new post at the avant guardian

in this week's popOp I discuss Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics and desubjectification (remember that one?)

pictures and videos and a link to a radio station... a cornucopia of media consumption can be yours if only you would click on this link, right here.

Missing Okinawa

It's crazy hot out here in Atlanta. It's the summer; that's natural.

During the summer months in Okinawa it's much, much hotter. 虫暑い (mushi atsui, literally means even the bugs are sweating). It's hot, the ocean is like bath water, you put on your jimbe or your kariyushi wear (as part of the mainland's "cool biz" practices, kariyushi  wear is supposed to be understood as professional/business summer attire).

This is appropriate because kariyushi in Okinawan, or ウチナーグチUchinaguchi, means "harmony with nature." And it's very important to be appropriate in Okinawa because when the Ryukyu Kingdom 流球 still paid tribute to the Chinese dynasties the small islands were known as shurei no kuni (the Land of Propriety). This message was sent to the Ryukyuans on a tablet as a token of gratitude for the historic kindness the Ryukyuans have shown visitors as well as their commitment to Confucian education in Naha. The inscription was later added to the Shureimon Gate leading to Shuri Castle, the ancient home of the Ryukyu Kings.

Any how.

In the summer comes Obon, similar to Dia de los Muertos, where the living celebrate their ancestors. In Okinawa this is the best time to see and be a part of the eisa エイサ festivities. Eisa began as a more solemn Buddhist affair but over the last fifty years has become increasingly flashier and livelier.
Here's a short clip of the Uruma City traditional eisa dancers during the 2008 10000 Drummers event in Naha on kokusaidori in Naha (apologies for the quality of the recording):

The traditional eisa performances, I was told were (as was the playing of the sanshin 三線) supposed to be done to the rhythm of one's heart. Today it's much faster, less contemplative, and tends to encourage dancing. Here's a great performance from the 53rd 全島エイサ祭り(zento eisa matsuri All-Island Eisa Festival) in Okinawa City:

I had the great fortune to perform at this festival with the Okinawa City International Association's eisa team. At the end of the long hot day everyone was invited to join on the field and dance.

My wife and I loved visiting Ikeijima 伊計島 off the coast of Uruma うるま and Gushikawa 具志川. Sometimes we'd go running along the kaichu dori 海中道路 bridge that connects them to the honto 本島 (main island). One summer night we went running and when we got to Henza 平安座島 we heard the beating of those big eisa drums. It was a beautiful night; it was crazy hot, of course. But there was a nice enough breeze from the ocean every now and again. I remember the moon was out. It was beautiful to be in such a lovely place.

This song from BEGIN is very reminiscent of that night. Although this video isn't filmed at Katsuren 勝連城 (which is near Ikei and Henza), it was filmed at Nakagusuku 中城城 (the two castles fought against each other in the 15th century).

I just wanted to write about Okinawa a little.

new post at the avant guardian

popOp's been noticing an awful lot of talk about ninjas lately.

and grown men being arrested in the mountains of Pakistan with 40-inch swords, hunting Osama bin Laden...

what's with that?

A Great Thanks for Great Heidegger-related Sites

I'm most certainly very late to this fine party that Pete has been hosting over at both Enowning as well as Ereignis.

Both sites are exemplary in the dedication that Pete has shown for providing the English-reading blogosphere with tons of great scholarship and opinion on Heidegger and philosophy in the world.

Selfishly, I'm really glad to have his Heidegger and East Asian philosophies section on Ereignis. Also, self-aggrandizingly, I've had two items shared on Enowning and it's really great to know someone is out there noticing.

Thanks, Pete, for all sharing the good times!

New Post at the avant guardian

This week on popOp we look at doctors performing experiments on the recipients of torture from the U.S. government (you're welcome, torture victims, I'm sure you find solace in knowing that future victims will have a more effective and efficient mode delivered to them). How would Hannah Arendt think about it, would it look anything like what Confucius taught?

Things that make you go hmmm.

popOp!

New Post at the avant guardian

In this week's installment of popOp we drop that delicious album from Spiritualized and just before we nod out we consider the crucial role that "drugs" has had in structuring the Western imagination since the Ancient Greeks.

