The Sensible and the Intelligible

Baudrillard - ideas and concepts

2011-10-15T10:38:00.001-07:00

Quotations: Bertolt Brecht, The Last Word

2011-09-20T14:25:00.001-07:00

The first country that Hitler conquered was Germany, the first people he oppressed was the German people. It Is wrong to say that all German literature went into exile. It would be better to say that the German people were exorcized [...]. There is hardly a literature that has been respected and honored by the state to such a degree- in the form of banishment- as the German literature of our time; when e fascists trample on it, this is their form of saluting it. -Bertolt Brecht, The Last Word, 1934

Michel Foucault Audio Archive: UC Berkeley

2011-09-18T18:06:00.000-07:00

Recordings in English
Howison Lectures, 1980
Discourse & Truth : Parrhesia
Rabinow Seminar & Recordings

Recordings in French
Sécurité, territoire, population, 1978
Naissance de la biopolitique, 1979
Gouvernement de soi et des autres, 1983
Courage de la vérité, 1984

Courtesy: Library, University of California, Berkeley

Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou in dialogue: communism and philosophy

2011-09-18T18:02:00.000-07:00

Pedro Noguera - Education in Changing Contexts

2011-06-23T13:01:00.000-07:00

Dr. Noguera discusses the importance of cultural understanding in education.

A Worker Reads History

2011-06-11T15:59:00.000-07:00

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Greek triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

-Bertolt Brecht, 1936

State Formation and the Accumulation of Symbolic Power

2011-03-28T12:12:00.000-07:00

Mara Loveman presents a very useful and thought provoking argument in her article the Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Capital (American Journal of Sociology; May 2005;110,6). In the historical analysis of the development of the nation-state, it is easy to over emphasize the material aspects of its development in accentuating the use of force, the monopoly of which, Max Weber has uncovered to be a critical aspect of state formation. And yet, Mara shows here how the development of symbolic power is as important, if not more so in securing the legitimacy of the state in order to acquire this monopoly, a fact that was not lost on Max Weber when he stated the monopoly over the means of force must be perceived to be legitimate. Loveman, like Antonio Gramsci before her, notes that direct and brute force alone will not secure the legitimacy of state power and requires a form of “consent from below” as Gramsci articulated to allow for the state to “rule through and not over the populace” (p.1669).

In analyzing the ways in which successful states develop this legitimacy, Loveman employs Pierre Boudieu’s notion of symbolic power but notes that a lot has been written on the routine exercise of symbolic power but not on the primitive accumulation or how states acquire symbolic capital in the first place. This is important, the author notes, to uncover the inherent ahistorical nature of this form of power whose misrecognized culturally and socially embedded nature gives it its very force. Thus one of the strongest implications of Loveman’s work is that in the process of placing so much emphasis on the “routine” exercise of symbolic power and not its primitive accumulation, theorists of symbolic power reify its symbolic power. Thus if symbolic power is defined as the power to constitute the given, to make the authority of power appear natural, universal, and inevitable, it follows that in order to obviate this system of relations requires an understanding of its genealogy.

Loveman’s article bears the influence of many theorists in articulating the primitive accumulation of symbolic power, including Benedict Anderson and Michael Foucault (not to mention all the writers she states), when she outlines the states desire to extend its capacity to classify, codify and regulate the population over which it seeks authority (p.1655). Anderson’s discussion of maps, museum, census in his seminal text, Imagined Communities clearly articulates the states bureaucratic extension in creating new categories of knowledge and power (Foucault) over which to extend its power and sovereignty. Where states do not innovate in this way, Loveman outlines how they will maneuver (co-opt, imitate, usurp) to bring other or non-state institutions into its sphere of authority (1662-3). Of particular intrigue in this struggle between state and non-state actors is that in the process, Loveman quoting Mann, states that both actors may increase their respective symbolic capital and thereby results “in a greater overall capacity to “order” social life” (p. 1663).

The overall argument made here is a strong and cogent one. Loveman’s work is important in undermining arguments as Charles Tilly’s in Coercion, Capital and European States, where his over emphasis on the state as a bureaucratic extension and thus product of a war machine, leaves its actual development unexamined by failing to critically investigate how states accrue the legitimacy to carry out its will (or necessity, in the case of encroachment) in the pursuit of conquest. As Weber, Gramsci, Loveman and many others have shown, a state cannot form without the consent “from below”. Where I feel less confident in her overall argument on the subject of symbolic power and primitive accumulation is with her proposed distinction between this form of symbolic power from ideology and the cultural milieu from which it emerges and that produces it (this discussion begins on page 1656). She states that symbolic power is not the equivalent “per-se” to cultural power, which she subsumes into ideology (within existing theories). And yet she states that state created nationalism has created to “foster the loyalty of its citizens” through the use of “specific symbols, promotion of specific cultural messages and inculcation of particular beliefs” (1656). Symbolic power on the other hand, is exercised through the “naturalization of the practices and cognitive schemes which make it possible for such messages to resonate with their intended audiences.” Further, “symbolic power operates through that which goes without saying”, she states, borrowing from Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992). But how else do messages “resonate” than through ones cultural understanding and how can any sort of meaning “operate” through that “which goes without saying” other than by going through the common sense ideology of a peoples cultural understanding? In the footnote on page 1656, she clarifies this dilemma somewhat by stating that her focus is not on any sort of “terminological causality” but merely to accentuate that “a cultural dimension of state power is not adequately captured by conventional understandings of state power”. While this later point may be the case, I do not see any clear dichotomy between the schema she presents between symbolic power and ideology and wonder if this obscuring of terminology is really useful. On the other hand, I see and appreciate the difficulty of articulating and conceptualizing such metaphysical concepts, so I am not at all completely against her heuristic devices.

Read her full article here: Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Capital

John Henrik Clarke - A Great and Mighty Walk

2011-02-13T14:59:00.000-08:00

"This video chronicles the life and times of the noted African-American historian, scholar and Pan-African activist John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998). Both a biography of Clarke himself and an overview of 5,000 years of African history, the film offers a provocative look at the past through the eyes of a leading proponent of an Afrocentric view of history. From ancient Egypt and Africa’s other great empires, Clarke moves through Mediterranean borrowings, the Atlantic slave trade, European colonization, the development of the Pan-African movement, and present-day African-American history."

Supportive Interchanges and Social Cohesion

2010-12-11T10:13:00.000-08:00

The work by sociologist Erving Goffman is often characterized by how the individual manages identity in modern society. For example, in The Presentation Of Self in Everyday life he introduces the concept of identity as performance, where individual actors perform or enact social roles and work to negotiate how she or he is perceived through impression management. In the process, one is attempting to ascertain information of the other, which translates into a highly ritualized conception of interaction. Similarly, in Frame Analysis and Interaction Ritual, Goffman structures his analysis around face to face interaction and seeks to uncover how individuals understand a specific situation, an interaction, a context, a role to be enacted and/or that is being enacted. All of these scenarios have implication within the social structure in which they are framed. And here lies the greatest implication in Goffman's work for the sociologist. Because it is within these "micro" contexts that large and abstract social roles and norms are perpetuated, constructed and reproduced, Goffman's work must be thought of beyond the sphere of the indivudal. Concepts such as alienation, race, gender, and exploitation are all examples of concepts that have no static qualities in and of themselves, but must be enacted and made salient through face to face, social interaction. The implications of this type of analysis is vast. For one, we avoid the mistake of attributing such concepts any inherent qualities and thus potentially reifying those ideas as fixed entities in an of themselves (This is a direct challenge to Durkheim's Sui Genaris concept, if you follow). On the other hand, by embedding the realm of individuals within the social context which produces them (and vise versa), this analysis allows us to get beyond the bifurcated notion of a micro and macro conception of social relations.

Erving Goffman takes up the question originally posed by the work of Emile Durkhiem, that is, how social order is maintained in complex modern societies which are (increasingly) absent of "traditional" forms of social bonding mechanisms such as religion, localism, and rituals that reaffirm the clan, community, etc. Goffman looks at the concept of the "individual" in society as providing this mediator of social cohesion. reverence for the individual provides a universal mechanism for affirming social relations and thus, order. Each serves as the guardian of his own totem as individuals seek respect (reverence) for their own individual being, or right to existence and affirm those of others through what Goffman calls "remdial exchanges" and "supportive interchanges" (Goffman, Relations in Public, pg.63). These rituals serve to bond social relations and form social cohesion when potentially offensive or divisive actions, gestures, signals need to be smoothed over so as to ensure flow of traffic, or social interaction. Examples of these in face to face interaction occur constantly in everyday life. For example, when an individual addresses a stranger by beginning with "excuse me", one pays honor to that individual's totem and excuses oneself for the potential infraction to ones sovereignty. When one infringes on another's "personal space" it's customary to apologize, or excuse oneself in this similar vein. Social norms and conventions such as "please" and "thank you" are intended to reaffirm the social order by paying homage to individual identities. It would be interesting to explore how marginalized members of these communities often resist the social order through this symbolic dimension of society as a form of resistance (see James Scott's Domination and the Art of Resistance). In the work of both Emile Durkheim and Erving Goffman we see then that individuals crave social order as they voluntarily seek to reproduce, perpetuate and ameliorate it when necessarily in order to preserve it. This analysis is indispensable to the understanding how power exerts influence on us as Goffman himself states that we often enact social roles and conventions that are often not of our own choosing. But on the other hand, and perhaps it is more interesting to note the potential we have in shifting dominant paradigms through our everyday face to face interactions.

Manuel Castells- Network Theories of Power

2010-11-16T18:15:00.000-08:00

Cuba in Revolution Sept. 24–Jan. 9, 2011

2010-11-16T08:12:00.000-08:00

International Center of Photography

49 Up [Full Movie]

2010-11-16T07:59:00.000-08:00

Following the lives of 7 individuals every 7 years, this series offers a great opportunity in analyzing, how identities, norms, beliefs, habits, and world-views are constructed reproduced and in turn affect life chances (Pierre Bourdieu's Habitus).

Durable Domination: Michael Burawoy on Gramsci and Bourdieu

2010-11-03T22:52:00.000-07:00

Professor Burawoy (UC Berkeley) illuminates some of the major strands of thought of Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu in this comparative analysis. In doing so, he offers the possibility of reassessing such notions as Gramsci's theory of hegemony and organic intellectuals, in contrast to Bourdieu's symbolic violence and autonomous intellectuals. Burawoy also ties the strikingly similar background of both theorists to their particular conceptions of social reality, structure, and domination. A link to the article and a lecture given on the same topic are provided below.

Article: Durable Domination

Audio Lecture

Pierre Bourdieu- Sociology is a Martial Art

2010-10-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

Mendeley-"A Last.fm for Research"

2010-10-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

Mendeley is the best program I have seen to organize and store research data across platforms. But the interactive quality may be the single best function, as it allows researchers to work collaboratively in the process of carrying out independent research. The power of social media undoubtedly shows its potential in this simple yet powerful application.

