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
Showing posts with label politics and philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics and philosophy. Show all posts
6.11.09
29.8.09
Follow-Up on George Sodini Note Below
Justin, thanks for your comments. You write:
A. On Schwarzenegger --
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.
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 --
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/p
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 --
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.
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/p
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.
14.8.09
George Sodini
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
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.feministi
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.
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
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.feministi
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.
20.6.09
Sex Tourism in Thailand
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:
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:
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:
- 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
19.2.09
*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.
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.
17.2.09
the beastly, the black, the sinful, the irrational, the sexual, the necessary, or the mortal
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?
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?
2.2.09
The New World
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.
14.7.08
We are warm in our hidden room down here
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.
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.
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.
22.4.07
On Pornography and Prostitution
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.
26.2.07
Lipstick I'd wear for 1 million years.
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.
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.
25.10.06
A PRELUDE TO THE LETTING GO
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
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
27.8.06
I forgot the password.
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.
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.
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