR: Many of the faults for which women are reproached – mediocrity, laziness, frivolity, servility – simply express the fact that their horizon is closed. It is said that woman is sensual, she wallows in immanence; but she has first been shut up in it. The harem slave feels no morbid passion for rose preserves and perfumed baths: she has to kill time. When woman suffocates in a dull gynaeceum – brothel or middle-class home – she is bound to take refuge in comfort and well-being; besides that, if she eagerly seeks sexual pleasure, it is very often because she is deprived of it. Sexually unsatisfied, doomed to male crudeness, "condemned to masculine ugliness," she finds consolation in creamy sauces, heady wines, velvets, the caress of water, of sunshine, of a woman friend, of a young lover. If she seems to man so "physical" a creature, it is because her situation leads her to attach extreme important to her animal nature. The call of the flesh is no louder in her than in the male, but she catches its least murmurs and amplifies them. Sexual pleasure, like rending pain, represents the stunning triumph of the immediate; in the violence of the instant, the future and the universe are denied; what lies outside the carnal flame is nothing; for the brief moment of this apotheosis, woman is no longer mutilated and frustrated. But, once again, she values these triumphs of immanence only because immanence is her lot. (603)

Okay.

So I'm going to try to summarize my criticisms of De Beauvoir's text a little. First, I think I should establish that her argument is styled something like this --

a) The problem, most basically, is a problem with the abstract category of identity that makes somebody a "woman."

b) Inherent to this category is a reactive and passive, solipsistic and narcissistic cult of self which encloses the person in what De Beauvoir establishes as a "situation" which prevents her from being free, whatever that may mean, and from being autonomous (economically, psychologically, whatev) enough to make her own place in the world.

c) The way to solve the problems associated with this category is to disengage from the situation of being a woman. Part of this disengagement would involve the understanding that this essential & abstract concept "woman" does not really bind us as a gender -- we need to distinguish, then, between "women," who have no potential to change, and "females," who can evade the necessity of the category of being a "woman."

d) Here De Beauvoir actually spends a lot of time explaining why women are unable to really establish a community between themselves and other women -- because every action they make, so long as they are women, remains determined by the expectations of the male gaze.

Right. but here is the problem:

e) Since we don't really have anywhere to begin with establishing an autonomous mit-sein composed of women without reverting to the reactive roles, to a greater or lesser extent to break free of the man's rein involves adopting the dominant values within a system that has primarily been established by men.

She seems to me to be concerned to detach herself from women in general, which is fine, but also to locate herself in a place that will allow chauvinist critics of feminism to feel some sort of common ground with her. In the meantime this will involve, in the text, long encyclopaedic descriptions of the way women fail. "She looks at herself too much to see anything; she understands in others only what she recognizes as like herself in them; whatever is not germane to her own case, her own history, remains outside her comprehension." The whole thing, ironically, reeks of misogyny -- keeping in mind her relationship with Sartre -- and as I remarked to Ben last night, reminds me of the way a father would degrade and insult his son in order to spur the son onto something higher. I'm ultimately really grateful that this text exists, as opposed to no text, but it certainly could have been done without either repeating the passive habits of behavior that allow women to become oppressed to begin with or merely appropriating the behavior of the oppressors.

Now, the issue I have with the Levinas quotation in relation to all of this -- well, first note that in every giving there is also a receiving and in every receiving there is also a giving. The problem with presuming to take that much responsibility for the Other's mortality is that it runs the risk of depriving the Other precisely of their own responsibility for it -- thusly their own ability to change it. And I think it is that feeling of unjustifiable guilt that has allowed, say, women to continue putting their own best interests aside for the sake of the men they want in their lives, Christians to put their best interests aside for the sake of God, which in turn allows for their lives to be more and more controlled. I should mention that Levinas is very religious. Anyway, to respond to what you said, about semen staining the mountaintops -- I love the conceit, right, but theoretically speaking it isn't exactly men who are doing the usurping, who historically have done it. It's white, property-owning men. All one would have to do then to be worthy of feeling this sort of idolized guilt is fall into one of those three categories (cf. Solomon's post on my wall) -- am I white? Do I own property? Am I male?

Now, we might want to think about issues with private property, and race or even gender as a social construct. But we should be able to realize that guilt in-itself, except as a bare motivation to self-criticism (which I don't think most guilt is) is not the answer. Nor is coddling the oppressed class. Ben was talking about how, when he was reading The Second Sex, he grew pretty pessimistic about the possibilities of human relationship insofar as she encyclopaedically lays out the ways in which one human being can dominate another -- noting that even the most earnest care and attention can be an insidious form of this -- Christian charity, right. So... I'm speaking really generally, and even if I were speaking more clearly, I'd eventually just start writing a dissertation, so I'm going to end it here. There's a scene in the Zizek documentary where Zizek is on a panel, and one of the people who is also on the panel stands up and says "Okay -- so I really like Zizek, and, well, he's probably got the highest I.Q. of anyone in the room -- I'd bet money on that -- still -- there are --- well, he's probably been speaking at least three times as much as any of us here."