Eric Hobsbawm on Charles Tilly

2010-05-30T20:11:00.000-07:00

Eric Hobsbawm on Charles Tilly from Social Science Research Council on Vimeo.

See more of the Charles Tilly series on The SSRC

Posted using ShareThis

Poetry is Not a Luxury -Audre Lorde

2010-05-07T18:26:00.000-07:00

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.

As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. " - Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury

[Click here to continue]

Power, Knowledge, and the Self: Wiki Technology Theory

2010-04-22T11:29:00.000-07:00

Ramón Reichert (AT) Rethinking Wikipedia: Power, Knowledge and the Technologies of the Self from network cultures on Vimeo.

Quotes, Anecdotes and Antidotes: Siegfried Kracauer

2010-04-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

"The forces leading toward mechanization do not aim beyond space and time. They are blessed with an intellect that knows no mercy. Inasmuch as it is convinced that the world can be grasped on the basis of mechanistic presuppositions, this intellect frees itself from all relations to the Beyond and renders pale the reality that man, extended across space and time, occupies. This detached intellect begets technology and aims at a rationalization of life that would accommodate it to technology. But since such a radical flattening out of everything living can be achieved only by sacrificing man's intellectual (geistigen) constitution, and since it must repress man's intermediate spiritual (seelich) layers in order to make him as smooth and shiny as an automobile, one cannot easily ascribe any real meaning to the bustle of machines and people that it has created. Consequently, technology becomes an end in itself, and a world arises that, to put it in vulgar terms, desires nothing other than the greatest possible technologizing of all activities. Why? It does not know. It knows only that space and time must be conquered by the power of the intellect, and is proud of itself in its mechanistic domination."
-Siegfried Kracauer, Travel and Dance.

The Making Up of People

2010-04-16T09:45:00.000-07:00

Ian Hacking’s Making up People describes the way in which individuals are constructed and negotiated. In doing so, he applies Michel Foucault’s argument of bio-power, the historical process by which “individuals” are constructed out of a previously undistinguished mass through scientific inquiry (be it statistical data gathering and analysis, or medical development). But while Foucault’s work seeks to show how power works not outside and/or above us, but below, and within and in every aspect of our daily lives with the creation of docile bodies. Ian Hacking’s concern is slightly different as he shows how we, the subjects, respond to and potentially shift these power dynamics. I say only slightly because while most of Foucault’s work emphasizes the power that emerges out of this scientific inquiry*, though medical specialization, deviance and the penal system or individual freedoms. He did in fact apply a normative proscription to his analysis (especially as it applied to post-modernity and the break down of “rational”, modernist project). Nevertheless, Hacking makes the relationship between subject and object focal point of the analysis.
Through the application of what he calls “dynamic nominalism” Hacking seeks to articulate how scientific observation, discovery, and defining interacts with the object it seeks to understand (types of human beings in this case). In doing so, he is quick to point out that this process is not generalizable and will vary from case to case. Thus with the example of sexuality, he shows how homosexuality emerges around the 1870’s as a medical typology and a kind of deviant behavior until it is redefined through the individual and collective action, which culminates in the gay rights movement. Hacking also notes why labels do matter. He states, “Previous to that point of discovery, it was not “a way to be a person”, people didn’t experience themselves in that way. They did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers or their counselor’s in this way. But after that point, this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society. Thus, the definitions of our actions translate into a way of being which shapes who we are and how we interact in society (and how society interacts with us). The implications of this understanding have resounding implications for how we understand the balance between subject and object, or the balance between the individual and society. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of how the individual is both structured, while at the same time structures reality (through habitus) seems to particularly resonant here especially when combined with Foucault’s assessment of power as not a static top-down model structure but one of a relational force operating throughout society, embodied and wielded at various levels between and within various actors and stages of society.

Read Ian Hacking's: Making up People

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* Be it how ever objective in it’s own pursuits of knowledge scientific inquiry really is-indeed the reason Foucault equates knowledge as power instead of being in some way correlated

Quotes, Anectodes, and Antidotes: Alex De Tocqueville

2010-03-30T18:34:00.001-07:00

"...so in democracies public opinion has a strange power...It uses no persuasion to forward its beliefs, but by some mighty pressure of the mind of all upon the intelligence of each it imposes its ideas and makes them penetrate men's very souls. The majority in the United States takes over the business of supplying the individual with a quality of ready-made opinions and so relieves him of the necessity of forming his own. So there are many theories of philosophy, morality and politics which everyone adopts unexamined on the faith of public opinion"

- Alex De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Critical Theory: Philosophy as Social Poetry

2010-02-28T11:37:00.000-08:00

Marx describes in the 1844 Manuscripts and again in Capital Volume one, the effects of when the products of one's labor become separated from those who produce them in capitalist societies. He roots this analysis in his contention that human's ability to produce separates us from other animals and thus develops a specific form of conscious awareness. That is, unlike any other organism, human beings have the unique capacity to create a world distinct from the natural world in which they find themselves (often in direct contrast to the natural world). Further, only in the process of doing so, did we develop language (a type of philosophy, he states) so as to aid the intercourse of this mutual desire. Thus, because the labor derived from this ability to produce our existence is what defines us as human beings, the physical severing of this direct relationship, which occurs with the division of labor and forced coordination of labor, makes human's alien to ourselves, each other, the labor itself. Marx goes on to state that this estranged labor, produces objects that are now foreign to its creator, to the degree that they take on a life of their own (reification) and ultimately aid in the separation of ourselves from our selves (and again, from each other). He uses the term commodity fetishism to describe how the object of one's labor takes on symbolic meaning and a repressive quality in capitalist societies.

It is from this contextual analysis that we can begin to understand the philosophical platform that unites the Frankfurt school theorists as a more or less unified group (school) of intellectuals. In the wake of the industrial revolution, Marxists everywhere were initially perplexed to find that the production process was increasingly commodifying every aspect of modern life in the same way the industrialization process had mechanized the production during industrialization. But they were even more horrified to find that the inhabitants of these societies were not only complacent in giving up their freedoms, but even thrilled by the novelty of a mass produced, mass culture.

In seeking to understand the great transformations in the industrial era and capitalism as a fateful force in the everyday life of modern culture more generally, these theorists devised the notion of Critical Theory, which sought to integrate the advances of various intellectual disciplines that could provide constructive insight in their analysis. In applying the various themes, they looked at the area of culture within societies to explain how and why individuals accepted the repressive and alienated reality of advanced capitalist society. In The Culture Industry for example, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer sought to explain this increasing commodification of everyday life and outline the fetish character Marx originally outlined for commodities to culture and cultural forms as a whole (since in fact, they argued that culture itself has been increasingly become commodified).

The Frankfurt School saw the mass culture of modern capitalist society as a form of diversion for keep the working classes from realizing their interests. The function of the culture industry was to keep people complacent by keeping them diverted, titilized and entertained. In this way, popular or mass culture reinforces ones condition by perpetuating it, thus leaving little room for thinking outside of the logic of capitalism. Thus Adorno states that art is not supposed to entertain us or create a sense of enjoyment, which was the tool of the culture industry, but on the contrary to make us unhappy. Unhappy in the sense that we are forced to confront objects thought familiar to us, in ways that force us to reexamine and readjust them in new ways. This then, can be read as an analogy as to how we perceive everyday life, and the way we must re-examine our position within it.

Listen to the BBC's, In Our Lifetime's recent segment on The Frankfurt School: here

The People's Historian: Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

2010-02-21T07:47:00.000-08:00

“If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it’s a different story.”

Howardzinn.org

The Structures of Habitus

2009-10-15T13:41:00.001-07:00

In Outline of a theory of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu says the unconscious is "never anything other than the forgetting of history which history itself produces by incorporating the objective structures it produces in the second natures of habitus" (1977;78) (habitus being nothing more then the habits of a people turned cultural system to [or guide for] lived experience). That is, history reproduces itself, as generations learn from their predecessors how to interpret and respond to their social world. Thus, within the unconscious or 'unthink' is latent with the reaction to political-economic structures which provide the mortar for cultural formations.

Historical analysis is often left out of the question of violence, crime, and poverty. Thus we fail to understand the ways in which conditioned response is both historical and historicized. We can see in Willie Colon's Cosa Nuestra (1970) and Lo Mato (1973), the use of violence as a form of communicated symbol of emotion (respect, solidarity). As a performer, the actual threat of violence from the artist has less significance then what the persona seeks to capture and convey. The message here is one of solidarity with the 'streets', and those who take action conditioned by an environment defined by a lack of resources. When rappers today do the very same with their album covers and aliases (Noreaga, 50 cent, Escobar, etc.) we find a long standing tradition of paying respect to those who have survived and "excelled" in an environment that offers few possibilities of escape.

Quotes, Anectodes, and Antidotes: Arlie Hochschild

2009-09-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

On paying respect to status:

"...to have higher status is to have a stronger claim to rewards, including emotional rewards. It is also to have greater access to the means of enforcing claims. The deferential behavior of servants and women- the encouraging smiles, the attentive listening, the appreciative laughter, the comments of affirmation, admiration, or concern- comes to seem normal, even built into personality rather than inherent in the kinds of exchange that low-status people enter into"

-Arlie Hochschild -The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling

*Related: Hochschild's paper entitled On the Presentation of Emotion

Images: Russia

2009-09-12T20:36:00.000-07:00

Photographs often speak more about social reality than words ever can. This is due to the fact that the perspective into everyday/mundane reality these images offer can be quite revealing about how social reality is carried out and thus maintained. By offering us a window into the past or from a non-traditional perspective, we are granted (if only in fragments) a glimpse into another world. English Russia maintains a great photo archive of daily life in Russia both past and present:

Russia, 1896, in Color

Life in Russia by Petrosian

[via David Sasaki]

Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey

2009-08-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

Most self-proclaimed Marxists will never read, or only reading excerpts of Marx's magnum opus, Capital. But this massive three volume text represents Marx's mature analysis into nature of capitalist society and thus cannot be separated from his earlier work. The reason Capital is often ignored is clear (shear magnitude aside); if Marx's earlier work presents the theorist as social philosopher and humanist, this later work presents him as he saw himself in the last half of his life, as a pure economist.

Marx is clear in the parameter and scope of the text from the first line (vol. 1, page 1) of Capital when he writes:

"The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity".[1]

In other words, because capitalist societies are defined (and shaped) by market production and exchange, a proper analysis of this form of society must begin from its most basic unit of analysis, the commodity, as the starting point in understanding this form of social organization. By situating labor as most basic unit of analysis (quantifiable within any given commodity), Marx seeks to translate labor as the source of power driving the whole system of production. In this way, he seeks to find the underlying structure in society to galvanize the powerless laborers by showing them the vital function they perform and in turn, the interest they have in uniting.

