Here is a great article discussing Google, it's published by Wired and really well written by Steven Levy.
My friends sometimes chuckle a little when I tell them how important it is that they get a good sense of how easily they can be "googled." I try to tell them that it's in their best interest to create as best they can the conditions where they are the first person that pops-up when someone searches their name.
I am quoting Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire here (45):
"What needs to be addressed, instead, is precisely the production of locality, that is, the social machines that create and recreate the identities and differences that are understood as local. The differences of locality are neither preexisting nor natural but rather effects of a regime of production."
I think that many folks, my friends included, resist the idea that they be easier to find because they harbor a certain false sense of anonymity such that what is most valuable is this false sense of privacy. What they fail to realize is that interiority and the ability to be triangulated are not at odds with one another.
Negri and Hardt, I think, nail it when they state:
"Globalization, like localization, should be understood instead as a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really homogenization and heterogenization. ... It is false, in any case, to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire. ... The globalization or deterritorialization operated by the imperial machine is not in fact opposed to localization or reterritorialization, but rather sets in play mobile and modulating circuits of differentiation and identification. The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and thus masks the enemy." (45)
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Toward a More Sensible Model of Addiction and Policy
(The following is from an email exchange with my friend, Hannah. Thanks, Hannah, for getting me inspired!)
I think that both addiction studies and decriminalization arguments benefit enormously from what the data says, and we're not really getting novel data so much as we're simply listening to what the participants are saying and trying to act as translators for everyone else. What we're saying is that people aren't waking up one day, typically as young teens or tweens, and saying to themselves, "I gotta get some illicit narcotics." It's not the case that people begin using drugs because they are seeking the drugs or the effects of ingesting the drugs.
Rather, the drug use comes to them. The vehicle of transmission always is a social medium: a family member introduces the practice of drug use to the child; a new kid at a new school can't fit in with anyone but the kids that are using drugs and in so hooking up with these kids the new kid now has something that makes him popular; maybe it's a summer job and the teen's boss told her that using meth will enable her to get more work done in a day.
Right now we have this emphasis on addiction as a personal disease (this is when the model for addiction is most coherent, there are, of course, many informal definitions that influence policy makers). It may be true that there are people that are physically dependent upon substances of abuse, where their body chemistry simply requires a supplement of dopamine in the brain; but, the truth of the matter is that these chemically dependent people are, at best, 10% of the people in all of the literature on addiction.
One can guess that a majority of drug users are never even included in the study of drug use (maybe because they only used once or twice); the nature of drug use networks is such that they are a hidden population because drug use is illegal. The result is that most people that are included in the addiction literature are not quite accurate representations of the whole drug using population; they're not accurate representations because the primary organ in society that senses drug users is the criminal justice system (again, because drug use is a moral crime). This situation has serious ramifications on society.
One result is that we continue to have a terrible sample population upon which to base our theories of drug use and addiction. This means that we have really unintelligible models for understanding drug use and addiction (such that even in the best case scenario, where people accept that addiction is a disease, the disease is not really a physical ailment but a pathological inability to make moral decisions - just to be clear, morality has no biological basis, it's strictly a mental capacity). The last element of our trifecta, then, is that we have really terrible policy toward this phenomenon called drug use and addiction. The policy seeks to (this is really when policy is at it's most coherent, which is of course rare)...seeks to balance the impossible: that we can develop a pill (NIDA and NIH are the two agencies that really pursue this most aggressively) that will cure addiction, or maybe develop some biological mechanism that would predict who will develop a chemical dependence - and let's keep in mind that at best that would be 10% of the minority of the population we've ever encountered. And on the other hand our current policy tries to develop the best moralistic (morality formalized and codified is law) solution to the problem - to be clear the problem is a moral one, a failure to choose the right thing.
Why won't these work together? Because there is no biological basis in making choices, if there were we could make a pill that enhanced decision making, right (and this is how some people in the field talk); so if we could make a pill that helped you make better choices we'd then have to concede that free will is not real because what we thought was reasoning and rationality was really a math equation. Of course, if free will doesn't exist, then we really can't put nobody in jail for making bad choices. Maybe we could put society on trial for not giving these people access to the substances that enable them to make the right choices, but this is clearly nonsense and an undesirable view (that there is no free will).
So our paper is trying to point out that this emphasis on morality and biology is missing out on the big picture: that people use drugs and they do so primarily in social settings. 99% of the time substances of abuse are consumed in intimate networks (i.e. family settings like a cook out with beer, a group of drug buddies in the fraternity, coworkers on the highways delivering groceries to grocery stores); only in the worst case scenarios, at the end of the drug using trajectory, does the criminal justice system encounter drug users: when they're stealing to get the drugs that former friends will no longer lend to them, when they're so consumed with drink that they no longer can live with their families, and so on.
If you look at drug use networks you see that they are very conservative: they are completely dependent upon mutual trust. Once someone breaks that trust, by ceasing to reciprocate in one form or another in that relationship (i.e. doesn't pay for the drugs in a timely manner, drank the whole bottle themselves, or quits using the substance that they once shared using and so now suspiciously might be a narc), this is the moment when drug use patterns fracture and we can predict how likely one is to relapse or cease to use substances of abuse.
I think that both addiction studies and decriminalization arguments benefit enormously from what the data says, and we're not really getting novel data so much as we're simply listening to what the participants are saying and trying to act as translators for everyone else. What we're saying is that people aren't waking up one day, typically as young teens or tweens, and saying to themselves, "I gotta get some illicit narcotics." It's not the case that people begin using drugs because they are seeking the drugs or the effects of ingesting the drugs.
Rather, the drug use comes to them. The vehicle of transmission always is a social medium: a family member introduces the practice of drug use to the child; a new kid at a new school can't fit in with anyone but the kids that are using drugs and in so hooking up with these kids the new kid now has something that makes him popular; maybe it's a summer job and the teen's boss told her that using meth will enable her to get more work done in a day.
Right now we have this emphasis on addiction as a personal disease (this is when the model for addiction is most coherent, there are, of course, many informal definitions that influence policy makers). It may be true that there are people that are physically dependent upon substances of abuse, where their body chemistry simply requires a supplement of dopamine in the brain; but, the truth of the matter is that these chemically dependent people are, at best, 10% of the people in all of the literature on addiction.
One can guess that a majority of drug users are never even included in the study of drug use (maybe because they only used once or twice); the nature of drug use networks is such that they are a hidden population because drug use is illegal. The result is that most people that are included in the addiction literature are not quite accurate representations of the whole drug using population; they're not accurate representations because the primary organ in society that senses drug users is the criminal justice system (again, because drug use is a moral crime). This situation has serious ramifications on society.
One result is that we continue to have a terrible sample population upon which to base our theories of drug use and addiction. This means that we have really unintelligible models for understanding drug use and addiction (such that even in the best case scenario, where people accept that addiction is a disease, the disease is not really a physical ailment but a pathological inability to make moral decisions - just to be clear, morality has no biological basis, it's strictly a mental capacity). The last element of our trifecta, then, is that we have really terrible policy toward this phenomenon called drug use and addiction. The policy seeks to (this is really when policy is at it's most coherent, which is of course rare)...seeks to balance the impossible: that we can develop a pill (NIDA and NIH are the two agencies that really pursue this most aggressively) that will cure addiction, or maybe develop some biological mechanism that would predict who will develop a chemical dependence - and let's keep in mind that at best that would be 10% of the minority of the population we've ever encountered. And on the other hand our current policy tries to develop the best moralistic (morality formalized and codified is law) solution to the problem - to be clear the problem is a moral one, a failure to choose the right thing.
Why won't these work together? Because there is no biological basis in making choices, if there were we could make a pill that enhanced decision making, right (and this is how some people in the field talk); so if we could make a pill that helped you make better choices we'd then have to concede that free will is not real because what we thought was reasoning and rationality was really a math equation. Of course, if free will doesn't exist, then we really can't put nobody in jail for making bad choices. Maybe we could put society on trial for not giving these people access to the substances that enable them to make the right choices, but this is clearly nonsense and an undesirable view (that there is no free will).
So our paper is trying to point out that this emphasis on morality and biology is missing out on the big picture: that people use drugs and they do so primarily in social settings. 99% of the time substances of abuse are consumed in intimate networks (i.e. family settings like a cook out with beer, a group of drug buddies in the fraternity, coworkers on the highways delivering groceries to grocery stores); only in the worst case scenarios, at the end of the drug using trajectory, does the criminal justice system encounter drug users: when they're stealing to get the drugs that former friends will no longer lend to them, when they're so consumed with drink that they no longer can live with their families, and so on.
If you look at drug use networks you see that they are very conservative: they are completely dependent upon mutual trust. Once someone breaks that trust, by ceasing to reciprocate in one form or another in that relationship (i.e. doesn't pay for the drugs in a timely manner, drank the whole bottle themselves, or quits using the substance that they once shared using and so now suspiciously might be a narc), this is the moment when drug use patterns fracture and we can predict how likely one is to relapse or cease to use substances of abuse.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
The Discursive Practice That Is Addiction
I am finishing up edits on a paper about meth addiction (hopefully someone will publish it, 'cause it's great) and I keep coming back to a joke I heard a long time ago. I really like this joke because it points out a very powerful truth about identity formation and I think illustrates the difficulty one encounters when trying to move away from an identity. Our paper is about identity migration in addicts.