By the way, what the hell is up with I.Q.? Srsly.

Confessions of a Feminazi

2006-06-16T00:02:00.003-04:00

"I think this reason why girls don't do well on multiple choice tests goes all the way back to the Bible, all the way back to Genesis, Adam and Eve. God said, 'All right, Eve, multiple choice or multiple orgasms, what's it going to be?' And we all know what was chosen." [Rush Limbaugh]

Rush Limbaugh is host of the most listened to radio talk show in the United States, with an estimated audience between 13 and 20 million listeners weekly. The show has been known to garner calls from such influential, conservative politicians as Vice President Dick Cheney.

Last night I was thinking about how, whenever I write in a journal, it's generally addressed to a dominant subject who on some level, I aim to gain the recognition and approval, or admiration of. April phrased the writer's position in Hegel's master-slave dialectic as one of the slave, and ultimately this is good, because the writer or artist gets indirect recognition through her or his works. I think part of this involves letting the form and the content of the world cleave evenly into the slavish and the lordly. For, while there's no way around the vulnerable, other-oriented structure essential to the written language, the tone of what's written can certainly oscillate between one that is desperately vying for attention, such that what's being discussed becomes almost irrelevant, and one that is more confidently engaged with issues – ultimately, self-addressed, like all truly scholarly work. And how strange, that writing should appeal to others more powerfully in proportion to its being self-addressed! The difference is that leisurely sense of play which must exist to meaningfully deal with the realm of ideas.

Now, this is related to a more general problem of lifestyle that I worry about – if this conceptual war, or war in principle, against shallow attention-seeking bleeds into any action we might take, or make, then does that mean that there is something essentially oppressive about romantic desire? Let me make the steps between that leap more clear. Is it possible to be involved with someone romantically without resorting to that sheerly other-oriented behavior that so traditionally leads women to be, or feel incapable of, a substantive societal or political life on a general par with men? To provide a feasible model, and because the word “romantic” is ultimately so expendable, I'm going to say No. To do this involves defining romance on the one hand, as the experience of passive upsweep as your love (not lust) for somebody overtakes you, on the traditionally but not exclusively feminine side. Simultaneously and alternatively, romance works as the action taken by the traditionally masculine role, something which involves earning a worth which allows one to receive affection from the object of desire, and earning this by precisely overwhelming her . The 'romance,' as it were, is always going to possess this structure – the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic can again be used here to say that the feminine has her immediate needs sated by the masculine, who receives indirect recognition, by way of substantive action, as opposed to the woman's direct recognition, by way of immediate physicality. Thus woman is “master,” man is “slave.” Not only does a patriarchal Christian conception of chivalry and selflessness give the slave the upper hand here, but even the more reasonable Hegelian model claims that, ultimately, the slave who achieves recognition indirectly through the fruits of her or his labors is more free than the master, who as such grows utterly dependent upon what the slave can provide.

I do need to read and think more about how Hegel moves from this asymmetry to a mutual recognition before my conclusions are set in stone, but it is clear that the traditional romance outlined above will oppress the woman insofar as she can only occupy this space wherein she ought be happy so long as her immediate needs are satisfied. And part of the difficulty, using the analogy, is that the slave does have the privilege of being aware of the entire structure of the relationship, for she or he produces what satiates the master's needs through work (labor? action?), through earning money to buy dinner, say, while the master merely is led out the door to the restaurant table. Receiving such things well is a difficult art and a dangerous one to practice exclusively.