While a proper synopsis of the thought process and theory of Karl Marx is order, I start that discussion from the final chapter, and the most important piece which holds it all in place. Because the task of reading Capital is a brave and daunting endeavor, the Marxist scholar and geographer David Harvey has posted his guided lecture through the text to assist you on his website, which can be found at:

www.davidharvey.org/reading-capital

I encourage you to put the authority of hindsight and your personal politics aside as you approach the work and instead, read as a historian and critical thinker in order to understand the debate within its proper context, the way Marx would have understood it within the intellectual climate of his own era. Only then, can we truly appreciate the poetry of his thought process.

Quotes, Anectodes, and Antidotes: George Luckacs

2009-08-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

“Mental confusion is not always chaos. It may strengthen the internal contradictions for the time being but in the long run it will lead to their resolution..." -Georg Luckacs

Soul as Dance

2009-08-22T09:39:00.000-07:00

As 'play' it nonetheless serves as a critical component in how we communicate our values, solidarity and mutual recognition. We dance so as to dispel fear, and quell anxiety. The way in which we move and contort our bodies serves to stir the soul in trance of group and self identity. Through it, we learn to be 'ourselves', while becoming one.

See Clifford Geertz's discussion on 'deep play'

Quotes, Anecdotes and Antidotes: Eco

2009-07-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Concerning the pendulum, or that which underlies the apparent nature of things:

"...he, trained on some textbook that has blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter..."

-Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, 1988

Film: The Education of Sonny Carson

2009-07-16T18:46:00.001-07:00

Sonny Carson's autobiography captures the harsh reality from which this controversial figure emerged and molded his political consciousness (the film being a book adaptation). Outlining an era of economic isolation of the African American community in the post war era, streets gangs became rampant as forms of security, status seeking and as a means of acquiring resources when little or none were available (i.e., by force). In the tradition of Manchild in the Promised Land and Down These Mean Streets, this story speaks of a reality that was never meant to be heard, or spoken of in a country modeled on the notion that 'anything is possible'.

Despite this harshness, the film captures many of the rhythm's of the African American tradition from the gospel sermon and chants, to the dancing and drum sessions, big bands and soul music.

The film itself is a masterpiece. From the scene sequences that produces lasting images in the viewers mind (note the prisoners holding the prison bars, which invoke the legacy of slavery); to the preciseness of the character's lines which convey the writers various messages (e.g. "How old are you boy?... 13, damn, them bastards must be running out of niggas to arrest").

The final scene of the film is of particular significance (students of Tocqueville will duly note), where Carson is imbued with a sense of empowerment as he reflects on the unity and pride of his former street gang, the Lords, as they march during a community parade. The message alludes to the subsequent chapter in the subject's life as he leaves the violence and crime behind him.

Watch the movie broken down in 11 parts on YouTube here

Thought As Art: Parodox and Parallel

2009-07-14T05:40:00.000-07:00

There are times that an artist’s work reminds us how the medium of art remains such a powerful tool for social criticism. It should be made clear, that critical thought does not [solely] imply the negative connotation of finding fault, casting judgment and/or condemnation. While this can surely be an important aspect of it, I am referring to a broader notion of critical examination of society and the self. Social relations involve a myriad of factors, which belie the surface of any given social interaction. Yinka Shonibare’s work seeks to outline some of these complexities as they played out within the colonial experience. Of course, this discussion is important for understanding not only the historical implications of this relationship, but also and perhaps more so, how this relationship has evolved to inform our own society and sense of our selves. Two themes in the artist’s work immediately resonate with my own, those on the notion of reason, as an outgrowth of Enlightenment thought, and modern sentiments; the politics of identity in the modern world (his work focusing here on the nature of sexual repression).

Contradiction, juxtaposition and paradox provide critical points of entry for understanding reality. That contradiction defines Shonibare’s six-piece work, Gallantry and Criminal Conversation (2002). The work itself begs further contemplation on the part of the viewer. In doing so, one finds that a variety of themes jump out of this installation, be it in the contradiction of clothing or the balance between ‘proper’ European attire and sexual debauchery. The combined effect gives a mixed message of condemnation on the one hand but also (and more importantly) a sense of cultural amalgamation, on the other.

It was the African that was forced to remove his and her traditional form of dress and take on that of the colonial invaders. But the subject here is the European master and we see here that it is s/he that takes on that of the African’s in all but the ‘cut’ of the garment. While the style of dress seems perfectly in line with proper 19th century attire, it is readily apparent that the fabric is not quite right. In fact it’s adorned with the print of traditional African fabrics to produce an irony, which has much broader significance. Because art involves an abstraction from the social reality it seeks to depict, we should read the African fabric seeping into colonial era dress more broadly, that is, as an analogy of an African cultural sensibility as seeping into the European’s own. This line of thought is radically different from the traditional notion of a one directional cultural transaction, by which the colonist is said to be ‘enculturing’ (cultivation through education) the hedonist savage of Africa. Instead, Shonibare suggests here that the African is also teaching the European. This leads me to the major themes in this work, that of sexual repression and debauchery as it fits within the lager theme of reason and personal sensibility in the modern world.

Debouchery and hedonism are rife within Gallantry and Criminal Conversation (2002). I am hesitant to call it a sexual “liberation” because the models are fully dressed, to the point that it doesn’t fit with such suggestive sexual positions. We can interpret this to imply a hidden sexual desire, and a guilty pleasure shrouded behind the illusion of proper cultural ‘refinement’ (articulated by the artist through the medium/form of dress. Indeed, what overtly speaks more about a culture’s distinctions then the way it adorns it’s individuals in dress?). The history of European cultural development is greatly marred with a sense of repression; be it a repression of nature or of each other, the European ultimately imposes this sense of repression on his own body and instinct in favor, initially, of religious piety and subsequently for the pursuit of reason and ‘enlightenment’. In order to conquer his reality, he learned to suppress his body (associated with desire). This is true through the so-called Dark Ages of religious piety, and the subsequent Enlightenment, in the name of ‘rational’ thought. In order to search for what he deemed to be “truth”, he sought to shun all that he considered untruths, fallacies, hedonist, and fantasy.

And yet, one can only exist with the other. The European created his own demons. Wasn’t this what Goya was speaking to in his original work, The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters (1799)? reason exists only so long as ‘unreason’ is created. Rationality must distinguish itself from what it deems ‘irrational’. In The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Africa) 2008, Shonibare is discussing this balance between reason and irrationality, but shifts Goya’s original assessment to outline how the European imposes his own ‘monsters’ onto the African. Isn’t it the African that is ‘sexually immoral’? Why is it then that the European that devised this notion, is acting in that very way in Gallantry and Criminal Conversation? Because he denies his own “irrationality”, they emerge as monsters to him. Despite the beauty created by his mind, the European is terrified of his own body and sees it as impure, something to hide, and to be shameful of (and this, in spite of the rejection of religious ideology). In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud outlines, how excessive repression leads ultimately to neuroses, as the inevitable expression of such desires surface in quite peculiar ways.

The paradox lies in the contradiction that the pursuit of more reason creates even more irrationality. The European sought to contain all that was virtuous and reasonable in his whiteness and its opposite, in black skin. The vibrant African tapestry breathes life into European austerity; Sexual bodies in cumbersome clothing, pokes fun at the hidden humanity of the colonial overlords. It was Kahlil Gibran who wrote, that in the pursuit of happiness one must come to embrace the dark as they do their light. It speaks to a blurring of the lines, of the danger of excessive value judgments associated with lived experience. Finally, reason is relative and ‘truth’ is self-evident, the one was unaware of its relativity until faced with the other. Together they create something better.

Yinka Shonibare's website

Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

2009-07-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

In what follows, I create a conversation between Walter Benjamin and Piet Mondrian in order to outline the arguments of both men on the nature of art and society; their relationship and the ways of conceptualizing the discussion. Using Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, A text which seeks to reconcile painting as art in society given the development of photography, I seek to juxtapose his line of reason to Mondrian's broader conception of art given this development. It is beyond doubt that the advent of photography affected the painting world with regard to the use of form, or object. While Benjamin argues that this effect was a fatal one for the painting, Mondrian contends that the existance of the photograph actually frees the painter from form and object. What we have here then, is discussion on the critical deminension of art in society, an inquiry into its abstract nature, and finally, a critique on both the Marxian Materialist conception of history and the painting as art.

As Piet Mondrian and Walter Benjamin are walking up the stairs of the gallery, Benjamin is trying to explain to Mondrain why he feels as an art, painting is dead. Mondrian listens, though obviously not convinced of the argument. He is actually eager to show Benjamin his work that is currently being exhibited at the museum in order to make his own case. The political viability of his latest work, Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue (1935-42), is the issue at hand for both men.
(Benjamin begins, as the men made their way from the train station to the museum):

Benjamin: “Art, as with every sphere of society, has become rationalized according to the demands of the market. This process has spanned generations, evolved with the development of capitalism and has organized social relations according to its principles. From what started as the most efficient economic model, capitalism’s rationalization has spread into every aspect of social organization, from political (through bureaucracy) to religion, leisure and even in family relations (which Marx himself remarked would eventually be ‘reduced to mere cash transactions’ (Communist Manifesto; 1848). With the development of mechanical reproduction (the photograph) the painting can no longer reach the senses of the viewer, they have become “heightened” by the effects of the photograph and the film on the subconscious...”

With this remark, the men reach the painting. They stand in front of it for some time absorbing the composition. Benjamin immediately understands to some degree what he is looking at. The rigidness of the lines, the order, the cleanliness; he interprets the structure of the piece as painting being absorbed by reason. He cannot help being repulsed by it. He is also saddened. His mind wanders for a bit to the prophesy of his own words. He thinks about the production line, about Ford and about the immigrant worker Taylor studied the movements of in his initial observations. He thought about modern society in the most abstract sense, about capitalism, and the immaculate oppression the masses live under. In other words, he interpreted the lines of ‘reason’ and ‘order’ as control, and the red as the blood of thousands who were subjected to it. Modern capitalist societies, he thought, looked immaculate on the surface, rationally composed like the painting. But like the white rectangle that dominates the composition, he saw it as an analogy for the emptiness of modern people. But then he thought, “Could painting absorb the principles of reason?” He knew it must have been what Mondrian was aiming for by incorporating such principles. He had no conception of Mondrian’s ambition to transcend cold reason precisely by using it as the means. Mondrian waited patiently for his friend to take in the painting, carefully aware of any gestures that might suggest his thoughts. He knew Walter was in deep contemplation, and finally decides to intervene. He begins...)

Mondrian: “You see friend, you Marxists are overly concerned with your material existence. As I stood here, I tried to place myself in your shoes, trying to discern how you must interpret this work. I wondered if you would, no, if you could transcend the lines and color. I assumed you would have gotten the principle of rationality, but what about what lies beyond it? You see, my work (as is the work of any true artist) strives for equilibrium between the world you see and one more elusive, one yet to be achieved, between the concrete and the abstract.
As I have stated elsewhere, every artist has unconsciously been moved by the beauty of line and color and for their own sake, though consciously their work took the form of material objects (Mondrian; 1993; 227). The evolution of art has brought line and color increasingly to the forefront of painting, slowly transcending form. Mine is purist art imaginable, as the subject matter or object (which has always been secondary in the subconscious) is completely done away with, and for good reason. Emphasis of the particular, an object or specific subject matter is worthless in dealing with true art. Art is precisely that which can transcend its particular quality or form, and tap into a universality. The artist must work to transcend the current reality and thus create the possibility of a new one, a better one (super reality). You see, “art precedes life”, and today “men have become machines, concerned only with what necessity imposes upon them” (1993;233).
In this work I present you with, line, unrestrained by nature achieves its most pure state, the straight line. And the colors, undiluted by mixing are also pure. The combination transcends the dimensions and depth of the canvas. And still the piece is held together by their contrast and composition. This work is delicate balance of equilibrium.