A man walks into a bar. Sits down. Orders a drink. Looks kinda sour.
Bartender says, "What's the matter, buddy?"
Man says, "I been building bridges for 18 years of my life. What would you call me?"
Bartender says, "A bridge builder, right?"
Man says, "Yeah. But y'know, you have sex with one goat and they what do they call ya?"
A man walks into a bar. Sits down. Orders a drink. Looks kinda sour.
Bartender says, "What's the matter, buddy?"
Man says, "I been building bridges for 18 years of my life. What would you call me?"
Bartender says, "A bridge builder, right?"
Man says, "Yeah. But y'know, you have sex with one goat and they what do they call ya?"
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Social Bonds in the Initiation of Methamphetamine Use
I presented this at the 7th Annual Suburban Studies Conference at Kennesaw State University last week. In a nut shell:
Boshears_Suburban Conference 2009
- underlying assumptions about the nature of the "self" are greatly shaping how the phenomenon called "addiction" is discussed
- an expanded notion of selfhood allows us to understand how addiction, as a discursive practice, can be possible
- issues of relapse and how to effect drug use cessation may be better understood when considering drug use cessation as suicide
- reciprocity is central to identity formation both in drug use initiation as well as necessary in drug use cessation.
Boshears_Suburban Conference 2009
Torture Is Our Legacy
It's as though having a conscience was something superfluous and, perhaps, a detrimental quality for those that would run this country. That is the take away message from the latest details of the recently publicized torture documents.
I now want to know how the people of Germany have come to understand themselves after the Nuremberg Trials, etc. Time to re-watch The Marriage of Maria Braun.
I am currently reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and I am severely saddened by the similarities between what these Bush Administrators are saying and what Eichmann and the other Nazis said about their role in executing atrocities against their fellow human beings.
Fascists, man. I live in a country that can more easily imagine the entire planet being destroyed by an asteroid (unless Bruce Willis has something to say about it), than it can imagine America not torturing or lying or spying on its own people.
I now want to know how the people of Germany have come to understand themselves after the Nuremberg Trials, etc. Time to re-watch The Marriage of Maria Braun.
I am currently reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and I am severely saddened by the similarities between what these Bush Administrators are saying and what Eichmann and the other Nazis said about their role in executing atrocities against their fellow human beings.
Fascists, man. I live in a country that can more easily imagine the entire planet being destroyed by an asteroid (unless Bruce Willis has something to say about it), than it can imagine America not torturing or lying or spying on its own people.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Oh Racism, Classist Be Thy Name
I'm having breakfast this morning, listening to V-103 ("The People's Station" as they call it here in Atlanta), as I am wont to do. I love listening to the "Frank & Wanda in the Morning" show. I used to love listening to NPR, but I gotta level with you: Frank & Wanda - they're funnier. Those of you that aren't from Atlanta, hell, most of y'all that are in Atlanta and are of a similar background to me probably don't listen to Frank & Wanda and don't know the joys of "Girl Talk with Ms. Sophia" where I get to learn the important news: which contemporary-urban (pop) star is having what legal problems, etc. V-103, Frank & Wanda, they are in many ways an important organ in how people in Atlanta think. If you're a rapper from the South and you want to make it big, you gotta get on V-103. If you're a minister and you want to expand form the small-time congregation to a mega church (probably in Conyers), you gotta get a segment on V-103. Because V-103 is supposed to be today's vox populi.
But I know, and you probably know as well, that V-103 is not really a radio station with "the People" in mind. At least not the People in that proletariat, working-class, don't own a house that's worth more than a quarter of a million dollars, I didn't go to college, I've been unemployed for six months just like most of my neighbors. V-103 ain't referring to these people. They're referring to someone else and today I was reminded of that in a pretty ugly way when Frank Ski took a moment to deliver one of his little sermons.
Frank today wanted "us" to take a moment this morning and think about something big that he knew was going to happen in Detroit soon. Immediately I started thinking about the riots in the 60s. "Sure, Frank, people are going to start making a fuss now that the economy has gotten really outta hand and the people living and working in MI are really going to be up the creek," I thought to myself. But I was pretty well disappointed when I heard Frank say, "These people working in the factories have been making too much money.... The industry just couldn't innovate...."
That's right: the reason why the economy is in the shitter is because the workers are making too much money. This isn't a new line of thinking, in fact, this is the history of the United States. Frank Ski, at best, is ironically Uncle Tomming us today, at worst he is deliberately regurgitating the vitriol of the power elite in an effort to further sow discontent and malevolence among those at the bottom of the success ladder. Disgusting, Frank, that you would encourage those at the bottom to fight amongst themselves, for your own amusement, so that you don't have to worry about anyone from the bottom impinging on the material success that you have.
But that's the way those in the popular media are largely playing it. So much so that even Stephen Colbert had to parody it with his "Word of the Week":
Unfortunately, the audience may not be getting the point here: we are being spoon-fed a nonissue with all this corporate bailout talk. Folks from Rush Limbaugh to Congress to even Frank Ski are creating a straw man argument that the super-rich (the power elite) shouldn't be given our tax dollars if all they're going to do is give themselves bonuses and not fix the real problem with their industry: paying the workers well.
What I've yet seen together in the same breath, but certainly in the show or on the same agenda at their meetings is this: "we need to cut back on the excesses of American industry: we need to get Labor Unions to stop unduly controlling how we pay people here, it's bad for competitiveness. Further, we need to close the border with Mexico because they are not only lower wages but they're also dangerous" (I guess because they can't get jobs any more and so a life of crime is the only way to go, maybe the natural state of affairs, 'cause ain't nothing more dangerous than a poor person).
As Tim Wise said, "Do we really believe that the only thing keeping bosses from paying people more in this country is the presence of low-wage, medium-semi-skilled labor from south of this artificial border?" (~5:30):
Tim Wise is pretty great to listen to, and so I'd like to share a full lecture he gave in Seattle a few years back, just follow this link
But I know, and you probably know as well, that V-103 is not really a radio station with "the People" in mind. At least not the People in that proletariat, working-class, don't own a house that's worth more than a quarter of a million dollars, I didn't go to college, I've been unemployed for six months just like most of my neighbors. V-103 ain't referring to these people. They're referring to someone else and today I was reminded of that in a pretty ugly way when Frank Ski took a moment to deliver one of his little sermons.
Frank today wanted "us" to take a moment this morning and think about something big that he knew was going to happen in Detroit soon. Immediately I started thinking about the riots in the 60s. "Sure, Frank, people are going to start making a fuss now that the economy has gotten really outta hand and the people living and working in MI are really going to be up the creek," I thought to myself. But I was pretty well disappointed when I heard Frank say, "These people working in the factories have been making too much money.... The industry just couldn't innovate...."
That's right: the reason why the economy is in the shitter is because the workers are making too much money. This isn't a new line of thinking, in fact, this is the history of the United States. Frank Ski, at best, is ironically Uncle Tomming us today, at worst he is deliberately regurgitating the vitriol of the power elite in an effort to further sow discontent and malevolence among those at the bottom of the success ladder. Disgusting, Frank, that you would encourage those at the bottom to fight amongst themselves, for your own amusement, so that you don't have to worry about anyone from the bottom impinging on the material success that you have.
But that's the way those in the popular media are largely playing it. So much so that even Stephen Colbert had to parody it with his "Word of the Week":
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Word - Keeping Our Heads | ||||
| ||||
Unfortunately, the audience may not be getting the point here: we are being spoon-fed a nonissue with all this corporate bailout talk. Folks from Rush Limbaugh to Congress to even Frank Ski are creating a straw man argument that the super-rich (the power elite) shouldn't be given our tax dollars if all they're going to do is give themselves bonuses and not fix the real problem with their industry: paying the workers well.
What I've yet seen together in the same breath, but certainly in the show or on the same agenda at their meetings is this: "we need to cut back on the excesses of American industry: we need to get Labor Unions to stop unduly controlling how we pay people here, it's bad for competitiveness. Further, we need to close the border with Mexico because they are not only lower wages but they're also dangerous" (I guess because they can't get jobs any more and so a life of crime is the only way to go, maybe the natural state of affairs, 'cause ain't nothing more dangerous than a poor person).
As Tim Wise said, "Do we really believe that the only thing keeping bosses from paying people more in this country is the presence of low-wage, medium-semi-skilled labor from south of this artificial border?" (~5:30):
Tim Wise is pretty great to listen to, and so I'd like to share a full lecture he gave in Seattle a few years back, just follow this link
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Readings for 17 December, 2008
The Third Stage of University Education - New York Times: I've said it before and I believe it is true that the nonprofit sector will surprise many as their future preferred employers. I'm also really excite that Obama-Biden want to grow Americorps and Peace Corps - two programs that really get the most bang for the buck. Combine these federally-subsidized service mini-careers with massive public works and the U.S. economy and civil society look promising. Enter Harvard's strategy to create a bridge between retiring executives and the impending leadership vacuum in the nonprofit sector.