In the traditional heterosexual relationship, the female, treated as master, generally does not recognize herself as such, in the usual sense of the word. Because of our desire for mutual recognition, or at least related to this desire, we too easily take liberty and assume that the other feels the way we do, and furthermore that this is just how all love feels when in reality the other is watching this play unfold and grows in danger of assuming that the simple, passive immediacy is just how women feel about love, which of course is, on his side, mostly a result of the asymmetrical fetishization of woman as flesh and all of the aesthetic judgments which, despite their complete relativity, have been essentialized so as to say that the female form is “just more beautiful.” This narrative is never free of some hetero-normative subtext, no matter who voices it. And the process of fetishizing another person's being-as-flesh causes problems when it leads to trying to understand their desires as they are inertly expressed in the flesh, as can be seen clearly by the eyes of the other. This touches upon the well-known feminist argument that even our basic epistemology is founded upon a conception of knowledge as sight that not only goes along with a conception of woman as body, as object of sight, but also does an injustice to the knower's ability to experience himself as body. Think of the judgment men so often make that a woman is romantically or sexually interested in him simply because a) her appearance “appeals” to him, as it were, and b) she does not actively resist the performative actions he takes to embody his own desire, actions which are, in the traditional role of slave, an anticipation of the woman/master's needs so that the slave himself can gain the liberty he desires. If she accepts the dinner out, a gift which is supposed to be offered, and indeed precisely is offered in freedom on the part of the giver, oftentimes if she even accepts the man's company and conversation, she becomes aware of herself as in the awkward position of being expected to feel as if she has received some great privilege, and as such now bears a certain romantic responsibility to the giver. The woman is only really recognizing and relating to the other when she, too, is able to freely take action, when she asserts her subjectivity as more than the inert fleshly recipient of desire, and as such, all too often the only thing the man is seeing is his own desire, projected into the features that form the actual visceral content of his desire. No relationship really happens in the traditional heterosexual romantic power-struggle.

I believe that, at base, this situation is only able to continue at all because of the false consciousness a woman develops when she finds her needs for mutual recognition seems to have no other outlet than the fetishization of her own body, and comes to believe that self-actualization results from the “I” molding its body into what it wants aesthetically, which is really, of course, only the internalization of what whoever it is that she wants wants out of her, as object. Ultimately what I think is the teleological goal here is an efficient way to produce the married, monogamous, childbearing couple, obviously something useful to a greater society looking for a higher population, or new workers for its economy. Now, the Disneyland attitude so many children in middle-class America are brought up with disagrees – its claim is that some other more lofty self-actualization is the goal of their romantic relationship, with that structure in society perhaps only as a dutiful consequence of romance. But all one need do is travel a little, or indeed ask a member of a more impoverished economic class, to make this deflowered utilitarian aspect of the romantic relationship strikingly apparent. And where we turn to our own movement past the Industrial Revolution, our economic independence, or our world population problems, as proof that this is not essentially the goal of the heterosexual romance, I am confident to say that insofar as the dynamic still exists despite these things, it is for the sake of a) a new goal on the part of those oppressing, but more tragically, more crucially, out of b) sheer emotivist ignorance of what the dynamic really is, what it must entail, as I outlined above, how essentially inextricable from those exclusionary and power-laden roles the concept of 'romance' is.

Where we might look for love as an egalitarian friendship, founded upon a condition of mutual recognition, we need another name entirely, and certainly not before the ones who have so much to lose learn how to analyze their Disneyland lifestyles, and are able to define their terms. This must involve a radical revaluation of gender and reproductive roles and priorities in society – i.e., are we in this over-populated, orphanage-filled, purchased-at-Wal-Mart world really fulfilling ourselves by pursuing those two related and omnipresent goals of material wealth and biological children to be supported by this wealth? How is the picket-fence that most heterosexual women and men have, on some level, hardwired into their life's ambition going to further either a personal or a global good?

Genuine relationship must be fostered within a condition of leisure, of not at all safety but precisely as a sublimely trivial play. This attitude is so often cast aside by a frenzied set of sexual scruples and romantic longings which are eager to classify the other as either a) an object acceptable for some predecided romantic role, or b) an object unacceptable for such a role. In my view, what we know as love is composed of physical intimacy (which is only a ritual exception to the
arbitrary Victorian norm of prudish scrupulousness), sexual intimacy (which, in the ideal sense, is impossible when one is wearing all those anxious hetero-normative blinders, tinted lenses, and the like), and friendship. None of these, except for the purely symbolic act of physical nearness, is really possible within that dynamic of romance, which is left as a surreptitiously oppressive structure which has been artlessly sheathed in ritual.

"Excepting one whom I love still more,” answered the voluntary beggar. “You yourself are good, and even better than a cow, O Zarathustra.”

“Away, away with you, you wicked flatterer!” Zarathustra cried with malice. “Why do you corrupt me with such praise and honeyed flattery? Away, away from me!” he cried once more and brandished his stick at the affectionate beggar, who ran away quickly.

Always in life we all must make this mistake.

2006-05-26T23:09:00.000-04:00

My father takes me to buy three twelve-packs of Heineken's worth of metallic acrylic paints last night, tells me stories about his World-War II Veteran father taking him to buy new guitar strings when he himself was eighteen, when he, unlike myself, had a stress-related ulcer in his stomach.