Benjamin, who has been listening patiently and attentively, finally interjects:

Benjamin: “First of all, before I comment on your work, let me remind you that it is your material conditions that matter first. The ability to feed, clothe and find shelter for oneself. The fact that you can preoccupy yourself with other distractions assumes you have provided for these most basic needs. If you think the slaving and starving poor have time to contemplate such lofty thoughts as yours, you are a fool. And this brings me to what I think about your work here.
Though your work has effectively absorbed the proper rationale lets say, and effectively transcended the art gallery, the principle of art has already shifted, and the eye of the masses (if that is to whom you presume to appeal to) has already found a heightened form of distraction, as I alluded to earlier. What mechanical reproduction does for the eye, the painting could never compete with. The eye has been effectively enhanced. This new art can dramatically alter the way average people perceive their surroundings and sense of reality. Furthermore, with mechanical reproduction, this form of art is done with the expressed purpose of a broader dissemination, or inclusion. Yours, though it may be targeted for a broad audience, reaches a specific minority and (upper) class status group for that matter. In fact, your work must rely on the reproducibility of the new art in order to spread your message to the masses through reprints, photographic images and the like. It is with mechanical reproduction, by ridding it of its ritual origins, that art is placed squarely within the world of politics (Benjamin;1969; 224). Its appeal is specifically towards a broad audience, and its effect is not at all objective on the part of the artist.
So your art frees line and color from its bondage of particular objects. And perhaps every artist and would-be artist that has secretly fetishized color and line cheers at your accomplishment. So what of the rest of us, what are we to make of it?”

Mondrian: “Didn’t I tell you that art precedes life? It is the artists that open up the subconscious and create avenues for alternative realities. It is the artist’s sole responsibility. What is your point?”

Benjamin: “My point is that art before mechanical reproducibility was based on ritual. It was always for a specific audience. In terms of political viability this makes it rather limiting. More over, with mechanical reproducibility, the aura you artists were once able to capture is diminished. Painting, as an art form is dead.

Though I do agree with you that art must transcend the particular and capture the universal, as this is a principle not unlike my own when I speak of an ‘aura’, it is mechanical reproduction that can alone do this now and not paints. The intimacy with which the viewer looks onto a photograph or film image awakens within him (or her) a sense of reality that the painted picture could never depict. The connection between art and actual experience is captured far more tangibly, concretely, accurately. Times and places long since past and forgotten are recharged in the viewer by the image on a photograph (Benjamin;1979; 243). In this way, an image of a desolate industrial town at the turn of the century may conjure images and analogies of current trends and social processes”.

Mondrian: “mechanical reproduction is politically oriented, that I do not question. The fact that art has been rationalized according to the nature of the capitalist market is evident. But does a photograph or a reprint, which would allow for a broader dissemination of my work take away from what I intended to convey here? I mean, these are lines and paints; it is their philosophy that is important. Can't the two mediums help one another, coexist?”

Benjamin: “every age has a particular consciousness to it, from a specific historical evolution. The age of mechanical reproduction has rendered your occupation obsolete. It does not speak to the people as it once did. The forces of production have evolved all subsequent aspects f the superstructure. There is no looking back. I am affraid you need a camera to remain a viable critic, my friend”

Notes: Gangster rap as a Cultural System

2009-06-23T07:45:00.000-07:00

*By culture we mean "a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life" (Geertz)

*If the meanings which they create with their words are violent and offensive, it must mean that the environment from which they emerge (reflect) are themselves violent and offensive (how else are we to explain the lack of violent and offensive cultural symbols emerging from the "leisurely" classes?). Cultural objects such as the rhythmic flow of words over a pattern of beats express aspirations and discontent of a people. They speak of situations, and surroundings that are abstracted to convey common sentiments and symbols shared within a group (if the cultural object, gangster rap here, succeeds in achieving broad acceptance, it must resonate with a certain reality). Thus cultural objects re-enforce solidarity, group behavior and commitment.

*Symbols latent in 'gangster rap' do more than represent the immediate objects they seek to convey (gold, women, money). This is not a new or novel idea. Humans have always used people as objects (slaves, subjects, harems) to convey status and a sense of accomplishment; Likewise with actual physical objects such as money and gold for the pursuit of power, self worth and social recognition, such as respect.

*Certain objects or symbols have more prestige then others. Gold chains and car rims hold less status (in the totem of status symbols) than do yachts and golf club memberships. What unifies the objects (in market structured societies) is the underlying capital that is used to acquire them. (Bourdieu and distinction. Cultural habits, consumption patterns and the forms of capital)

*We can analyze objects as symbols of meaning. Symbols of meaning can be analyzed as symbols of emotions (gold=esteem and self worth). Emotions, like symbols, are social: We learn them. We learn which ones to esteem, which ones to communicate.

*We pull the symbols that feed into our system of meaning from our immediate surrounding (again, culture). It seems that the distribution of income within a certain social surrounding (environment, milieu, habitus) dictates what objects will be associated with 'worth' and esteem. Cultures subject to a lack of resources center on short term and immediately recognizable objects while cultures with long histories of wealth use more abstract forms of wealth displays, e.g. physical capital and hard wealth identifiers in the ghetto. Opera and other forms of 'cultivation' in the dominant classes.

*In market oriented societies, market forces underlie and tend to dictate the system of cultural meaning, and the hierarchy of meaning. While the objects very within each class and environment, they migrate between classes as well. (Soccer mom's on rims, gang rap aspiring to the latest Italian leather wares).

*How else are we to explain aggression and the desire for social recognition (be it fear or respect) then as the result of certain deprivations of the like? We have to ask ourselves, what are the messages they seek to communicate in order to understand what they seek to attain. Respect, income security, [social] esteem, personal sense of accomplishment.
-Indeed, cultural objects and the systems they produce are coded in meaning.

*The greater the personal sacrifice to a cultural form/system, the more intricately defined the rituals associated with that way of being. These serve to justify behavior that is otherwise risky or counter intuitive. They work to constantly reaffirm behavior and reassure the subject. Cops, Armed forces, gang members and codes of honor, sacrifice, and commitment. (See the sociology of Erving Goffman)

*Culture serves ad s guide for action, it reinforces action, serves as a guide and justifies it. It communicates/transmits shared belief.

*For an individual to reproduce a harsh reality (and the understanding associated with it) s/he must take on a greater active role to accept it, to legitimize it to one's self and thus impose it on others. Thus, one will not question values that require little personal sacrifice, but will require great rationality to accept one that requires greater personal commitment. (e.g. Why is this necessary?) (See the sociology of Erving Goffman)

*Symbolic violence: the acceptance of unequal and/or gross injustice in the guise of a natural order (Bourdieu)
-Rap suggests an un-acceptance. An unwillingness to concede to that 'natural order'.
-So much so that the reproduction of violence (felt in the dominant system of relations) is proposed as the natural.

Structures and perception

2009-06-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

Sociology is the study of institutions. While individuals are brought fourth into a world free in volition, it is in the system of relations in which they are socialized that will determine how they will make sense of this "objective" reality. Values, beliefs, perception, preferences, all of these notions held sacred to the individual, emerge and develop through the reciprocal exchange between the self and society. Knowledge is shared, beliefs are transmitted and these are re-enforced by the institutions that develop as a result.

David Simon, writer and producer the HBO television show The Wire, brilliantly outlines these notions and is well aware of the fact. He states:

"...the show is really about the American city, and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how whether you're a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or a] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you've committed to." [1]

Below, is dialogue from the series that captures how these institutions (we can call them worlds) collide, mesh with, or buffer each other.

[School superintendent] So write them off?

[Howard "Bunny" Colvin] No, that's exactly what we're not doing.

[Superintendent] But you're not educating them, you're socializing them.

[Bunny] You can't put a book in front of these kids, put a problem on the blackboard or teach them every problem for the state wide test, it wont matter, none of it. Cause they aren't training for our world they are learning for theirs. And they know exactly what it is they're training for and what it is everyone expects them to be.

[Superintendent] I expect them to be students

[Bunny] But it's not about you or us, or the tests or the system. It's what they expect of themselves. I mean every single one of them know they headed back to the corners. Their brothers and sisters--shit, their parents--they came through these same classrooms, didn't they? We pretended to teach them, they pretended to learn, and where--where'd they end up? Same damn corners. I mean, they're not fools, these kids. They don't know our world, but they know their own. I mean jesus--they see right through us.

-The Wire, season 4, episode 10

Book Review: Domination and the Arts of Resistance, J.C Scott, P.1

2009-06-18T06:02:00.000-07:00

I started reading James C Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance, and while it is too soon to offer any critical thoughts, I was struck by a few of the initial pages. Following his popular work, Weapons of the weak, this book develops his notion of alternative forms of resistance. If we understand the dichotomy of the powerful and the powerless to rest primarily on the ownership of resources (and yes, the means of production) this would also include a monopoly over the means of violence. The art of resistance then suggests a side stepping of this overt struggle and a cultural logic as the "alternative" and thus artful form of resistance. Scott's task then, is to draw out the nature of cultural struggle as it constitutes a form of resistance. This is not a novel exercise in academic rhetoric. One should not idealize armed struggle or direct force as a form of resistance, simply because it is direct. Power often fails to flinch in the face of such reaction, and in fact, accounts for and invites such a questioning to its legitimacy. Indeed, what better way to legitimize its authority by playing into what it knows best and thus validating its strength and serving as a symbol of legitimate authority. Likewise, political mobilization often serves to legitimize the overall power structure even if the immediate perpetrators are displaced, which serves to further alienate those who are most susceptible to power.

Instead, when the culture of a people is left unconquered or un-colonized, Scott outlines how the overt forms or symbols of power are ceded to the dominant groups, while an underlying logic of power presents a more accurate account of social relations. Scott purposely pieces together a wide range of power relations from slavery, feudal to colonial examples in order to draw the parallels of cultural resistance. By studying culture through various mediums of representations from folklore, sayings, popular songs, and accounts, he seeks to weave an alternative or at least nuanced narrative of how power works in society. What becomes immediately apparent in this account is that power works both on the dominated as well as the dominant classes or groups. This is made clear as a result of Scott's particular methodology. Echoing Erving Goffman's theatrical model of stage and offstage representations of the self, Scott transposes this framework on power relations between groups. By showing how an official narrative (or what he calls a transcript) of social relations cuts through a "hidden transcript" of both the dominant and the dominated group or class structure, he sets the stage (indeed) for where power is negotiated, undermined and re-enforced.