I Think I'm Turning Japanese - NewYork Times: I'm moving back to the U.S. in February and I couldn't choose a better time to start buying dollars - 1USD ~ 90JPY, when I arrived last year 1USD~120JPY. So I've basically made an extra 30% recently. Anyhow.... I return to an American economy that is in tatters and about to really start getting Mad Max-y by the summer of 2009; maybe September. The Fed has dropped interest rates to about 0% which is about what I'm getting here with my savings account in Japan. At least that won't feel too weird.
I'm Sure Walt Whitman Wrote About This - Wired: Or maybe it was Emerson? Although I'm not at all a transcendentalist I sure do like those American Transcendentalists (Yes I'm thinking of Song of Myself). The Earth and the Sun seem to be breathing together. I know, I know: it's kinda flaky-sounding to say "We're all part star" but it's a science fact. We interare.
The Rhythm Is Gonna Getcha - Wired: Oh Gloria Estefan! Here's a great example of using your head and not your gun to do the work necessary to draw a bright line in the minds of your community. The insurgency is being fuelled by fundamentalists? Take a page from the book of Kevin Bacon and encourage the local kids to dance it out. Music holds a special place in my heart.
I Think I'm Turning Japanese - NewYork Times: I'm moving back to the U.S. in February and I couldn't choose a better time to start buying dollars - 1USD ~ 90JPY, when I arrived last year 1USD~120JPY. So I've basically made an extra 30% recently. Anyhow.... I return to an American economy that is in tatters and about to really start getting Mad Max-y by the summer of 2009; maybe September. The Fed has dropped interest rates to about 0% which is about what I'm getting here with my savings account in Japan. At least that won't feel too weird.
I'm Sure Walt Whitman Wrote About This - Wired: Or maybe it was Emerson? Although I'm not at all a transcendentalist I sure do like those American Transcendentalists (Yes I'm thinking of Song of Myself). The Earth and the Sun seem to be breathing together. I know, I know: it's kinda flaky-sounding to say "We're all part star" but it's a science fact. We interare.
The Rhythm Is Gonna Getcha - Wired: Oh Gloria Estefan! Here's a great example of using your head and not your gun to do the work necessary to draw a bright line in the minds of your community. The insurgency is being fuelled by fundamentalists? Take a page from the book of Kevin Bacon and encourage the local kids to dance it out. Music holds a special place in my heart.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Readings for 16 December, 2008
I'm back. Many thanks to those of you that periodically drop by here and a thousand pardons, again, for not being able to offer more recently.
Secondary Education as Birth Control - Nature: I've mentioned earlier that children are viewed as social security in developing countries and that children are often abducted and forced into military service. Periodically the argument is put forward that education will solve, seemingly, all problems. One trend that seems pretty convincing is that the more educated women become the more likely these women are to delay the birth of their first child. Delaying this first birth is crucial in a number of ways; for one, there is a reduced strain on what are already, typically, strained health care systems. More importantly, there is less poverty when women delay the birth of their first child because these women are able to pursue careers (not necessarily Murphy Brown-type careers) with minimal damage to their society. Your typical first year Sociology or Anthropology student should be able to tell you about that one section of their primer where they learned that, in certain South American cultures at a certain moment in our recent history, teen mothers did not even name their child until the first year because that child was too likely to die before the first year was up. Why was this mortality rate so high? Because the mothers were leaving their children unattended at home while they went to work in factories (making products at everyday low prices, no doubt) so that the mother would not be out in the streets. They cannot afford day care and are likely to be without a social system that can provide for this child if they are one of the masses of people leaving the countryside to the cities where they perceive their lives will be better.
The Human Terrain System Doesn't Work - So Sayeth Nature: I agree with Nature here, but they make no case as to why. I will be posting on this topic in the not-too-distant future.
Let Me Use My Mind Enhancing Drugs, Man! - Nature: My ass twitches, just so, whenever I read a manifesto like this one from academics. It's unfair, I know, since I am an academic; but what can I say? These guys begin with a great statement and then miss the boat completely. One of the ways that you know to raise your hackles is when social scientists reference Francis Fukuyama, ADHD research, and make strong statements calling for policy change by using BOLD fonts. The argument begins by discussing a phenomenon they think they understand is occuring on college campuses: they hear that students are using methylphenidate and other amphetamines to enhance their performance in classes. "Good for them," seems to be the authors' argument, "because they are adult enough to realize they can maximize their abilities with these drugs." But, they don't really know that. They don't have evidence that this is what is meant when the students tell them they do this (as someone who recently graduated from college where plenty of kids with money were buying Ritalin and Adderal, I have my doubts about the authors' appreciation of their students' lived experience). They also don't know what the actual mechanism at work is here. ADHD research is the most widely published topic in psychology in the world and they don't know what the disease is. Period. They don't know how these drugs work, they don't know how to measure the effectiveness of the treatments, and they don't know how to collaborate (thus the field continues to churn out garbage where people publish minor modifications to existing work and state that they've developed a new method or scale). So, they call for evidence-based assessments of what might be the benefits of allowing people who don't get prescribed methylphenidate, etc. and what might be the long term problems associated with this usage. I agree that drug laws should be changed, but I disagree with the authors here. Where do they really miss the boat? They don't even address the nature and meaning of being educated. It is assumed that education means "this," and then they proceed to talk about education being enhanced by people feeling more organized or focused. I wouldn't disagree that focus and organization are the lynchpins in successful academic endeavors but I would not also consider you well-educated if all you were really skilled in was organizing and staying on task. But maybe that's beyond the scope of their argument.
Secondary Education as Birth Control - Nature: I've mentioned earlier that children are viewed as social security in developing countries and that children are often abducted and forced into military service. Periodically the argument is put forward that education will solve, seemingly, all problems. One trend that seems pretty convincing is that the more educated women become the more likely these women are to delay the birth of their first child. Delaying this first birth is crucial in a number of ways; for one, there is a reduced strain on what are already, typically, strained health care systems. More importantly, there is less poverty when women delay the birth of their first child because these women are able to pursue careers (not necessarily Murphy Brown-type careers) with minimal damage to their society. Your typical first year Sociology or Anthropology student should be able to tell you about that one section of their primer where they learned that, in certain South American cultures at a certain moment in our recent history, teen mothers did not even name their child until the first year because that child was too likely to die before the first year was up. Why was this mortality rate so high? Because the mothers were leaving their children unattended at home while they went to work in factories (making products at everyday low prices, no doubt) so that the mother would not be out in the streets. They cannot afford day care and are likely to be without a social system that can provide for this child if they are one of the masses of people leaving the countryside to the cities where they perceive their lives will be better.
The Human Terrain System Doesn't Work - So Sayeth Nature: I agree with Nature here, but they make no case as to why. I will be posting on this topic in the not-too-distant future.
Let Me Use My Mind Enhancing Drugs, Man! - Nature: My ass twitches, just so, whenever I read a manifesto like this one from academics. It's unfair, I know, since I am an academic; but what can I say? These guys begin with a great statement and then miss the boat completely. One of the ways that you know to raise your hackles is when social scientists reference Francis Fukuyama, ADHD research, and make strong statements calling for policy change by using BOLD fonts. The argument begins by discussing a phenomenon they think they understand is occuring on college campuses: they hear that students are using methylphenidate and other amphetamines to enhance their performance in classes. "Good for them," seems to be the authors' argument, "because they are adult enough to realize they can maximize their abilities with these drugs." But, they don't really know that. They don't have evidence that this is what is meant when the students tell them they do this (as someone who recently graduated from college where plenty of kids with money were buying Ritalin and Adderal, I have my doubts about the authors' appreciation of their students' lived experience). They also don't know what the actual mechanism at work is here. ADHD research is the most widely published topic in psychology in the world and they don't know what the disease is. Period. They don't know how these drugs work, they don't know how to measure the effectiveness of the treatments, and they don't know how to collaborate (thus the field continues to churn out garbage where people publish minor modifications to existing work and state that they've developed a new method or scale). So, they call for evidence-based assessments of what might be the benefits of allowing people who don't get prescribed methylphenidate, etc. and what might be the long term problems associated with this usage. I agree that drug laws should be changed, but I disagree with the authors here. Where do they really miss the boat? They don't even address the nature and meaning of being educated. It is assumed that education means "this," and then they proceed to talk about education being enhanced by people feeling more organized or focused. I wouldn't disagree that focus and organization are the lynchpins in successful academic endeavors but I would not also consider you well-educated if all you were really skilled in was organizing and staying on task. But maybe that's beyond the scope of their argument.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Deleuze & Confucius?!