Go ahead, take a little read - it won't kill you and you won't get hooked. Promise.

Desubjectification

My friend, Ryland, asked me a great question tonight:
"Every time you talk about desubjectification in yr popOp, I don't understand what you mean. What do you mean by desubjectification?"

In reponse:

I think a great place to look would be in Foucault as this is where Agamben (from whom I learned the term) gets it. He gives a fairly good account of it in an interview in 1978 with Le Bitoux (Mec, 1988, trans. Savran, 1992). The idea seems fairly similar to D&G's discussion of the BwO - a zone of intensity, no longer a representation of an ontic being. 

Foucault states, in that interview:

[in the bath houses] you meet men who are like you, who are like what you are for them....You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity."
So desubjectification can be an affirmation of non-identity. A means by which to become a multiplicity, a communal being.

Immediately I don't feel much of a resonance with the idea of an emancipatory strategy in this sort of situation, it seems a bit too much plaisir and less jouissance. But then I read this article "Overcoming Masturbation" by Light Planet, a mormon proselytizing organ. Now I see why desubjectification as a strategy would be of use to someone.

I'm fairly surprised that 1) these people think there is something wrong with masturbation 2) the problem will be "cured" by not "admiring oneself" nor touching one's body, and 3) one strategy for overcoming the problem of enjoying oneself a-sexually is to eat a snack "even if you're not hungry" and finally 4) don't even pray about it.

Seriously? You believe that prayer, the direct means of access to the Lord of all Creation (including masturbation, mind you!) is actually a bad thing when you're trying to overcome what God created us to do?

I'm with you, Foucault:

It is regrettable that such sites of erotic experience do not exist for heterosexuals. Wouldn't it be a marvelous state of affairs for them to be able to, at any hour of the day or night, enter into a place furnished with all the comforts and with all the possibilities they could imagine...?

I am writing this week's popOp about addictions (even masturbation, I guess) and the centrality of this concept to the very notion of how we think of the universe. I'm referencing, of course, Plato's Phaedrus and the discussion of pharmakon-pharmakeia-pharmakeus-(pharmakos); thanks, Derrida!

New Post at the avant guardian

Musical guests? The Wu-Tang Clan (a la 36 Chambers) and Sigur Ros (performing "( )" in its entirety).

This week's popOp tries to understand the closing of Middlesex University's Philosophy department (home of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy), as well as the possibility of communicating that which resists being communicated.

Head on over for fun.

New Post at the avant guardian

I've been rocking back and forth in a corner for the last couple of weeks as I consume the MSM news and now it's time to get off that trip and into something more real.

So, I share with you my thinking on the nature of the 24 hour news cycle, the need for a reconsideration of the difference between time and experience, how political agents become spectral (if Debord and Agamben are correct), and Rand Paul. I assume he goes by Rand (rather than Randal) because he really wants to drive home his libertarian views and these were sadly combined with that doofus Ayn Rand. Rand Paul: you're a jerk. Stop being such a weasel.

Enjoy popOp! it's the Real thing.

New Post at The Avant Guardian

popOp is back and it's bad. no, that's not true. popOp's a good boy. who's a good boy? is it you? is it?

Addiction as Cultural Pathology?

I use an addiction model to understand the nature of human relationships, I employ a comparative philosophical perspective to investigate this addiction model. Philosophy, at its best, is the tool for reconceptualizing how we understand the world. In my research, funded by NIDA and as a researcher for Kennesaw State University, I noticed that the addiction science literature tends to operate with a particular model of how humans can define themselves and so how they interact. This assumption tends to guide the research and experiments toward a certain range of responses and perhaps outcomes.

Culture is a recursive patterning of human behavior in relating to the world. Like a fractal, if we can get a sense of the overall pattern, we can begin to understand how the system works at a micro and macro level. Addiction, it seems to me, is above all a pathological recursive patterning of one's behavior. But addiction does not happen only in an individual, contrary to our primary methods for treating and “dealing with” addictions (prison, a strict pharmacological intervention). Because human beings are defined by this recursive patterning of behavior that we call culture, if we are to properly understand this phenomenon called addiction, we must examine the interactions between the person addicted (or with the problematic use of a substance) and their environments. The guiding question became for me, what insights might a focus on the relational dynamics of selfhood provide to understanding how methamphetamine practices are negotiated throughout the drug-use career?