Yet, the question remains for not only the vulgar Marxists and liberals to ask, as too how a question on the cultural struggle, which leaves the underlying power relations in tact is worth considering. Shouldn't the goal be towards a redistribution of resources and the right to self determination? While I will be addressing this in subsequent posts as I progress through the text, it should be immediately noted that resistance, be it armed or cultural, is the first step to revolutionary change.

Documentary: Malcom X Make it plain

2009-06-08T15:49:00.000-07:00

I stumbled on this debate between Malcolm X and James Baldwin looking for the former's autobiography to go over some of the quotes I had remembered, those which particularly struck me. While it's only an excerpt, it captures the very different world views of both men. It has always saddened me how so many people associate Malcolm with his boldness and anger, never having been exposed to his deep humility, compassion and commitment to the love of humanity. His fire is no doubt a reaction to the condition of African Americans during a very particular time in our history and an embodiment of the general sentiment of the people for whom he gave a voice. His rhetoric on violence seeks to galvanize black people's frustration and restore their dignity. Much more about this is order in the near future.

But first things first, read his autobiography and listen closely, look beneath his public identity, and you will find a calmer, gentler man. A lover of knowledge, Malcolm read extensively in various subjects and was deeply devoted to his his people and to his God. For those who would lend their hearts and minds to social ills, Malcolm's devotion and humility serves as an example to be admired.

I've included a documentary to get you started, and you can download the book here: The Autobography of Malcolm X

"...if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America-then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine."-Malcolm X

Watch the rest of the rest by clicking here

Symbolic interaction

2009-06-03T15:51:00.000-07:00

Indeed, the grand and elaborate Spanish and Portuguese churches built throughout the Americas during the conquest and subsequent colonization of native peoples stood as a testament to the "glory of the one true God"...but more importantly, they stood as symbols of the might of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns.

We can explain the use of architecture as technological innovation used as a method of struggle over the systems of meaning which structure reality. In other words, colonizers learned some very insightful lessons about how symbols operate within culture (or, as culture) in shaping the perceptions of its individual constituents; their motivations, values and beliefs, which they come to possess as seemingly ‘natural’ habits.

Symbols are at work all around us, a particular style of clothes can signify class and distinction, as does a waltz in serving as an indicator of a certain disposition. For power to attain the appearance of an objective system of relations (that is, uncontested and universal), it must infuse with and seep below the level of conscious action. It must become a part of the everyday habits or worldview of a people. So churches are built over sacred pagan grounds, Christian saints and holidays replace pagan gods and festivals in a form of cultural struggle. Whatever initial shock overt and direct power may perform, the lasting effect of symbolic and cultural objects eventually mollify as ‘accepted reality’. And these symbolic battlegrounds are not arbitrary. On the contrary, they perform the lasting effects of controlling ‘hearts and minds’ more so than armed struggle ever could (the lion provokes resistance, where the fox eludes it; See The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli).

Graffiti is a refusal. It stands as a testament to the discontent and the dispossessed. It is the slave of Egypt writing his name on the sacred stone bricks of the pyramid he was forced to build. Norman Mailer calls graffiti the "hanging of your presence on their presence…hanging your alias on their scene". But with the use of style with which they carry out their markings lies a further form of defiance. Often, they suggest an alternative, as with the re-appropriation of symbols and images. But always more then than simply attesting to the persistence of one's existence, they represent a flourishing. In this way, graffiti serves as an aberration to the normalized flow of the symbolic order of capitalism.

Hiphop pioneer Rammellzee outlines the notion of symbolic interaction through the relationship of graffiti to mainstream society.

Image courtesy of Eyelost

The Photography of Jack Delano

2009-05-26T16:32:00.000-07:00

FSA - T[enant] P[urchase] borrower? by his field, Puerto Rico, 1941 Dec. [or] 1942 Jan.

Sugar cane worker and his woman, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1941 Dec.

Courtesy of The Library of Congress' photostream

Pierre Bourdieu on the work of Lévi-Strauss

2009-05-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

Bourdieu here speaks about one of the founders of the structuralist approach in Anthropology, Claude Levi-Straus. Himself a structuralist, Bourdieu synthesizes the Marxian historical materialist critique with the vital missing element of culture in advanced (should we call it post-modern?) capitalism. Bourdieu's work is acknowledged for the development of field analysis, and to the conceptualization of alternative forms of capital such as "symbolic", "social" and "cultural capital". Others may know his work through the idea of "habitus", or through various notions of the use of "symbolic violence". In this rare interview, Bourdieu speaks about the importance of Straus's work to him and role of the philosopher in analyzing social reality.

A Break In The Cycle Of Production

2009-05-24T12:03:00.000-07:00

Lunchtime at work is no longer solely for nourishing the body, thanks to Melville House's 10 minute lecture series. Starting again this summer, it's also a time for nourishing the mind. If you work in or around the Dumbo region in Brooklyn, NY, this is a great opportunity to hear guest lecturer's speak on a variety of topics designed around the normal work schedule. Previous topics include Darfur, the families of the fundamentalist elite, and gentrification in Brooklyn. Bring your lunch and critical thinking skills.

Stay tuned for upcoming events here: http://10minutelectures.com

Images: Library of Congress on Flickr

2009-05-23T13:54:00.000-07:00

Proclaiming itself to be the largest library in the world and the oldest federal cultural institution, the Library of the Congress offers thousands of its archival photographs to you via Flickr.

Negro going in colored entrance of movie house. Mississippi Delta, Mississippi

Visit the Library of the Congress's Flickr Page here

Quotations: Ideology, Consciousness and Everyday Life

2009-05-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

"...ideology has very little to do with consciousness...It is profoundly unconscious...ideology is indeed a system of representation, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with 'consciousness': they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their 'consciousness'. They are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them." -Louis Althusser, For Marx, 1969. (As quoted in Dick Hebdige's, Subculture: The Meaning of Stlye.)

2009-05-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

"There is no such thing as good painting about nothing."

The National Gallery of Art features the art of Mark Rothko, giving the viewer a brief introduction to the artist's work and to the style of Abstract Expressionist art. This artistic period was popular during the post-WWII era, in the wake of reports of the inhumanity of the atrocities of the war and the realization of the primitiveness of so-called "rational" and "civilized" modern man (that the most cutting edge scientific and technological innovation was used to wipe out untold thousands in minutes with the dropping of the atomic bomb should bring this contradiction to light). If the style of art seems simplistic, archaic, childlike and brutish, it is because it mirrors the modern conscious in search of its more primitive (eternal?) drives and pursuits.

"Rothko's reading of Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, suggests that his work could represent the binary opposition between a rational or abstract element versus an emotional, primal, or tragic one (referring to Nietzsche's discussion of the polarity between an Apollonian and a Dionysian principle). Certain qualities such as radiance or the duality of light and dark have a long history of symbolic meaning in Western culture from which Rothko clearly drew. An impression of vast space can be said to represent the historical concept of the "sublime," a quasi-religious experience of limitless immensity in nature. Conversely, these canvases also produce an environment of their own, and installations of Rothko's work create the sensation of a sacrosanct place." -The National Gallery of Art on the work of Rothko

See it here.

Greening The Ghetto: Majora Carter

2009-05-22T07:57:00.000-07:00

"from a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, begets social degradation." -Monterey California, 2006.

Majora Carter uses a both personal approach and an informed perspective to draw the connections between race, class, and the environment. She shows not only why certain areas and groups become marginalized (she sites pernicious city zoning laws and political exclusion among others) but what can be done to reverse the trend. By offering the historical context of the problem (framing) and a cohesive solution for it, Carter serves as a model for social activists working in the field.

[courtesy N.Goodman]

Good Writing And Public Sociology at Berkeley

2009-05-21T05:32:00.000-07:00

It's not a given that academic discourse be an esoteric and sterile "scientific" discipline. This was Micheal Burawoy's rationale when he made public sociology the central focus of his keynote address at the annual Sociological Association conference in 2004. Following this theme, Arlie Hochschild speaks here about the importance of good writing and offers three specific reasons for the persistence of bad writing (By "bad", she sites a few examples from Orwell as being "The use of bad mixes of metaphors ("mix-a-phors"), vacuous bloated language, stale imagery..."). These reasons include an envy of the physical sciences and the relative lateness of sociology being established as an academic discipline. The stratification and hierarchy of high theory verses the low perception of data on the totem of methodologies. And finally, "Market language creep" into academic writing. To use Habermas's terms, it's a system's world creep into the life world.

She accentuates George Orwell's work, Politics and the English Language throughout her discussion, and considering the following passage from the text, you can immediately see why:

"Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause,reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the
English language."

Regardless of our specific emphasis in academic discourse, Orwell and Hochschild offer some some very poignant insight. Paying attention to how we write is just as important as what we write.

Part2:Q&A

Find out more about public sociology at the department's main page: Public Sociology at Berkeley

Culture, Jazz and Resistance

2009-05-20T07:39:00.000-07:00

For a music to find significance, it must resonate with the experiences of a people. Signaling Davis's distancing from the detached and sterile sound of the 'cool jazz' era, Walkin' captures the shift to 'hard bop', or the infusion of African-American blues and gospel music. Originally recorded on April 29, 1954, this was also the time that African American's were beginning to find a voice on the mainstream political arena. The stream of consciousness which coalesced at this time would ultimately lead to a resistance struggle that inspired the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power and decolonization struggles around the world. But it began as a conscious break with the mainstream, and a shift in the cultural logic of the African American community, that set the tone for the long hard struggle that was yet to come.

Colonial Legacies: The Battle of Algiers

2009-05-19T20:10:00.000-07:00

What does it look like when a people have been completely enveloped in the notion of change? How is it that in the face of superior weaponry (the instruments of coercion) the will of that people is unfettered?

Besides being a brilliant cinematic experience, this film shows that a group of people [in this case, the Algerians during French colonial occupation] cannot be ruled by direct force alone. An ideological dimension plays an equal, if not more important, role in the preservation of power. In coming to terms with this notion, Antonio Gramsci writing in an Italian prison, articulated the notion of hegemony in order to account for the reason the working class failed to rise up in revolution. He founded the notion of legitimacy, or rule by consent, to be the corner stone of power. But once the fabric of this hegemony begins to wear, groups such as the ALN will work to sow the seeds of an alternative model (who Gramsci calls the 'organic intellectuals').

It is worth restating the obvious, that these are lessons not only in subversion and separation but in order and structure (functionalism) as well.

Lecture: The Essential Marcuse

2009-05-19T19:03:00.000-07:00

In this lecture, Andrew Feenberg disuses the life and work of Herbert Marcuse, one of the most celebrated Neo-Marxist intellectuals (commonly associated with the Frankfurt school). Having been his student, Feenberg offers a personal account of the late theorists life, especially with regard to his time with him at UCSD during the sixties.