Below is a short sample from the third revision of a paper originally published in Interplay: Selected Proceedings from the 4th Annual North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference. Aflague, Jones, Swanson; eds. Marietta: Luxor Media. 2006.
This is where I've been for the past two weeks; I've been preparing this for my writing sample to be considered by Emory's Philosophy department. It's also how I arrived at the name of this blog. Don't worry: it's only a very short sample.
Kudzu Kongzi: A Rhizomatic Zhongyong中庸
Paul Boshears[1]
Does not the East…offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the tree?[2]
The way of heaven and earth can be captured in one phrase: Since events are never duplicated, their production is unfathomable.[3]
If we accept Foucault's position that Anti-Oedipus is primarily an introductory text to non-fascist living, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus should then be first thought of as an educational text. In reconceptualizing the self and its relationship to the world by reconceptualizing desire as meaning production, Anti-Oedipus was thought by its authors as creating an “air sain,” a healthy region that would overcome the tyranny of psychoanalysis. There were unexpected results: some took the text as advocating experimentation in all manners, including drug abuse, thus leading to self-destruction and the opposite of health. Deleuze and Guattari always felt a sense of responsibility for those that took this path.[4] Their schizoanalysis engendered novelty generation, a mode of self-creation that would overcome the tyranny of structuralism by emphasizing the interconnectedness of everything such that no structural boundary can resist constant ebb and flow through its borders; Anti-Oedipus sought to show this as the nature of things. Their emphasis and trust in the co-creative nature of humanity and faith that promoting this will ensure a flourishing human community is shared by the Classical Confucian text, Zhongyong中庸.
To suggest that Confucianism could be understood in any way other than as institutionalized apology and bureaucratic oppression will likely strike the reader as not only odd, but that Confucianism and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari share mutual worldviews is perhaps perverse. In no small part this is due to a fundamental misreading of the texts by the first translators of the Chinese traditions. Primarily these were completed by Christian missionaries who simply had a bias towards teleology and an ontology of fixed identity that had not been the worldview of the Chinese philosophical tradition.[5] With the philosophical translation of Roger Ames and David Hall the reader and text benefit from a radically different Confucius (and China), this is largely due to the translators use of Whitehead’s process theory and their use of the language of both John Dewey and William James.[6] The central concern of Confucianism, then, is not about establishing an unbroken chain of authority but an exploration of how one becomes authoritatively human. Virtuosity is determined in how well one can perform their humanity, a creative process of synthesizing what has come before and harmonizing its contents with the changing world in which we find ourselves.
The elevation of the human being to co-creative status is one of the truly distinctive features of the Zhongyong[7] and it is here that we see the most obvious harmonizing with Deleuze and Guattari's works. The central message of the Zhongyong is to promote an understanding that tian (天), the predominant natural, social, and cultural circumstances shape (ming 命) both the initial human tendencies (xing 性) and overall human development (dao 道); the text then suggests that education (jiao 教) is crucial in the process of self-creation.[8] The primary gift of education is personalization and this transactional process is a creative act as it is, “the realization of the focal self and the field of events – the realization of both the particular and context.”[9] We are told that developing our ability to harmonize the particular with the context is “the great root of the world.”[10] It seems fair to say that the plant growing from the nourishing soils of Deleuze, Guattari, and the Zhongyong will not be arboreal and tree-like, but rhizomatic like kudzu.[11] In reconceptualizing the self and its relationship to the world we may consider how one might live and this is certainly a matter of pedagogy, of teaching creativity.
This is where I've been for the past two weeks; I've been preparing this for my writing sample to be considered by Emory's Philosophy department. It's also how I arrived at the name of this blog. Don't worry: it's only a very short sample.
Kudzu Kongzi: A Rhizomatic Zhongyong中庸
Paul Boshears[1]
Does not the East…offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the tree?[2]
The way of heaven and earth can be captured in one phrase: Since events are never duplicated, their production is unfathomable.[3]
If we accept Foucault's position that Anti-Oedipus is primarily an introductory text to non-fascist living, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus should then be first thought of as an educational text. In reconceptualizing the self and its relationship to the world by reconceptualizing desire as meaning production, Anti-Oedipus was thought by its authors as creating an “air sain,” a healthy region that would overcome the tyranny of psychoanalysis. There were unexpected results: some took the text as advocating experimentation in all manners, including drug abuse, thus leading to self-destruction and the opposite of health. Deleuze and Guattari always felt a sense of responsibility for those that took this path.[4] Their schizoanalysis engendered novelty generation, a mode of self-creation that would overcome the tyranny of structuralism by emphasizing the interconnectedness of everything such that no structural boundary can resist constant ebb and flow through its borders; Anti-Oedipus sought to show this as the nature of things. Their emphasis and trust in the co-creative nature of humanity and faith that promoting this will ensure a flourishing human community is shared by the Classical Confucian text, Zhongyong中庸.
To suggest that Confucianism could be understood in any way other than as institutionalized apology and bureaucratic oppression will likely strike the reader as not only odd, but that Confucianism and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari share mutual worldviews is perhaps perverse. In no small part this is due to a fundamental misreading of the texts by the first translators of the Chinese traditions. Primarily these were completed by Christian missionaries who simply had a bias towards teleology and an ontology of fixed identity that had not been the worldview of the Chinese philosophical tradition.[5] With the philosophical translation of Roger Ames and David Hall the reader and text benefit from a radically different Confucius (and China), this is largely due to the translators use of Whitehead’s process theory and their use of the language of both John Dewey and William James.[6] The central concern of Confucianism, then, is not about establishing an unbroken chain of authority but an exploration of how one becomes authoritatively human. Virtuosity is determined in how well one can perform their humanity, a creative process of synthesizing what has come before and harmonizing its contents with the changing world in which we find ourselves.
The elevation of the human being to co-creative status is one of the truly distinctive features of the Zhongyong[7] and it is here that we see the most obvious harmonizing with Deleuze and Guattari's works. The central message of the Zhongyong is to promote an understanding that tian (天), the predominant natural, social, and cultural circumstances shape (ming 命) both the initial human tendencies (xing 性) and overall human development (dao 道); the text then suggests that education (jiao 教) is crucial in the process of self-creation.[8] The primary gift of education is personalization and this transactional process is a creative act as it is, “the realization of the focal self and the field of events – the realization of both the particular and context.”[9] We are told that developing our ability to harmonize the particular with the context is “the great root of the world.”[10] It seems fair to say that the plant growing from the nourishing soils of Deleuze, Guattari, and the Zhongyong will not be arboreal and tree-like, but rhizomatic like kudzu.[11] In reconceptualizing the self and its relationship to the world we may consider how one might live and this is certainly a matter of pedagogy, of teaching creativity.
[1] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 13th National Asian Studies Development Program, Seattle, WA, February, 2007; and has benefited greatly from comments it received there. I thank David Farrell Krell for his comments.
[2] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2003. 18. Hereon ATP.
[3] Ames, Roger T. and David L. Hall. Focusing the Familiar: A Philosophical Translation of the Zhongyong 中庸. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press. Verse 26. Page 107. Hereon FF.
[4] Stivale, Charles J. Gilles Deleuze’s ABC Primer with Claire Parnet. “D as in Desire.” Found at www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G?ABC1.html
[5] On the importance of translation to philosophy see Charles Bernstein’s comments in his “Breaking the Translation Curtain: The Homophonic Sublime,” stating, “philosophy in translation suffers perhaps more greatly than poetry if only because its readers are often less conscious of the semiotic cost of translation…and even less willing to cede significance to what is unrecoverable.” Found in Toward a Foreign Likeness Bent: Translation. Jerrold Shirma, ed. Sausalito, CA: Duration Press. 2004.
[6] See their Thinking Through Confucius Albany: SUNY Press. 1987; as well as The Democracy of the Dead: Dewey, Confucius, and the Hope for Democracy in China. Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing. 1999.
[7] FF, 30
[8] Ibid. 26
[9] Ibid. 32
[10] Ibid. 89
[11] Based on comments from readers outside the southern United States I should clarify both kudzu as a plant and kudzu as a social phenomenon. Kudzu was imported into the southern U.S. to combat rapid soil erosion, the result of the wide-spread deforestation that accompanied the industrialization of the south after the Civil War. Kudzu was seen as drought-resistant and a panacea for farmers. Ask anyone who tends a garden in the southern U.S., however, and you are likely to hear one of many stories of the bale that this plant has become. The plant is now listed by the U.S. Congress as a Federal Noxious Weed and anyone with familiarity will tell you that this once ornamental plant is measured in miles per hour rather than inches per year. I choose the image less for its noxiousness and rather to stress its success in propagating itself through a decentralized physiognomy. http://www.invasive.org/eastern/biocontrol/25Kudzu.html
A Thousand Pardons (or, On Getting Into Emory)
I've not been writing here lately, but I can share a little about why:
I am writing. I am writing my admissions materials for a PhD program. Over the past few days I've been revisiting a paper I presented in Seattle last year and I am writing my Statement of Purpose.