There are two predominant strategies for the treatment of addiction – pharmacological interventions and psycho-social interventions and most commonly employed is the incorporation of both dimensions when treating those afflicted. Following Volkow and Li (2004), the term addiction is employed so as to distinguish between chemical dependence (defined by the DSM-IV) and the broader phenomenon encountered while documenting the respondents' meth-using practices which can be characterized as repeated drug use resulting in an intense desire for methamphetamine and an impaired ability to control their urges to use methamphetamine. My aim is not to conflate chemical dependence with addiction, nor do I use the term without an acute awareness of the historical and philosophical problems associated with it (Berringer, 1979; Buhler, 2005; Davies, 1998; Hammersly, 2002; May, 2001). The pharmacological interventions developed to date (methadone for opiates, disulfiram for alcohol, the TA-CD vaccine for cocaine and perhaps methamphetamine), as the developers themselves are quick to point out, are not preventative and cannot act as stand-alone treatments: the effectiveness of these interventions are attenuated if the patient simply begins taking larger doses of the drugs. Thus, the central problematic in addiction science right now is managing relapse, a phenomenon that seems to be intimately related to drug use initiation and reiteration. It is here argued that these are primarily social processes and as such require a properly social intervention.

The success of therapeutic group dynamics as found in Alcoholics Anonymous-style twelve step programs seem to be based on the insight that an individual who changes not only their individual behaviors but also their social context is more likely to abstain from problematic use of drugs. This process of recovering in groups such as AA is possible through the many interpersonal interactions of the members themselves (Kitchin, 2002). Adams (2008) has argued that addiction is the gradual foregrounding of the person's relationship to the substance of abuse and so he calls for an increase in the intimacy among individuals' relationships as a means to both attenuate the individual's susceptibility to addictions as well as a means to overcoming addictions. Where Adams' model assumes externalized relationality, I am suggesting the primacy of internalized relationality in identity formation, as Hughes, Valentine, & Kenten (2009) have stated, our identities are, “inevitably socially and historically, constituted...always embodied, material; and so subject to embodied social and material constraints.” (10)

Culture is a recursive patterning of interactions. How we understand ourselves is subject to a long process of identity creation and negotiation within a social milieu. The identity migration model (Hughes, 2007; Hughes, Valentine, & Kenten, 2009) is a three-step process that assumes that people are fundamentally developed and come to define themselves in their relationships to their environments and their social worlds. Central to understanding both how one creates an idea of oneself (identity creation) as well as understanding how one changes one's identity over time (identity migration) is recognizing the performative nature of social life. We seek to produce an identity within what our social contexts allow and, given this pallet from which to choose, we then evoke this sense of self as frequently as is possible. With frequent evocations of this constructed self we are able to say that we are “being true to ourselves.” Because repetition is central to how we understand “who we are” at the fundamental level, we can to discuss problematic usage of substances of abuse without already having to concede to the language of volition or chemical overdetermination. In this way the identity migration model presents an understanding of addictions that eschews the classical dilemmas that have been well-documented in the literature (Bailey, 2005; Berringer, 1979; Davies, 1998; Graham, 2008; Hammersley, 2002) enabling us to generate novel understandings of the initiation into problematic behaviors as well as routes to cessation by illuminating the fundamentally relational nature of problematic behavior. The identity migration model also bolsters a renewed vision of risk in the addiction literature, as Pilkington (2007) has demonstrated what is at risk in drug-use is not necessarily the assumed legal or health implications, but must be expanded to include the traumatic loss of one's identity-affirming position within a group.