Of particular interest in this account, is Marcuse's attempt to reconcile both Heidegger's existentialism and Freud's pleasure principle to that of Karl Marx's materialist theory. Also, Marcuse's emphasis on advanced capitalism as a form of 'surplus repression', or the use of science, technology and consumption as forms of control and legitimation, make his work of particular relevance today. Marcuse is keen to pick up the similarities between communist and capitalist societies even in the late 50's and 60's when these two industrial models were situated on polar extremes. Finally, it was Marcuse's actions made him a popular thinker in his own time. Examples such as his support for the French students and workers during the '68 upheaval and his connections with Angela Davis, set him in contrast to arm chair intellectual's who felt (and feel) that the social theorist has no business engaging in actual social struggles. His work is an important contribution for post Marxist thinkers, and his example outlines the most important Marxian principle in bridging the gap between thought and action.

You can get access to Marcuse's work here.

The Will to Man

2009-05-15T10:00:00.001-07:00

At best we cannot know God and so we must make a living in his absence. This is the story the Dostoyesky tells through the cardinal to Jesus's face. "You left us to fend for ourselves, what else were we to do?" "The church provides stability and meaning for these people", he tells jesus before telling him that he knows exactly who he is but that they do not need him anymore. He would later sentence him to death.

At worst, God is a myth, designed out of fear and ignorance of the natural world. The modern sentiment finds pride and is emboldened by these assertions. The development of Western civilization has thus been defined by the conquering of the natural world. The scaling back of the realms we had once resigned to the 'mystical elements'.When Nietzsche famously proclaims that "God is dead" and "we have killed him", he brings to life a story about the Western condition Max Weber articulates through his notion of a 'disenchantment of the world'.

The modern sentiment that prides itself on its rational disposition to the physical universe and the metaphysical questions of life is the result of centuries of Western thought. Western man emerges form the 'dark ages' in the Enlightenment, revitalized in humanism. In direct subversion of the Christian church's hegemony, these thinkers sought to cast light on all of the aspects of life that were relegated to the divine but which they found to be a product mere of ignorance. "How many, if not in all of of the facets of our life is this true?", they asked with each great discovery. The irony in this story is that it was Christianity that initially sowed the seeds for its own unraveling. In an attempt to prove the notion of the "one true God", the Christian church promoted scientific inquiry to dispel notions of pagan mysticism. By stripping trees, rocks and other natural elements of their mystical qualities, Christian followers sought to shift the spiritual consciousness of believers from physical reality to its rightful place in metaphysical 'eternity'. But this 'rationalization' of the world progressed beyond the notion of "the one true God", to none at all. In fact, Weber (and many German thinkers before him) noted how it evolves (and is increasing evolving) towards nihilism, meaninglessness, and ultimately towards what he famously called, an 'iron-cage'.

What becomes apparent in the historical context of this development is not the immediate question as to the existence or non-existence of a God. instead, the genealogy of Western thought and subsequent reality structures the question to be meaningless. In this reality, God is dead. The question itself is marred and coded in the language of rational thought. The structures that frame our consciousness as modern peoples, our patterns of thought, our disposition to physical space, our relationship to it, our thinking about the concept of 'nature', 'humanity', 'reason', science and technology all inform our reasoning to the point that the conversation is scripted long before we are asked. And its etched on our bodies, as well as our minds. We can't know the answer to the question of a God, not because God is too great (though an argument from this direction is possible from a spiritual standpoint) but because we have molded a reality that completely dispels such a notion.

If this seems too lofty and philosophical, let me explain by analogy: In football, you have rules that guide the game and allow it to work, or function smoothly. For this to work, each player must know the rules and play his or her part accurately if the game is to be had, played well if the game is too be competitive and fulfilling for all participants. Sure you can perform other functions with the ball or a certain positions that are not proscribed in the rules, but to do so is ridiculous and perhaps may even contribute to slowing the functional flow of the game.

In the Will to Power, Nietzsche was essentially stating that the game (modern life) was now structured around rules of its own nature as in the football game, where rules that did not pertain to an unapologetic humanism were no longer necessary and even stifling to a purposeful life. He calls this need for a 'superman', a 'will to truth', and will to power' and a inevitably, a 'will to man'. It is worth noting that his conception is of a specific reality and a specific historical context.

Mainstream Media Watch: Crisis And Legitimation

2009-04-05T07:56:00.001-07:00

"Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn. Put pejoratively, they are stupider. It is not surprising that they do less well at school, end up poor as adults and often visit the same circumstances on their own children."

This truly incredible conclusion was not published in the 19th century during the height of the colonial era but in The Economist just a few days ago (4/2/2009). By attempting to re-frame the discussion of poverty in terms of the individual with this type of psychoanalysis or quasi neuroscience, apologists of capitalism have always sought to distance the institutions of society that are to blame for the material conditions of the poor. If pressed, defenders of free market liberalism would argue that only capitalism can improve the conditions of the poor (when convenient), but when this assertion is tested and/or does not work in practice, they resort to these types of attacks on the individual.

The truth is, it is not a given that the poor automatically experience more stress in their day to day lives as a result of poverty (though poverty does account for a good deal of stress to be sure). On the contrary, traveling outside of the U.S. to pretty much anywhere across the so-called "Third-World", who hasn't been immediately struck by the lack of stress and sense of content in the hearts of people the Economist would call poor and stupid? Conversely, who doesn't know of the sense of insecurity, and restlessness that leads to greed and stressful discontent among the middle and upper class that compose the capitalist social structure? So what accounts for this inversion of social reality on the part of the Economist? Before I get to that, let me back track a bit.

If children who suffer the conditions of poverty do have a "diminished memory" capacity as a result of poverty, that does not explain their condition, it only accounts for what perpetuates it, vis-a-vie poverty. Indeed many of the poorest children are not able to attend school at all as a result of the consequences of poverty, having to work at a young age, should we say that they have no memory at all? The underlying cause of poverty remains uninvestigated in this article, which I suspect, is intentional and inconsequential (if not unconsciously so). By equating poverty with stress (and wealth with the absence of the latter) in this most facile of ways, the Economist is speaking to those who are completely engaged with the system of wealth creation and its pursuit. This is an attempt to reassure the middle and upper classes that they are on the right path and not to be alarmed or concerned about notions of 'crisis' or the poor (but to be aware of poverty least they be found stupid). In the same way that measuring the brains of African slaves to find a 'scientific' way to explain the inferiority of blackness was meant to legitimize the institution of slavery (not to the slaves but to the slave owning society), so this use of science is intended to reassure the masses of the modus operandi.

So, while the Economist should be read to understand market forces and for the explanation of specific events, when it's allowed to speak speculatively and "scientifically" about society in general and human nature in particular one should tune out or turn off. Read the full curious article here:

Neuroscience and social deprivation

Banksy: Village Pet Store

2008-10-31T13:21:00.001-07:00

Full interview with Clifford Geertz - part 1 and 2

2008-10-29T12:30:00.001-07:00

“Not men and their moments, but moments and their men”*

2008-10-29T10:22:00.001-07:00

By analyzing the structure of interaction, the engagements of women and men, Goffman sets out to situate the roles, identity and the notion of "individuality" within a social context. The individual is squarely the business of social interaction or group dynamics. The irony should not be lost on us. That which we perceive to be the most autonomous of society (or group think) is in fact an overwhelming social phenomenon. Even other sociologists hadn't thought through the implications of the "individual" to the extent Goffman had. Emile Durkheim saw the division of labor as force of modern society that while allows for greater complexity through specialization, also creates anomie or alienation as a bi-product. This is because through specialization the individual emerges from the group or clan, which both liberates her from her traditional role/s and identifications and yet alienates her from the very same people she once shared her identification of self with. Durkhiem saw this as a very real problem that needed to be circumvented through the recreation of group signifiers (God or the totem) as symbols to reinforce social cohesion (or the social order). In doing so he speaks about uniform education systems, the newspaper as a form of "nation" building and yes, the individual. Without realizing the full implications of his thought process Durkhiem did note that the individual served as a form of totem in modern Western society. Like a God, people vest [perhaps undue] emphasis on the individual as the highest unit of society. "God is the measure of all things" becomes supplanted with "man is the measure of all things". In the same way "traditional" villagers revere the village totem by paying alms and speaking of it in abstract and mystical admiration. So do Westerners of their new god. It is by no accident that the founding fathers of the French and American democratic systems established a constitution based, in the first principle, "on the rights of man".

Goffman takes this analysis one step deeper. Where Durkhiem feared men and women turning in on themselves like islands or mini gods [worshiping their own gods, which is themselves and ] in conflict with one another, it was only because he was looking at the overt or macro social implications of this new quasi-"religious system". Goffman takes us down, to the level of human interaction, face-to-face encounters, or the microcosm of social relations. Goffman states that we pay homage to society in every encounter with other individuals. By respecting certain norms in our interaction (spatial, conversational, bodily) we re-enforce, not only our own "sovereignty" but that of others and thus of the "clan". These form the bonds of society that keep the social order. Most of the time this ceremony is unconscious so we don't even know it is happening. It is only when the sacred is profaned do we all know the order has been transgressed. Should a person be insulted on the street in plain view of the masses for no apparent reason, all recognize a violation has occurred. Should an individual cut another in line, all recognize the injustice caused on the one who was cut. But this is a violation not only of the ones immediately involved, all recognize that the sovereignty of all (and thus of the 'totem man') is threatened. Some may interject, others will express scorn through facial gestures and these reassert the social order. By acknowledging the wrong and recognizing the contempt that others express do we understand the social order and reaffirm its qualities. In other words, in this way we learn and reproduce the social order.

In seeking to understand this normative behavior, we should not feel that the "individual" is under attack. The individual exists; this is no less evident in the fact that people respond differently to different situations. But Goffman was not interested in emotional responses that would suggest an individualizing response. If this displeases the psychologist, the traditional sociologist also feels wronged by Goffman's analysis in that he wasn't very much concerned by the macro structures in place that lead to the development of any one encounter (i.e., different social conditions and socializations between actors that will produce varied results). What he was looking at was the social order expressed in the minute realm of interaction. So holding the individual and the society constant, Goffman was looking at how social psychology informs, shapes, wields, reproduces, determines and is perhaps determined by face to face encounters. Goffman then, undermines psychology by showing that society creates the roles people are to fill when faced in social encounters, leaving the "individual" nothing other then a narrow selection of decisions as to the role he or she will apply in any given interaction (decisions that are highly structured and/or filtered through socialization). This adds another dimension for the social theorist since not only is society at work in establishing the macro surrounding that led to the encounter, but is present in the very forms that the interaction will take place, the responses, body movements and overall conventions that make the interaction feasible. There seems to be no room for the individual in this formulation of society. Indeed Marx said it best in the 18^th Brumaire, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

*Quote by Irving Goffman, in the introduction to The Interaction Ritual

The logic of Late Capital through David Harvey's "The Condition of Postmodernism"

2008-10-15T09:11:00.001-07:00

David Harvey notes that in times of insecurity and crisis, people turn to the aesthetic for refuge and escape (1990;327). Only in this way can we understand the cultural shift since the late sixties. The Late sixties/early seventies coincides with the severe crisis if not the end of the ideology of modernism as a form of cultural hegemony. In the wake of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz and the Belgium Congo, the end of the Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Combined with the rise of social movements domestically (Vietnam, Civil Rights, free speech, women's liberation and "Third World" liberation struggles) and de-colonialization struggles internationally, all brought into question the Enlightenment notion of a "modern" and "rational" Western Civilization. Modernism, with its idealized meta-narratives, proved to be idealistic, incomplete, inadequate and Eurocentric.