I am applying to Emory's Philosophy Department and I'm really sweating it! Emory has an awesome program that is very strong in both Continental and American pragmatic philosophies. I'm particularly interested in working with Cynthia Willett and John Stuhr.
Stuhr is the new department chair, coming from Vanderbilt (a great school featuring David Wood). Were I accepted I'd be all over hearing Stuhr discuss John Dewey's philosophy of experience as critique.
Cynthia Willet is the former department chair at Emory and her work is right up my alley. I recommend you buy her new book Irony in the Age of Empire; you can read a good bit of it here for free. That's right, a philosophical text discussing the implications of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
As insipid or trite as this might sound, I'm actually really excited to be among all their faculty. I think that they're doing really interesting work and I feel that I would develop very well in that community. I think their focus on social and political thought from both the Classical American tradition and the Continental tradition would really foster my development and guide me toward civic engagement and Public Philosophy.
Wish me luck!
I am writing. I am writing my admissions materials for a PhD program. Over the past few days I've been revisiting a paper I presented in Seattle last year and I am writing my Statement of Purpose.
I am applying to Emory's Philosophy Department and I'm really sweating it! Emory has an awesome program that is very strong in both Continental and American pragmatic philosophies. I'm particularly interested in working with Cynthia Willett and John Stuhr.
Stuhr is the new department chair, coming from Vanderbilt (a great school featuring David Wood). Were I accepted I'd be all over hearing Stuhr discuss John Dewey's philosophy of experience as critique.
Cynthia Willet is the former department chair at Emory and her work is right up my alley. I recommend you buy her new book Irony in the Age of Empire; you can read a good bit of it here for free. That's right, a philosophical text discussing the implications of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
As insipid or trite as this might sound, I'm actually really excited to be among all their faculty. I think that they're doing really interesting work and I feel that I would develop very well in that community. I think their focus on social and political thought from both the Classical American tradition and the Continental tradition would really foster my development and guide me toward civic engagement and Public Philosophy.
Wish me luck!
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
The 100th Post!
I wish it were otherwise, but the 100th post here will be an apology for radio silence: I just had two wisdom teeth pulled and this week we're hosting a conference on the state of ADHD research in Japan (this Friday in Onna) so I'm just not really able to write much right now.
Actually, it is Thanksgiving week so I will thank you for reading, and for the feedback I've received. I am wishing you all a happy holiday and I hope the best will come to you and yours.
Thanks!
Actually, it is Thanksgiving week so I will thank you for reading, and for the feedback I've received. I am wishing you all a happy holiday and I hope the best will come to you and yours.
Thanks!
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Reading About Terrorists
So here are some good-reading articles in the popular press about life as a terrorist.
I think that Nir Rosen's recent article in Rolling Stone is a good read, albeit not particularly informative of why people are terrorists, per se. What his article does do well, and I think this should perhaps be more broadly the approach used, is to point out that "terrorist" is a poor description of who we are fighting around the world.
Probably the best reading I've done on the matter recently, and a read that ties the above article with my next article, is Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown. While many will say that above all Rushdie's is a novel, I must point out that the power of the novel is it's truth-telling. Shalimar the Clown, even if read as only an exploration of how people would live in response to their times, did a great deal for me to begin to understand the nature of the lives of those that call the Silk Road region their home.
The novel does a great service because it illustrates very well an uncomfortable truth about te future of America: Americans have watches, but we have no sense of time (which I am lifting directly from the Rolling Stone article). This is a conflict that simply knows no bounds, Shalimar the Clown is also without boundaries. The book doesn't even resolve one of its central tensions: the resolution of a blood feud. I think that there is a profundity in this that Americans are not going to want to hear but it's a truth that we will have to become more intimate with: peace is not the absence of violence. Wars cannot be won.
Dan Murphy's three-part series (in the Christian Science Monitor) on the bombing of a Balinese night club and the rise of violent Islamist extremists in Indonesia is another excellent resource in trying to uncover the not-so uncanny humanity of "terrorists." We learn in part one about the role of marriage to bring social cohesion and as a vector for the transmission of violent extremism in areas of the world where the authority of a state looks pretty much like the stability of war lords. Marriages in many parts of the world are primarily social buffers, a marriage can ameliorate tensions between competing groups by bringing the two groups together.
Marriages also, of course, improve the social security of those involved: marriages facilitate the production of children that can increase the group's overall productivity (by working the land, or manning the family's shop, say), it also means that two people (husband and wife) can put their hands to managing the needs of the house; of course, there are numerous other significant benefits of marriages.
Marriages can also amplify the meaning of the social context of those involved. A marriage is a social construct, how one performs one's role in a marriage very much matters: in the U.S. beating a spouse is not tolerated, both genders are free to (theoretically) do any kind of work. The roles of those involved in marriages matter. In societies where subsistence farming is the primary means of life support, children are necessary to ensure survival because they introduce more hands to gather food. Children, especially boys, can be used as soldiers, as Amnesty International has been telling us (I bring up Congo here because of the on-going deterioration and overall catastrophe there). The young boys are either press ganged (as in the Sudan, read What Is the What) or see no other option available to them.
When you're married to a man that dies in the conflict and your sons have been sacrificed to the struggle, what do you do next? In Iraq the demographics of the suicide bombers are starting to spell it out: women are becoming the next wave of suicide bombers. This seems to reinforce the earlier research suggesting that what primarily drives people to become involved in terrorist networks is not so much political motivations as such, rather the lack of meaning outside of these affinity groups. When the State no longer can provide the order, when the social fabric has become of too little value to those sown into it - why not take an active role in a grand narrative of adventure and righteousness, of purpose-"fullness."
We are seeing this same pattern in the Horn of Africa today. In the wake of a disintegrated Somalia and constant warfare between Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, and what was Zaire (now Congo), what happened? Nations bordering the Indian Ocean began sending their fishing boats into the fertile areas around the Horn and plundered the Somali's livelihood. In response, during the 90's Somali fishermen began to patrol their coast acting as vigilantes, extracting "taxes" on these foreigners. It was a small step for them to then steal, say, super tankers and 30,000 tons of wheat. Africa and Central Asia are going to continue to be living hells for millions, I predict that Africa will become a key site for exporting instability across the globe, thanks to growing contact between Central Asia and China.
The European Community should be primarily concerned were this to happen, particularly France, because of that nation's tacit involvement in the "African World War" including the genocide in Rwanda, and the destabilizing effect their late-involvement (or mismanagement of affairs) in the region has produced.
I think that Nir Rosen's recent article in Rolling Stone is a good read, albeit not particularly informative of why people are terrorists, per se. What his article does do well, and I think this should perhaps be more broadly the approach used, is to point out that "terrorist" is a poor description of who we are fighting around the world.
Probably the best reading I've done on the matter recently, and a read that ties the above article with my next article, is Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown. While many will say that above all Rushdie's is a novel, I must point out that the power of the novel is it's truth-telling. Shalimar the Clown, even if read as only an exploration of how people would live in response to their times, did a great deal for me to begin to understand the nature of the lives of those that call the Silk Road region their home.
The novel does a great service because it illustrates very well an uncomfortable truth about te future of America: Americans have watches, but we have no sense of time (which I am lifting directly from the Rolling Stone article). This is a conflict that simply knows no bounds, Shalimar the Clown is also without boundaries. The book doesn't even resolve one of its central tensions: the resolution of a blood feud. I think that there is a profundity in this that Americans are not going to want to hear but it's a truth that we will have to become more intimate with: peace is not the absence of violence. Wars cannot be won.
Dan Murphy's three-part series (in the Christian Science Monitor) on the bombing of a Balinese night club and the rise of violent Islamist extremists in Indonesia is another excellent resource in trying to uncover the not-so uncanny humanity of "terrorists." We learn in part one about the role of marriage to bring social cohesion and as a vector for the transmission of violent extremism in areas of the world where the authority of a state looks pretty much like the stability of war lords. Marriages in many parts of the world are primarily social buffers, a marriage can ameliorate tensions between competing groups by bringing the two groups together.
Marriages also, of course, improve the social security of those involved: marriages facilitate the production of children that can increase the group's overall productivity (by working the land, or manning the family's shop, say), it also means that two people (husband and wife) can put their hands to managing the needs of the house; of course, there are numerous other significant benefits of marriages.
Marriages can also amplify the meaning of the social context of those involved. A marriage is a social construct, how one performs one's role in a marriage very much matters: in the U.S. beating a spouse is not tolerated, both genders are free to (theoretically) do any kind of work. The roles of those involved in marriages matter. In societies where subsistence farming is the primary means of life support, children are necessary to ensure survival because they introduce more hands to gather food. Children, especially boys, can be used as soldiers, as Amnesty International has been telling us (I bring up Congo here because of the on-going deterioration and overall catastrophe there). The young boys are either press ganged (as in the Sudan, read What Is the What) or see no other option available to them.