There is neurophysiological evidence (Volkow and Li, 2004) to suggest that the brain itself, without the learned cues from external phenomena will function differently as it unlearns the methamphetamine habit. While Hughes (2007) prefers to eschew, “a positivistic preoccupation with causality,” as well as avoiding a, “clinical search for the 'mechanism' of addiction,” (674) I would suggest that employing this apprenticeship language succeeds in her goal of reorienting addiction as an object of social theory and also jibes well with what the neuroscience of learning seems to be indicating (Schultz, 1998, 2000; Tripp and Wickens, 2008). Addictive behavior seems to be the result of a hijacking of the brain's inherent reward system corrupting how the brain naturally processes salience (Robinson and Berridge, 2000; Everitt and Robbins, 2005). The identity migration model, understood in the manner I've described suggests that the reward of methamphetamine is not only found in the surge of dopamine that accompanies the metabolism of methamphetamine, but this model also fits within the model of learning as a process of the dopaminergic system. These modes of understanding addictions are extremely powerful in identifying pharmacological interventions that will facilitate the social interventions that are necessary to reinforce methamphetamine cessation.

My data demonstrates the identity migration model is a process with three distinct moments: 1) an apprenticeship to methamphetamine use in a meth-practicing community, 2) an archaeological “bottoming-out” that the performative utterance announces so that gains entry into a community of recovery and thus 3) one may perform recovery at given opportunities. Key to understanding this process is the fundamentally social nature of methamphetamine use. With this analytic we are provided a lens for reconciling both pharmacological and psycho-social addiction interventions. With future studies employing the analytic here described and with other substances of abuse it is hoped that the community will be able to shift our understanding of addiction from an individual's pathology to an understanding of the primacy of social relations in how we understand ourselves.

Heidegger's Profound Boredom and Addiction

Today I presented the following paper calling for a reconceptualization of addiction in light of Martin Heidegger's theory of moods. The paper was presented at the Southern Sociological Society's Annual Meeting and I prefaced the remarks with two things:
1) Heidegger is very explicit in his 1929-30 lecture (later published as Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics) that he is not at all interested in kulturphilosophie (or sociology or anthropology) - nonetheless I think that we all can benefit from reconsidering modern living in light of what Heidegger has discussed -
2) specifically, I'm thinking that it's no accident that the concepts of addiction, modernity, and the study of modern society (sociology) all occurred within the same fifty year period.

Here are the slides to what I presented:

Heidegger's Profound Boredom and Addiction

Relationality and Methamphetamine

Today I presented this talk at the Southern Sociological Society's Annual Meeting in a panel discussion concerned with qualitative research methods. This is a similar talk to the one I gave at the Society for Applied Anthropology in Mexico a couple of weeks ago.

Tomorrow I will be presenting another paper in a theory session: Heidegger's theory of profound boredom and insights that we might gain to understanding addiction in light of his theory of moods. Wish me luck!


Relationality and Methamphetamine Use

Spectacular Agency - A political theory for everyone and no one

April has been a crazy month!

First I presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology's annual meeting in Merida, Mexico.
Then we headed off to Grenoble, France for our dear friends' wedding (felicitations!)
Next week I will be presenting two papers at the Southern Sociology Society's annual meeting.
Last week my best friend got hitched (congratulations, y'all!), and I presented this paper at the North Georgia Student Philosophy Conference.

Those of you that are reading my weekly popOp articles at the avant guardian will recognize some of these images. The popOp writings are my practice for preparing my thesis for The European Graduate School, and what's included here is the outline of my central hypothesis:

Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, stated that the spectacle, the idiomatic mode of human relatedness in late Western modernity, is presented as an instrument of unification, but, “the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” This model of sociality, problematic in itself, troubles the possibility of sovereignty. Nonetheless, the works of Debord and the Situationist International have received much-deserved attention in the last decade precisely because investigating spectaclist economic relations provides an evocative analytic for palpating the contours of that new mode of agency required in the fruition of globalization. In this paper is discussed the commodification of memory by examining appropriation-based art practices (e.g. Girl Talk or Kutiman's “Thru You”) and appropriation-based activism (Anonymous) with an eye toward developing further the possibility of agency within these increasingly-isolating relations.

I am calling this mode of sovereignty "spectacular agency," and what follows are some considerations of the sites of this mode of sovereignty as well as a (brief) consideration of the possibility of political action within this mode.

Here's the slide show that went with the talk - apologies, but scribd doesn't share the animations that were present in the original so some of the comedic effect is lost.

Sites of Spectacular Agency: A political theory for everyone and no one

New Post at The Avant Guardian

It's a magical time in the universe, again:

popOp springs eternal.

My Poem Over at W5RAn

The fine folks at W5RAn have published one of my poems. You can read it here.