The US economy in the late sixties and early seventies was at a particularly ambiguous time in its development as well. The demise of the industries still left from the wartime boom left massive holes in the Nation's infrastructure in the form of ghettos and high unemployment. The restructuring of previous colonies into sources of cheap labor and thus, the exporting of manufacturing production helped the U.S. and Europe transition into the service industry, but left massive short and long term woes. Harvey states that the process was facilitated by a crisis in capitalism, namely Fordism and Keynesianism's inability to "contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism" (1990;142). The contradiction amounted to a crisis of overproduction, and over rigidity in the Fordist system of production. After attempting multiple solutions, including monetary policy adjustment, devaluation, and macroeconomic market control (1990;180); A multiple pronged approach, which included "absorption" through spatial and temporal means, was necessarily employed. A radical restructuring of the global financial system, industrial production and the subsequent work force (in conjunction with the tactics previously noted); which was marked by and emphasized temporal production and fragmentation. This new era was all which amounted to what we can call "flexible accumulation" (1990;147-160). This transition is also characterized by the transition from modernism to postmodernism, a theme I will return to shortly.

In spite of, or because of this crisis in modernism, there developed a very interesting and reactionary political climate across the U.S and Europe. For one, people were tired of fighting; hence the emphasis on culture and style of the seventies. This aesthetic retreat from the political realm would culminate in the Regan era in the U.S and the Thatcher era in Britain, defined as a time of extreme political conservatism and market liberalization. To put is simply, politics was left to the politicians. This mass exodus out of the political and into the cultural realm created radically new forms of self-awareness and social consciousness, which masked the previous forms of class struggle. In other words, people were looking for "liberation", but though the medium of culture or the aesthetic. The emergence of the "culture industry" was the bourgeoisie's way of meeting this evolution of "class struggle".

The emergence of a "culture industry" is rooted in the crisis of late capitalism. Harvey notes the "absorption" of goods in time and space within society as a means of displacing an accumulation of goods produced. As stated above, this was a necessity given the reemergence of global markets and thus the restructuring of the Fordist/Keynesian era economy. Harvey states, "As commodity producers seeking money…we are dependent upon the needs and capacity of others to buy. Producers consequently have a permanent interest in cultivating 'excess and intemperance in others, in feeding 'imaginary appetites' to the point where ideas of what constitutes social need are replaced by 'fantasy, caprice and whim'. While the absorption of goods within any given society is by no means a new phenomenon, but the scale with which it unfolded in the early seventies is unprecedented. The capability to do so depended on the ability to shape and define "culture" in a radical way. This new method ultimately relied on the ideological tool of "cultural production", which amounts to nothing other then the attempt at the 'colonization of culture'. But in order for the culture industry to be effective it must reach into the 'lowest orders' of civil society to appeal to the broadest audience.

As stated before, the ideological transition in late capitalism is marked by the shift from modernism to postmodernism. where modernism was fixed, postmodernism was fluid. where modernism was linear, postmodernism was multi-directional. Postmodernism sought to incorporate rather then exlcude. It was ephemeral rather than eternal and immutable. For this reason, the transition from modernism to postmodernism may perhaps signal the greatest threat to the Enlightenment project as the dominant ideology is forced to open up, and reevaluate its value system.It is here where the negotiation occurs.

On the Role of the Sociologist

2008-10-15T08:49:00.000-07:00

Taken from Pierre Bourdieu's Bachelor's Ball

Docile bodies, habitus and the boxing ring

2008-07-07T06:42:00.001-07:00

Dr. Loic Wacquant, Professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley talks about some of the major themes of his work around the relationship between the American black ghetto and the prison system. Applying Bourdieu's notion of habitus, he uses the boxing gym as a means of entering the world of young black male (who he states is "orientalized" in American mainstream society) who, upon release from jail, seek to avoid the world of the streets, through the physical rigor and adjustment necessary for boxing. Because they walk the line of two worlds that work to control their physical bodies, they train to maintain self control and avoid the dangers of both. By disciplining the body in this way, they seek to rid themselves of the habits which would sacrifice their freedom and the consequences of a confinement system which intensifies and thus perpetuates those habits.

Seize the Time

2008-06-24T14:47:00.001-07:00

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. "The truth will not run away from us" – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism's picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.

-Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

WILL TO POWER

2008-05-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

Friedrich Nietzsche’s "Genealogy of Morals" is a plea for the escape of certain individuals from the tyranny of society. He traces the development (genealogy) of morals essentially to a battle between “Rome and Israel” by showing the evolution between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. ‘Good’ was initially associated with aristocratic values and character traits and ‘bad’ was associated with the masses. Until “Israel” ascends to power and the tables are turned. Everything that was associated with the poor or the “meek”, was inverted as “good”, and all the characteristics that were associated with Rome (strength, valor, arrogance or confidence in self) became “bad”. Ultimately, through resentment , the Jewish people infused this dichotomy with a spiritual dimension, thus bad becomes not only bad, but “evil”. Thus, every strength attributed to man(as opposed to God) embodied through the Roman sensibility became an object of scorn and shame.

By arguing that this ‘slave ethic’ has taken predominance in western civilization, Nietzsche argues that the predicament is that “together with a fear of man we have also lost the love of man, indeed the “will to man”. Nietzsche asserts that the will to human freedom has been introverted and made into a feeling of guilt (very much like Freud’s super-ego). Feelings such as happiness, pride, and power, which were characteristic of the aristocracy, were attacked, made suspect and condemned, being replaced by the values of the sick, the suffering and poor. Thus any ambitions of happiness are immediately repressed as “bad conscience”. These desires being introverted, “lacking external enemies and resistances, and confined within an oppressive narrowness and regularity, man began rendering, persecuting, terrifying himself, like a wild beast hurling itself against the bars of its cage" (218). Strong parallels can be made here to Freud’s super ego. For Freud, neurotic symptoms emerge as a result of unfulfilled instinctual drives, which he defined as sexual desires. “…To our surprise” he states, “perhaps every neurosis conceals a quota of unconscious sense of guilt, which in turn fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as a punishment” (1961;103). These men seem to be in perfect dialogue when Nietzsche calls bad conscience (or guilt) “a sickness” (1956;221). And Freud seems to be referencing Nietzsche’s "Genealogy of Morals" directly when he states that, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all…(1961;97)”.

This questioning of modern social morals as a guiding force in the lives of individuals places society as the antagonist or perpetuator of alienation. Nietzsche (like Freud), is clear in assessing the negative effects of moral constraint on the individual, as he attributes morality with the means of enforcing this slavery of individuals within themselves. Thus morals must be transcended if one is to achieve any sort of “freedom”. Nietzsche saw himself and other philosophers of his time as leading the way for the eventual “supermen” that will be able to perform this transcendence, but stated that he or the men of his own time were much to enmeshed in their time and place. He was certain that the supermen will come not within his own time, but at a future one, when men and women are less bound to the norms, morals and customs of their particular epochs.

For this reason, Nietzsche advocates the need for an “anti-Christ and Anti-nihilist, conqueror of both God and Un-being” who will restore humanities “will to power” (1956;230). Nietzsche challenged the intellectual to question all unexamined assumptions, which was necessary in order to transcend the good vs. evil paradox. But this of course takes one who is comfortable or who is at least capable of going against her or his societies and epochs sense of right. And yet, this constant questioning teeters on madness as culture provides the foundation of reason. It should come to no surprise that Nietzsche succumbed to this madness in his endless battle with the confines of “reason”.

Beyond Good and Evil

2008-05-13T06:28:00.001-07:00

Then the woman said, speak to us of joy and sorrow.
And he answered,
your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else could it be?
the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potters oven?
and is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, "Joy is greater then sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet

Human, All Too Human (BBC) - Jean Paul Sartre: Part 1&2

2008-05-12T09:14:00.000-07:00

Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Art and the Social

2008-05-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

Is the only art "worth anything", the art that presents some sort of social value? Be it political, humanist or exploring some sort of eternal truth(s), art is the abstract exploration into the human condition. The only worthless art, it is argued, is that which seeks to assert "art" for its own sake. The negative connotations associated with modern art stem from this perception of art as fluff, pretty child like images that have no relevance to the real world. this has not always been the case, although it has always been a strong undercurrent in the history of art.

The modern Western notion of "art", was traditionally a luxury of the upper class, the bourgeoisie. Be it elaborate tapestry, or portrait painting of the elite and their offspring, these representations were intended to capture "la bella vita". It was only later that art got a sense of itself and began its journey in the critical understanding of reality. Consider Francisco Goya's portrait painting of the Spanish royal family. Their is nothing out of the ordinary in the depiction of this subject matter. tracing the evolution of capital and the art work and you will see that in its inception it was the rich (and the church, ...which was also rich) that bought (or was the patron of) art, so art emphasized the portrait (and/or the church aesthetic). But Goya "flipped the script" if you will, he depicted the monarch and his family not in the traditional regal manor, instead they appeared scattered, corporeal, human. The king even has a foolish look on his face. This was Degas form of protest. And a powerful one.

Since then, few periods in art have actually developed to try to advance "art for art's sake". Most were trying to understand and depict the essence of their particular time or some universal quality in the human condition. And so, Neoclassicism sought to correct the excesses of the Rococo period which had become obsessed with the decorative, with linear, elegant functional tradition of the classical era. These were understandings of reality, not ends in of themselves.

In this sense, the main stream art world has always been an esoteric development that cannot be understood with the naked eye alone. The vast majority of main stream modern art has been an internal dialogue within itself, where it builds on and disputes within itself. In this sense, The modern art gallery goer is like one who intrudes into a heated conversation. It is no wonder that most feel alienated from modern art if they are versed in the discourse that lead to its present form. Will have to leave the modern sentiment and the art work at that for now.

"Good" art cannot be understood on its own merit alone, one must take the broader (or macro) Western social, political and economic trends into consideration. Only in this way can one understand what Jean Harp, one of the most famous Dada artists (and one of the most commonly confused periods of art with "art for arts sake") means when he states about the purpose of Dada to be to , "..destroy the hoaxes of reason to discover an unreasoned order". It is here that the modern philosopher, she who seeks to understand the "modern sentiments" finds value in the practice of art. Modern capitalism is distinguished from previous capitalism's through its emphasis of "rational, instrumental reason" according to Max Weber. Western civilization has developed a body of thought around the notion of "reason" and "rationality". Most of these notions flow through both you and I without our conscious awareness. they are built into our value system, our logic, our economy, our school system, our perception of the body (Foucault), and so you see: our perception of reality.