When you're married to a man that dies in the conflict and your sons have been sacrificed to the struggle, what do you do next? In Iraq the demographics of the suicide bombers are starting to spell it out: women are becoming the next wave of suicide bombers. This seems to reinforce the earlier research suggesting that what primarily drives people to become involved in terrorist networks is not so much political motivations as such, rather the lack of meaning outside of these affinity groups. When the State no longer can provide the order, when the social fabric has become of too little value to those sown into it - why not take an active role in a grand narrative of adventure and righteousness, of purpose-"fullness."
We are seeing this same pattern in the Horn of Africa today. In the wake of a disintegrated Somalia and constant warfare between Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, and what was Zaire (now Congo), what happened? Nations bordering the Indian Ocean began sending their fishing boats into the fertile areas around the Horn and plundered the Somali's livelihood. In response, during the 90's Somali fishermen began to patrol their coast acting as vigilantes, extracting "taxes" on these foreigners. It was a small step for them to then steal, say, super tankers and 30,000 tons of wheat. Africa and Central Asia are going to continue to be living hells for millions, I predict that Africa will become a key site for exporting instability across the globe, thanks to growing contact between Central Asia and China.
The European Community should be primarily concerned were this to happen, particularly France, because of that nation's tacit involvement in the "African World War" including the genocide in Rwanda, and the destabilizing effect their late-involvement (or mismanagement of affairs) in the region has produced.
Monday, November 17, 2008
We Can't Win in Iraq - Here's Why
Armstrong's If They Don't Know You Won, Did You? was the one that made me see it: why public diplomacy matters, because this may be the only way to understand peace.
And here's where I had my "aha!" moment, reading AngryBear's Iraq Is Won?
In the latter link I read that the war in Iraq is pretty much over now, and we won!
But, why doesn't this feel like we won?
It doesn't feel like the U.S. won anything not only because there's been no "reliable source" to announce the victory - even when Bush donned his jumpsuit and got the big ol' billboard to saying we'd completed our mission: this war pointed out something that America has been avoiding for at least 40 years, wars are unwinnable.
"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake," it was stated years before me by a fellow Georgian (well, she had property in Watkinsville), the first woman to serve in Congress, Jeannette Rankin. The situation in Iraq only amplifies this message.
At best what can be done now is to promote a revisionist history of the war in Iraq: state that there were two wars, we won the first one (and so Bush didn't lie about victory) and in the immediate aftermath of American victory a civil war broke out in Iraq. This civil war is what has been claiming the lives of our soldiers and thousands and thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqis.
With the massive promotion of this new history, a stage can be set where America can claim a victory. But it will likely require some other massively traumatic event to occur first. Why? Because wars are won in the popular imagination when their is agreement between belligerents. Petraeus walks into an office, the leader of the oppositional forces shakes his hand, they sign a treaty announcing that the war is over and everyone starts popping corks.
But that's not what we're fighting is it? Victory implies in the popular imagination that bullets stop flying, that families are reunited, that stability returns in the form of picking up where the belligerents left off.
But the war America is fighting isn't a war for territory, it's not even for oil (apparently). America's been fighting a war against the global poor and has been losing since at least the fall of the former colonial powers in the 1940s. America's "War on Terror" could be successful if it were to inject capital into these battle sites through infrastructure and bread trucks instead of injecting capital through ballistics. The areas where terrorism flourish are those where the least amount of justice have been present.
The more I think about it, the more and more I wish I wasn't making these things publicly viewable - but I will keep publishing because I'm hoping someone helps me think this stuff through.
And here's where I had my "aha!" moment, reading AngryBear's Iraq Is Won?
In the latter link I read that the war in Iraq is pretty much over now, and we won!
But, why doesn't this feel like we won?
It doesn't feel like the U.S. won anything not only because there's been no "reliable source" to announce the victory - even when Bush donned his jumpsuit and got the big ol' billboard to saying we'd completed our mission: this war pointed out something that America has been avoiding for at least 40 years, wars are unwinnable.
"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake," it was stated years before me by a fellow Georgian (well, she had property in Watkinsville), the first woman to serve in Congress, Jeannette Rankin. The situation in Iraq only amplifies this message.
At best what can be done now is to promote a revisionist history of the war in Iraq: state that there were two wars, we won the first one (and so Bush didn't lie about victory) and in the immediate aftermath of American victory a civil war broke out in Iraq. This civil war is what has been claiming the lives of our soldiers and thousands and thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqis.
With the massive promotion of this new history, a stage can be set where America can claim a victory. But it will likely require some other massively traumatic event to occur first. Why? Because wars are won in the popular imagination when their is agreement between belligerents. Petraeus walks into an office, the leader of the oppositional forces shakes his hand, they sign a treaty announcing that the war is over and everyone starts popping corks.
But that's not what we're fighting is it? Victory implies in the popular imagination that bullets stop flying, that families are reunited, that stability returns in the form of picking up where the belligerents left off.
But the war America is fighting isn't a war for territory, it's not even for oil (apparently). America's been fighting a war against the global poor and has been losing since at least the fall of the former colonial powers in the 1940s. America's "War on Terror" could be successful if it were to inject capital into these battle sites through infrastructure and bread trucks instead of injecting capital through ballistics. The areas where terrorism flourish are those where the least amount of justice have been present.
The more I think about it, the more and more I wish I wasn't making these things publicly viewable - but I will keep publishing because I'm hoping someone helps me think this stuff through.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Public Diplomacy Video from Japan
I got this from Matt Armstrong's excellent Public Diplomacy blog, MountainRunner. This video is excellent for making intuitive complex phenomena.
Small World
I'm trolling the internet trying to find demographic information for Okinawa's prison population for an upcoming United Nations University presentation and I came across this article:
Yet another reason for me to really commit to doing my best while living here in Okinawa; of course I can in no way reduce the heaviness of these events, I can actively seek to reduce the burdens of those around me.
Former Marine who sparked Okinawa furor is dead in suspected murder-suicide (Stars and Stripes)
If you read the article you learn that:- The United States had to agree to give back the land of Okinawa to Japan at an accelerated rate in order to reduce the diplomatic strains caused by the gang rape of a 12 year-old girl committed by several U.S. Marines stationed here - and,
- That one of the guys who committed this heinous crime (and played no small role in shaping the international security policy of the worlds largest military power) killed himself after he raped and murdered a woman who went my university and lived right down the street from me.
Yet another reason for me to really commit to doing my best while living here in Okinawa; of course I can in no way reduce the heaviness of these events, I can actively seek to reduce the burdens of those around me.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Video Games... 2 of 2
I will refer the reader/player to Rohrer's statement about Passage.
So there's a debate, now about the meaning of video games. Ian Bogost draws heavily from Marshall McLuhan and (months before Ledonne) states:
In his argument he calls for abandoning the idea of the "gamer" as a class of people for whom video games are made because games are used for entertainment. He points out a game that is a recreation of historical events in Australia and then I had my "a ha," moment: what's so enjoyable about recreation?
Is there a common thread that ties Doom 3 players, Katamari Damacy players, Braid players, and Civil War reenactors?
What does it mean to re-create in the context of video game play? If Nietzsche is right about the will to return, do we evaluate a video game that has limited replay ability in the same way that we evaluate a game that is infinitely different with each play?
I'd like to read more phenomenology of video games....
But Rohrer spends too much time trying to make an argument that sounds like, "movies have come to be seen as art and video games are like movies, so it must be art." Maybe it's because he's "speaking" with Roger Ebert; but even if he were able to make the argument stick he does a disservice to his medium by trying to make the medium look like another medium. No one who is half serious would try to argue that paintings are like photographs and so they should be judged with the same criteria. Video games are not like cinema, at least not "good" video games and "good" movies. They are constitutionally similar butI would argue that they are not tethered to the same problems.
The problem of cinema, as Peter Greenway has pointed out, is that it continues to be tethered to the written word. Movies must make sense in the same way that written narratives or they are simply no good. People just assume that first the movie has a script and then the movie is made. But are video games similarly limited?
Rohrer just misses the boat on this point when he says:
The assumption that living itself is not an aesthetic act is what makes this debate about video games so difficult to listen to and why it always sounds so tinny. From Ames and Hall's Zhongyong:
The perfect image of this masturbatory nature of most video games comes from, surpise to none I'm sure, The Sims. I had someone very close to me create a game where the house was set up exactly like their own house with the same number of parents and children in the house with the same personality types. Surprise! In their game their sim sat in the house and played video games while the rest of the people went about their lives. Recreational recreation.
So there's a debate, now about the meaning of video games. Ian Bogost draws heavily from Marshall McLuhan and (months before Ledonne) states:
When we acknowledge videogames as a medium, the notion of a monolithic games industry, which creates a few kinds of games for a few kinds of players, stops making any sense. As does the idea of a demographic category called “gamers” who are the ones who play these games. The point is not whether games qualify as art or not. Nor whether games are useful tools or not. Rather, the point is that there are lots of other things people can and do accomplish with videogames.Rohrer responds a bit more passionately (and unfortunately to the detriment of his argument I would say) in his mock conversation between Roger Ebert, himself, and Clive Barker. Overall the argument is a little plodding, but it's going in the right direction.