New Post at The Avant Guardian

Another Friday, another popOp.

This week we're looking at the beef between Fahamu Pecou and Fabian "Occasional Superstar" Williams, and also the continuing palpating of spectaclist economics.

holla!

Dogs in the Media

Wired's Science blog has a great article on the world's oldest trees (here).

Did you know know trees can live to be as old as 9,500? This one did (right).


This is Old Tjikko and lives in Sweden.

And it's named after the dead dog of the geologist that discovered it.

Who's a good boy?

New Post at The Avant Guardian

I've just posted a new little ditty over at the avant guardian, this week's installment of popOp.

Something about Nietzsche vs. hyphy vs. snap vs. Bob Fosse (?)

Checka out.

It Costs More To Be Poor

It's true: living costs poor people more than the not poor. I bring this up because I read this headline and the supporting report today:

"Study finds median wealth for single black women at $5"

(here's the report upon which the article is based)

Here's a report from the Washington Post that discusses this counter-intuitive truth "The High Cost of Poverty"

Also, here's a report from the Brookings Institutes, almost exactly a year before the WaPo article, discussing the financial costs of being poor, "Public Policies to Alter the Use of Alternative Financial Services among Low-Income Households"

The poor pay more to have access to their income:

• for example -- if you cannot pass a Chex Systems report, then you likely cannot get a bank account, which means you will pay someone to cash your check. If you're not familiar with this concept, the poor will pay somebody money to give them access to the money they earned.

The poor have to pay in terms of housing:

• if you are poor, you likely have a poor credit history, based on this you will not qualify for standard financing for your mortgage. You might be offered a subprime loan, and since about 2006 we've seen what that leads to: massive financial hemorrhaging that can only be stopped by giving the ultra wealthy of the world all the money they want.
• Some might say, "don't buy a house if you can't get good financing." But, of course, paying rent (as everyone who tries to sell housing initiatives to the public typically brings up), means not building wealth and again, loosing that money.

The poor have to pay more for transportation:

• Not unlike financing a home, if you are poor you will likely pay a more punitive interest rate for that car loan...
• ...Unless, of course, you don't buy a car and instead use public transportation. As a regular user of the bus and train services in Atlanta, I can assure you that although our system is very efficient (despite what most white people in the metro area suspect) - public transit's real cost must also include the time spent waiting for transfers and connecting service. This is really a drag now since it seems likely that half the bus routes in the city will be cut soon.

The poor have to pay more for health care:

• The poor tend to work in industries that do not provide things like health care, but they may qualify for limited assistance from programs like Medicaid (maybe)
• The leading reason people (62% of those who filed) filed bankruptcy in 2007 because of medical debts. 92% of those who listed this as their primary reason for filing had $5000 of medical debt or more, this representing more than 10% of their gross income (from the American Journal of Medicine)

But the real cost of being poor vis-a-vis health care is more subtle - because the Federal Poverty Rate as it is, being poor is likely also going to cause a life time of health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.

The Federal poverty rate is not determined by your income, the cost of your housing, the cost of transportation; it doesn't consider medical debt, nor student loan debt, and certainly not consumer debt (credit cards or pay day loans). The Federal poverty rate is a measure of how much it costs to get a certain number of calories (not nutrients, just calories). I've talked about this before, here.

To refresh you: the Federal poverty rate seeks to find the cheapest cost for the individual to get calories. This means that the individual is encouraged to consume the foods that would have the richest calorie pay-off - since you're only given a limited amount of money to spend, you'd better buy the most food at the cheapest cost.

This is why you will see in really poor neighborhoods signs at the (freaking) convenience stores and gas stations that state "Food Stamps Accepted Here."

What foods have the best pay-off? Foods that have been heavily-processed and contain high-fructose corn syrup. They are typically foods that also have really large amounts of fat and calories from fat.

Of course, poverty doesn't fall out of the sky and like lightning strike you: you're typically born into poverty or at the threshold of being lower-middle class. This likely means also that your recipe book (as it were) is filled with foods that made sense to eat two generations ago when your forebears were working the fields and mines - more likely to die from work injuries than live long enough to develop diabetes or heart disease.

More on this later....