And so Impressionism captures the fleeting, Abstract Expressionsim the metaphysical, Dada, the irrational. Surrealism depicts the dreamlike after the discoveries of Freud in the primordial and "uncivilized" currents within both the individual and civilization(s). Even the toy like sculptures of Alexander Calder are a deliberate attempt to infuse the "childlike" into the modern discourse as weapon against the hegemony of "reason".

Fortunately, or unfortunately, art is not a medium to be considered in its own right, without a history or narrative. It has to be contextualized. By showing the work of art side by side in the modern gallery to be considered along with hundreds of other works, the modern work of art is reduced to a 30 second info-mercial. It's a shame when you think about all the thought that went into any particular work of art. This development cannot be explained in the context of art alone. broader or macro political-economic trends are at work in this development. Industrial capitalism, through mass production and the creation of a consumer society, seeks to reduce all aspects of society to its logic. With the demands of profit evolved a logic of production to speed consumption to speed up production. So comes the stress testing of products, to make them good, but not that good. The development of style to coincide with seasons to boost both consumption and production, which in turn spur profit. The modern production cycle then emphasizes the temporal, the throw away, the instant. Instant gratification comes from this speeding up of the production cycle(s).

No art that makes it to the "public sphere" can be understood outside of a broader system of meaning. Art that seeks to revert into itself is escapist and thus fits into the broader social structure if even against its will. Like a drunkard who seeks to escape in the bottle, so the artist who seeks to find "pure art" in a "art for art's sake" aesthetic tries to escape in worthless form and color. It is only with the realization of some "truth" or even "non-truth" that form and color coalesce into the timeless and the beautiful.

The Cheese and the Worms

2008-05-09T18:26:00.000-07:00

Carlo Ginsburg seeks to articulate the relationship between society and culture within a revisionist framework away from the traditional top-down interpretation of culture. Because “the learned men” who traditionally recorded history were part of the aristocracy or upper classes, they focused solely on their own form of culture. Thus it was assumed that the only notion of “culture” was synonymous with the upper class (to “have culture, to “be cultured”). Conversely, any of that “culture” in possession of the lower orders was the result of a topdown dissemination. Indeed, the only time lower class culture was studied, was to show its decay in the process (Ginsburg XIV). By expanding the concept of culture to be a general strategy of how people make sense of their realities (to be framed specifically below), we get a radically different formulation of what “culture is”. But to situate culture within society we must account for conflict, power struggle, and this is a question of agency. Ginsburg wonders correctly about culture and class struggle within society (to use the Marxist framed antagonism), to what degree is the lower class culture subordinate to the upper? And to what measure is the lower “class” independent of the upper? (Ginsburg, XIV). Obviously, these questions cannot be explained here in there entirety here, but through Ginsburg’s work, we can see how the balance is struck between the upper and lower classes as they battle over meaning.
Culture, to borrow from Robert Darton, determines not only what we think but how think. Where we attach meaning and thus infuse it with emotion, comprise what what we refer to as a “world view” (Darton,pg.3). In other words, “Individual expression takes place within a general idiom, what we learn to classify sensations and make sense of things by thinking within a framework provided by our culture. (pg.6)” Thus, we all operate within cultural constraints, since culture defines or frames “meaning”. Beyond the framework of culture lies madness, as Darton notes, conjuring up notions of Foucault’s genealogy of madness, where Western culture strove mercilessly to define its parameters by defining its outliers. On the other hand, within cultures parameters, “great men can test and shift the boundaries of meaning (pg.6).
The Cheese and the Worms, by Carlo Ginsburg, is a history that does not document the development of ruling powers as traditional historical accounts do (kings, wealth, war, land developments), instead Ginzburg seeks to depict the history of a typical commoner, the poor or the masses, ablate through the mind of an atypical individual. (It is important to note that this history is still written within the parameter of power. This account is not a drastically different rewriting of historical events as it is a drastically different perspective on historical events. This distinction is important since not only is the actual play of events between the upper and lower classes important, but also the telling and retelling of those events (if not more so). Ginsburg chooses Mendoccino as his subject because by pulling together strands of religious dogma (or dominant hegemony) with elements of naturalism and ancient oral traditions in the weaving together of his ideology, Mendocino embodies the complexity of cultural elements at play within society (not to mention that it was so well documented). But what was also equally interesting about him was that he seemed to have consciously [systemetized] his perspective as an overt attack on the dominant group or class, in this case the church. Through the use of analogies which would have made sense and been readily understood by the poor or common people, he was in a sense fashioning a cultural understanding of the lower class. He was explicit in his condemnation of the priests and the power structure that kept them in place.

Culture, to reenforce by reiteration, has been historically tied to the power structure in society. And that by broadening our understanding of how culture shapes society and thus, reality (and vis versa), we can begin to see how the dominant discourse in society, shapes and is shaped by the various status groups within any given society.

Human, All Too Human (BBC) - Friedrich Nietzsche: Part 1 & 2

2008-05-09T17:30:00.000-07:00

Part 3

Nations and their fragments

2008-05-09T15:44:00.001-07:00

Partha Chatterjee's "Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories"

... an alternative/revisionist interpretation of colonial history.

Its too long to get into here but one of the most important arguments concerns his cultural distinction of an inner and outer realm. He is talking here about the case of India; he says that while the Brits colonized the external realm of Indian society (that is, the political and economic)... India's demarcated a "sacred" inner dimension, what he calls the "cultural domain". He writes: "this inner domain of culture is declared the sovereign territory of the nation, where the colonial state is not allowed entry, even as the outer domain remains surrendered to the colonial power" (p237). Further, he states that this is where the power of the anti-colonial movement lay, as it is "irrational" while the state and the market strives for rationality in every dimension. He uses the analogy of Gandhi in using the rhetoric of love, sacrifice and kinship, etc. which is the opposite of capitalism and liberalist ideology of self, rational, reason (over passion). It's this "inner, rooted in the community, or the particular or local (community is important, but I can't get into it here either) that stands in contradiction to capitalism and modern society that forms the basis of a critic of that modern society..." ok, so what?For those of us rooted in the pursuit of equitable societies and worse, are sceptical that such is possible in this social/economic structure (since even the poor serve a very real purpose in market societies), there is an argument here for the resistance in the cultural dimension. There is a contradiction between the small and the over-arching.

Culture, enclaves of resistance... for India it was religion; the West was devoid of the spiritual, "we" (the Indians) place our "wealth" elsewhere. Now herein lies another problem. When do these enclaves (real or not) become self deprecating, retreatist? I'm sure the run of the mill Brit colonial was fine with the Indian having his spiritual realm as long as he came to work for him in the morning and made all the right moves. Though I'm sure a lot of this went on, nevertheless, the historical truth is that religion and this inner dimension provided the foundation for colonial resistance. You have to have their hearts and minds to totally control them- the colonial regime could never lay claim to this.Im thinking about alternative modes of thought, the semblances of new ways of thinking and being apart from the regimes of truth put forth by the dominant political and economic structure .Culture, meaning, local, ancient, real, imagined, destructive, spiritual.

2008-05-09T09:27:00.001-07:00

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

T.S. Eliot
Choruses from The Rock
(as reprinted in Daniel Bell, Cultural Contradiction of Capital)

Modern Sentiments: Micheal Foucault and Norbert Elias

2008-05-08T10:08:00.001-07:00

In accessing the historical transformation of pre modern to modern Western civilization, Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias performed the difficult task of tracing the evolution of 'modern sentiments' that has led to the current development of Western civilizations. I intend accesses the similarities and differences in their perception of that development. Norbert Elias's statement that in a sense, "the battlefield has moved within" the individual sets the tone for both theorists though with very different connotations. And yet, both share some very important assumptions. The most important being that both see individuals as rooted in social web, in contrast to previous homo clausus assumptions. What I find to be the most intriguing in both of these assessments is the power negotiates on the sense of self between the state, society (and culture) and the individual evolving through historical transformation.
    These authors come from very different trajectories. Foucault sees mores or group norms/values as shaped by controlling force, something to be transcended. Elias on the other hand, sees them as a shaping force, providing a venue for action. Robert Darton's framing of culture serves as a good example to highlight this distinction. Darton states that because culture shapes meaning, within cultures boundaries great men have been able to test and shift its boundaries. But we can apply this concept generally, since culture provides the recipe knowledge for action within any given society for its individual members. Thus, to pretend to work from outside the web of knowledge, or a frame of reference can only be understood as "madness". Foucault acknowledges this distinction well, since he spent a good portion of his career tracing how Western Civilization incessantly went about defining its cultural borders, categorizing every aspect of its composition and quantifying the desirable from the deviant (prisons, hospitals, madness). And so on the other hand, Foucault shows the dangers when a culture severely restricts its definitions and limits those boundaries so as to constrict individual freedom...(Darton pg.6) Here lies the entry point into both of their discussions.
    Both authors look at the centralization of the state as the significant change in the structure of society. Foucault re-conceptualizes the theory and purpose of knowledge in its association to power by showing that the two are inextricably linked. And so the "accumulation of men", much like the process of the 'accumulation of capital' (both necessary in the development of state formation) condemns the "soul" of the individual to "the prison of the body". By delineating, assigning, relegating and numbering people in a society he shows how control is achieved broadly through knowledge. Through this attainment of information (once again, knowledge) of the masses, the state is able to penetrate and give shape to individuals, he then describes how this allows for control of populations down to the movements of the body, creating "docile bodies". Through observation, examination, and knowledge people are subjected to the "all seeing, all knowing" Penoptican like structure of power. Individuals ultimately learn to regulate themselves (or act as if they are constantly being regulated), thus internalizing control of the state. This is the ultimate use of power since it is always present and requires little excursion of overt force.
    For Elias, the modern state and specifically the centralization of the use of force, "is characterized by the lengthening of of chains of interdependence of individual actions that occurs as people have more contact with more different people whom they know little of, if not at all, but who share the same society. This occurs with the increase of social functions" (Dant, 295). In other words, Elias is concerned with the civilizing norms that regulate interaction and therefore manage the self in society. Elias traces this evolution through the knights and the royal court when overt force as a means of settling disputes was stripped. In the absence of war and warrior mentalities, civilization took on the form of civility and weighed interaction. Ultimately, "in order to attune conduct to that of others, the web of actions must be organized more and more strickly and accurately, if each individual is to fulfill its social function. The individual is compelled to regulate his/her conduct in an increasingly differentiated, more even and more stable manner. (Dant, p.295)"
    Elias's main concern was that of Durkhiem's in that with the increasing division of labor which leads to the increase of the over all size of society arises the problem of social cohesion and adjusting mutual relations. Thus he sees the internalization of controls (to put it in Foucaultian terms) as a positive force since they foster cohesion. Where he falls short in his thinking is on the subject of agency. although he states that the civilizing process is neither "rational" (thought out) or "irrational" (completely random), he fails to account for powerful social forces that often do shape and wield this dynamic.