But if the player of the game is rightfully the co-artist, and a given gameplay experience... is the work, then couldn't that particular gameplay instance be a work of high art in itself? If we continue down this track, we might conclude that the games themselves are not art, but instead tools that have the potential of producing art experiences for their users.Rohrer is pointing out that there is a process inherant to the creation of art, and that the "artist" is distinguished from other agents by her participation in the events unfoling. Here's where the conversation becomes more interesting, to my mind, and shows what Bogost has failed to discuss in his "End of Gamers" argument. And unfortunatley for Bogost the connection is right there in his argument.
In his argument he calls for abandoning the idea of the "gamer" as a class of people for whom video games are made because games are used for entertainment. He points out a game that is a recreation of historical events in Australia and then I had my "a ha," moment: what's so enjoyable about recreation?
Is there a common thread that ties Doom 3 players, Katamari Damacy players, Braid players, and Civil War reenactors?
What does it mean to re-create in the context of video game play? If Nietzsche is right about the will to return, do we evaluate a video game that has limited replay ability in the same way that we evaluate a game that is infinitely different with each play?
I'd like to read more phenomenology of video games....
But Rohrer spends too much time trying to make an argument that sounds like, "movies have come to be seen as art and video games are like movies, so it must be art." Maybe it's because he's "speaking" with Roger Ebert; but even if he were able to make the argument stick he does a disservice to his medium by trying to make the medium look like another medium. No one who is half serious would try to argue that paintings are like photographs and so they should be judged with the same criteria. Video games are not like cinema, at least not "good" video games and "good" movies. They are constitutionally similar butI would argue that they are not tethered to the same problems.
The problem of cinema, as Peter Greenway has pointed out, is that it continues to be tethered to the written word. Movies must make sense in the same way that written narratives or they are simply no good. People just assume that first the movie has a script and then the movie is made. But are video games similarly limited?
Rohrer just misses the boat on this point when he says:
...[Y]ou must acknowledge that some form of audience collaboration is necessary for an art experience.... Some films ... demand quite a bit of participation, leaving the audience hanging at the end with unanswered questions....Couldn't we say that the very best art films are the ones that rely on the most heavy lifting from the audience? .... However, if we push too far in that direction, can't we cross the line? I mean, if we start pulling audience members up on stage with the actors, we end up with a real mess.Rohrer is of course forgetting that Pirandello did exactly that with his Six Characters in Search of an Author. Granted, it was not well-received at first, but 70 years later people continue to reproduce (rip-off) this work and it's still considered fresh.
The assumption that living itself is not an aesthetic act is what makes this debate about video games so difficult to listen to and why it always sounds so tinny. From Ames and Hall's Zhongyong:
Creativity involves both the realization of the focal self and of the field of events, the realization of both particular and context. Self-actualization is a focal process that draws upon an aggregate field of human experience....Human realization is achieved not by whole-hearted participation in communal life forms but by life in community that forms one whole-heartedly. (32-33)If we think about a community of video game players we begin to see something more telling about the very conservative nature of video games because video game players are so conservative. I think that Rohrer is right, people don't want to be given total freedom in a video game, that's why Mario Paint never sold well; perhaps also why Nintendo's new Wii Music game is doing to poorly. Video game players mostly want their recreation time to be mostly masturbatory recreations of the ordered lives they live when not playing video games.
The perfect image of this masturbatory nature of most video games comes from, surpise to none I'm sure, The Sims. I had someone very close to me create a game where the house was set up exactly like their own house with the same number of parents and children in the house with the same personality types. Surprise! In their game their sim sat in the house and played video games while the rest of the people went about their lives. Recreational recreation.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Video Games.... 1 of 2
"The larger question for each of us to answer when we ask ourselves how to evaluate art--whether in games or cinema or literature--is what we expect it to accomplish." Danny Ledonne
I'm pulling this quote from Henry Jenkins' three-part interview of Ledonne, the creator of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! I started thinking about video games this morning because of this little history of the Sega Genesis video game platform at Ars Technica.
I was staring at the pixelated goodness and was caught in a little nostalgia-hole. This sense of nostalgia, perhaps, that Phil Fish is referring to in his interview at Arthouse Games.
The question that Ledonne puts forward was answered for me several years ago when I simply stopped playing videogames. In part this cessation was the result of playing Star Wars Pod Racer against a child (all of 10 years) in a Blockbuster and feeling like the technology had simply lapped me. At the time I believed in the infallibility of video games to distinguish generations: I held, very dearly, the moment that I beat my father at video games.
It was, for me as a child, a moment for me to begin to assert that I was someone more than just the child that must do as he is told. This sense of rebelliousness (so totally useless in all fact) was perhaps also fuelled by the marketing that has come to dominate American life. As a child we learn, through the television, what is expected of us, we learn broadly what the range of responses to social cues can be - some are funny, some are sad; all can be amplified with a Sony Walkman and a 2-liter of Coca-Cola. But I've digressed... or is this the uncanny mechanism of nostalgia?
I believed in video games. The logic of the side-scrolling world was a given. In fact, I'd argue that much of my worldview was shaped by the video games I played. In a side-scrolling action game like Goonies you don't even need the instruction book: you are supposed to go from here to there and while doing that you must learn patterns of how events unfold. If you pick up an object on the way it's likely to be of use later in the game. This was a profound lesson for me because it emphasized that seemingly mundane items, like a slingshot, or a red passkey, are equally as likely to effect the outcome of my life as anything else I'd learned to that point. And, really, that logic has yet to fail me; it's what draws me most closely to the Confucian classic Zhongyong, whose message is so similar, "When making an axe handle, the model is never very far away." Take that, Heidegger!
But, what do we expect from video games? When I was about 22 I failed most of my classes in college for two reasons, I've joked: Sid Meier's Civilization II and Tenchu 2. I simply couldn't stop playing these games; they were far more interesting and rewarding than my Music Appreciation class, say. I found them fascinating because in them I saw so many assumptions about how people are, how events unfold in time, the rewards of making some decisions and not others. At the time my head was swirling around exotic ideas metaphysical ideas: a steady diet of Marx, Qabbalism, Sufism, Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson, Tim Leary, Carl Jung, and Josephy Campbell - they all seemed to be conspiring and each moment seemed so rich with significance and synchronicity that playing video games suddenly stopped being fascinating and became depressing.
I'd come to expect more from video games. That this was just at the dawn of the explosion of the internet perhaps explain why I didn't continue buying video games - I'm far too social. I loved CivII and Tenchu 2, but they were games that could only be played alone. My gaming experiences were thus taking turns playing Tony Hawk at my friend's apartment while hanging out or playing Final Fantasy X alone. In no way could video games compete with what was happening to me at school, though. Suddenly finding patterns and persevering made a difference in unexpected ways: I might not have to work in retail and food service for another 6 years, say. No amount of saving princesses or gold coins could buy me that. True, I started to hear rumors about some friends that were able to make real money doing things in Everquest - but I also saw plenty of real relationships lost to Evercrack.
I'd come to expect more from my life than what video games could offer, so I quit playing video games. Besides, to be a game enthusiast meant having to save lots of money (which I was terrible at) because the platforms and games were so damn expensive; I could barely keep me and the dog fed, let alone drop $500 on a game system, much less a game. Video games couldn't give me anymore insight into how to live my life; nor would playing video games help me know what to do after college. Video games had this terrible tendency of showing the player that things weren't as they seemed, but then cynically expecting the player to get a dumb job that paid them enough to continue to buy and play video games. Too much of a rat's treadmill for me.
But then, I played Katamari Damacy at a friend's house and I knew that someone else had been having much more interesting and productive conversations about just this problem.
Then today I played Passage. The game is free and lasts only 5 minutes, so please, play this game right now, then come back and read more here.
I'm pulling this quote from Henry Jenkins' three-part interview of Ledonne, the creator of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! I started thinking about video games this morning because of this little history of the Sega Genesis video game platform at Ars Technica.
I was staring at the pixelated goodness and was caught in a little nostalgia-hole. This sense of nostalgia, perhaps, that Phil Fish is referring to in his interview at Arthouse Games.
The question that Ledonne puts forward was answered for me several years ago when I simply stopped playing videogames. In part this cessation was the result of playing Star Wars Pod Racer against a child (all of 10 years) in a Blockbuster and feeling like the technology had simply lapped me. At the time I believed in the infallibility of video games to distinguish generations: I held, very dearly, the moment that I beat my father at video games.
It was, for me as a child, a moment for me to begin to assert that I was someone more than just the child that must do as he is told. This sense of rebelliousness (so totally useless in all fact) was perhaps also fuelled by the marketing that has come to dominate American life. As a child we learn, through the television, what is expected of us, we learn broadly what the range of responses to social cues can be - some are funny, some are sad; all can be amplified with a Sony Walkman and a 2-liter of Coca-Cola. But I've digressed... or is this the uncanny mechanism of nostalgia?
I believed in video games. The logic of the side-scrolling world was a given. In fact, I'd argue that much of my worldview was shaped by the video games I played. In a side-scrolling action game like Goonies you don't even need the instruction book: you are supposed to go from here to there and while doing that you must learn patterns of how events unfold. If you pick up an object on the way it's likely to be of use later in the game. This was a profound lesson for me because it emphasized that seemingly mundane items, like a slingshot, or a red passkey, are equally as likely to effect the outcome of my life as anything else I'd learned to that point. And, really, that logic has yet to fail me; it's what draws me most closely to the Confucian classic Zhongyong, whose message is so similar, "When making an axe handle, the model is never very far away." Take that, Heidegger!
But, what do we expect from video games? When I was about 22 I failed most of my classes in college for two reasons, I've joked: Sid Meier's Civilization II and Tenchu 2. I simply couldn't stop playing these games; they were far more interesting and rewarding than my Music Appreciation class, say. I found them fascinating because in them I saw so many assumptions about how people are, how events unfold in time, the rewards of making some decisions and not others. At the time my head was swirling around exotic ideas metaphysical ideas: a steady diet of Marx, Qabbalism, Sufism, Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson, Tim Leary, Carl Jung, and Josephy Campbell - they all seemed to be conspiring and each moment seemed so rich with significance and synchronicity that playing video games suddenly stopped being fascinating and became depressing.
I'd come to expect more from video games. That this was just at the dawn of the explosion of the internet perhaps explain why I didn't continue buying video games - I'm far too social. I loved CivII and Tenchu 2, but they were games that could only be played alone. My gaming experiences were thus taking turns playing Tony Hawk at my friend's apartment while hanging out or playing Final Fantasy X alone. In no way could video games compete with what was happening to me at school, though. Suddenly finding patterns and persevering made a difference in unexpected ways: I might not have to work in retail and food service for another 6 years, say. No amount of saving princesses or gold coins could buy me that. True, I started to hear rumors about some friends that were able to make real money doing things in Everquest - but I also saw plenty of real relationships lost to Evercrack.
I'd come to expect more from my life than what video games could offer, so I quit playing video games. Besides, to be a game enthusiast meant having to save lots of money (which I was terrible at) because the platforms and games were so damn expensive; I could barely keep me and the dog fed, let alone drop $500 on a game system, much less a game. Video games couldn't give me anymore insight into how to live my life; nor would playing video games help me know what to do after college. Video games had this terrible tendency of showing the player that things weren't as they seemed, but then cynically expecting the player to get a dumb job that paid them enough to continue to buy and play video games. Too much of a rat's treadmill for me.
But then, I played Katamari Damacy at a friend's house and I knew that someone else had been having much more interesting and productive conversations about just this problem.
Then today I played Passage. The game is free and lasts only 5 minutes, so please, play this game right now, then come back and read more here.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
How To Save America? National Service
On the morning of September 13, 2001 I read several newspapers and was struck by two things:
I voted for the Obama campaign because I agreed with their policy proposals on national service.
Not because I think that America will now become a Deep Blue paradise.
As an Americorps*VISTA alum I have seen first hand the transformative potential of service of this kind in the U.S. and I would suggest that there is a significant pool of talented, well-trained, and civically-minded people between 18 and 35 that are available and anxious to be engaged in their communities. America is ready for more civic engagement, I think this is true for the college-aged as well as for those of retirement age (just look at the RSVP program also under the Americorps umbrella).
Actually, when I reported to my orientation for my year of service I was most surprised by the median age of those hundreds of fellow volutneers. I went in expecting 19 year olds and I was surprised to see so many people in their 50's and older. I was also struck by the similarities of economic status at my orientation. Where I would have expected primarily trustafarians and rich kids I was hearing stories of mothers being recruited by the nonprofit organizations that provided the community low-income housing or subsidized childcare in their poor neighborhoods.
Their stories were not so different from mine: I had been working full-time and going to school for 13 years, off and on, and had next-to-no savings and no health insurance when I broke my arm and couldn't wait tables anymore. I was finally going to graduate from college in two months and I was tired of working food service and retail jobs that could care less about my social science education. That's when I saw an ad that paid little, but was involved in the community and offered a health benefit and very much wanted someone with my skill set. It turned out I'd be working in the Americorps*VISTA program.
I do think that there is a large number of people that will be willing to serve in the next five years, voluntarily. I predict that historians will view this volunteerism as simply an economic response to the deterioration of the American economy - like the WPA during the New Deal. But I think that these will be unduly cynical historians. It's true that public works are going to be necessary to shore up the American economy over the next six or eight years, but that's a coincidence.
Americans are looking for a way to reconnect to one another after decades of civic decay at the hands of people that say from one side of their mouth that: they are promoting freedom while they torture, stand for the rule of law and strip prisoners of basic rights, dispensed with the transparency and regulation essential to modern capital markets and claim to still be the beacon of free enterprise. That course has left us all feeling more alone.
Look here for the opportunity to serve, at the Office of the President-Elect; and here at the home page for Americorps.
- the world was saying that they were with us ("Nous sommes toutes Americains," as the usually very critical Le Monde stated)
- I had spent most of the night before with my friends identifying caravans heading to New York City and discussing how we were going to organize with our fellow students a civic response.
I voted for the Obama campaign because I agreed with their policy proposals on national service.
Not because I think that America will now become a Deep Blue paradise.
As an Americorps*VISTA alum I have seen first hand the transformative potential of service of this kind in the U.S. and I would suggest that there is a significant pool of talented, well-trained, and civically-minded people between 18 and 35 that are available and anxious to be engaged in their communities. America is ready for more civic engagement, I think this is true for the college-aged as well as for those of retirement age (just look at the RSVP program also under the Americorps umbrella).
Actually, when I reported to my orientation for my year of service I was most surprised by the median age of those hundreds of fellow volutneers. I went in expecting 19 year olds and I was surprised to see so many people in their 50's and older. I was also struck by the similarities of economic status at my orientation. Where I would have expected primarily trustafarians and rich kids I was hearing stories of mothers being recruited by the nonprofit organizations that provided the community low-income housing or subsidized childcare in their poor neighborhoods.
Their stories were not so different from mine: I had been working full-time and going to school for 13 years, off and on, and had next-to-no savings and no health insurance when I broke my arm and couldn't wait tables anymore. I was finally going to graduate from college in two months and I was tired of working food service and retail jobs that could care less about my social science education. That's when I saw an ad that paid little, but was involved in the community and offered a health benefit and very much wanted someone with my skill set. It turned out I'd be working in the Americorps*VISTA program.
I do think that there is a large number of people that will be willing to serve in the next five years, voluntarily. I predict that historians will view this volunteerism as simply an economic response to the deterioration of the American economy - like the WPA during the New Deal. But I think that these will be unduly cynical historians. It's true that public works are going to be necessary to shore up the American economy over the next six or eight years, but that's a coincidence.
Americans are looking for a way to reconnect to one another after decades of civic decay at the hands of people that say from one side of their mouth that: they are promoting freedom while they torture, stand for the rule of law and strip prisoners of basic rights, dispensed with the transparency and regulation essential to modern capital markets and claim to still be the beacon of free enterprise. That course has left us all feeling more alone.
Look here for the opportunity to serve, at the Office of the President-Elect; and here at the home page for Americorps.
Other Big Events
These are historical times, to be sure. What is not getting much talk, I'm fairly certain, among many in the U.S. are the following court cases:
Google settled with publishers (like McGraw-Hill and Pearson Scientific, text book makers, and we know THAT'S a racket) that claimed their copyrights were being violated by Google for scanning and making available sections of their books. As part of the agreement Google must help to establish a program that would seek-out copyright holders and ask them if they would be willing to have their "orphaned" works available online. I suspect this organization won't have teeth and pretty impotent, actually.
The Internet can rejoice because the FCC has unanimously ruled in favor of allowing the white spaces in the tv spectrum be used for high speed internet activity. Ars Technica and Computer World both have great discussions of why this is a landmark case for America. In short: this is on the same level as breaking "Ma Bell."
And, of course, those goons at the Motion Picture Association of America have begun lobbying our new President. The U.S. is going to have a new "Copryright Czar" I guess because all the other czars we've had were so great at what they did. We're still fighting that War on Drugs, right?
Google settled with publishers (like McGraw-Hill and Pearson Scientific, text book makers, and we know THAT'S a racket) that claimed their copyrights were being violated by Google for scanning and making available sections of their books. As part of the agreement Google must help to establish a program that would seek-out copyright holders and ask them if they would be willing to have their "orphaned" works available online. I suspect this organization won't have teeth and pretty impotent, actually.
The Internet can rejoice because the FCC has unanimously ruled in favor of allowing the white spaces in the tv spectrum be used for high speed internet activity. Ars Technica and Computer World both have great discussions of why this is a landmark case for America. In short: this is on the same level as breaking "Ma Bell."
And, of course, those goons at the Motion Picture Association of America have begun lobbying our new President. The U.S. is going to have a new "Copryright Czar" I guess because all the other czars we've had were so great at what they did. We're still fighting that War on Drugs, right?
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