Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization

Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization - Alexander Galloway, MIT Press

The internet continues to be framed in terms of its radical potential - the smashing of hierarchies, the expanded access to information, the ability to participate in public forums.

Galloway, however, theorizes the Internet in terms of its "materiality" - its hardware and operational protocols - in order to uncover how mechanisms of control are built into its structure. While TCP/IP - the protocols that govern how packets of information are broken up and find their way across the web - distribute control, DNS - the Domain Name System that resolves World Wide Web domain names into numerical internet addresses - is strictly hierarchical. For Galloway, a "protocological" analysis is one that focuses on what is possible or allowed in the system, rather than on the meaning or content of individual messages within the system.

In a society that increasingly falls into a distributed network mode rather than the decentralized hierarchies of the modern bureaucracy, such an analysis has implications outside of media technology studies. Galloway includes several examples of art/activist responses that test the limits of the system.

MOVIE PARTY!!!!

I throw MOVIEPARTY around a lot. Thats what I call my blog, thats the 'brand' I put on my videos and as of lately that is what I am calling my night at Dunes. I'm currently trying to do a monthly screening of videos and films at MOVIEPARTY created by and for feminists movie enthusiasts. The first of these screenings will be held November 6th. I'm posting this in hopes that people would like to submit things for this event. if you're interested please contact me at nadiabuyse@yahoo.com

yow!

Zippy strips here and there
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Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

I finished this book a couple weeks ago. It surprisingly came off as relatively non-biased, even though it takes on an industry that is not only unfavorable but basically terrifying. Almost every aspect that this book covers of the american food industry has a sympathetic character at some point, from owners of franchises to cattle ranchers. It's definitely one of those fact-confirming books, like everyone has ideas about the horrid things that happen within the food industry, and this confirms it, and then goes into detail about it. Some things that were mega-interesting to me was that the flavor of most food (the processed kind) is completely designed and engineered in a lab and that the difference between "natural" flavors and "artificial" flavors is basically non-existent. It was also really fascinating to read about how the "cleanest" meat usually ends up in fast food and that the gnarliest meat, the stuff that can't be sold to the general public, is instead used in school lunches. I know that this idea is obvious and everything, but it's completely deplorable that this country puts so little value into education, even down to the food that's provided. School food always makes me think of this time I had a job taking yearbook photos, and I was at some Olympia school working and they had a huge cart of vegetables in the main hallway, and it was totally fine for kids to just leave class for a vegetable break and go and grab some carrot sticks. It was the coolest thing ever!!!!!

This subject also makes me think of the slow food movement. There are a lot of aspects that I completely agree with and am excited about, such as making a connection between what's on your plate, where it came from, and how it got there, or sustainability, or the idea of preserving regional differences and stopping the homogenization of the world. However, and slow food advocates continually deny this, but there is such a huge class gap in this that I feel like a lot of these ideas are rendered useless. A couple weeks ago there was this whole slow food festival weekend, and past the fact that they made some of the civic center grounds into a garden, almost nothing was free. All the workshops and lectures and stuff were all in the $20 range, while actual slow food meal parties or whatever tended to land in the $50 range. The parts of the population (and I'm mainly talking about the U.S. here) that would benefit the most from education about these ideas, and implementing these ideas into everyday life are poor people and people below the poverty line, and at this point the slow food movement doesn't seem to have taken the time to reach out to and include these populations into the movement. I think it would be much more valuable and revolutionary to take these basically anti-corporate ideas and make them so they weren't so built for upper-middle class.

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

Just finished it the other day, then re-watched the film. I was surprised to notice that the screenplay was written by two women and the director was also a woman. The book is incredibly darker - much more horrid and sinister than the film, the latter which merely skims the surface of a story and character that is so complex and chilling. What I enjoyed most about the book, er, appreciated, er, not sure what word to use - well, of the writer's strategy, was the slow build regarding the character's psychotic tendencies, how well these were blended in with a constant barrage of brand names, designer label references, and the insidiously vapid conversations of the rich and bored New York elite. I'd seen the film years ago and was struck by Bale's incredible performance, so I had him in mind as I read, (which wasn't particularly difficult as most of the dialogue in the film was verbatim from the book) and then re-watching the film gave me an even deeper appreciation of Bale's range and abilities. But the reason I wanted to read the book is that there was a question that my first viewing of the film had left unanswered - and it still is...

Too Cool To Be Forgotten? Hmm....

Too Cool To Be Forgotten by Alex Robinson is a recent graphic novel about a middle aged man (40) who gets hypnotized to quit smoking and finds himself a 15 year old in 1985--back in high school again. I got it at the library because 1) I'm a sucker for time travel 2) the character is my age (class of '87) 3) I was hoping the story might offer some interesting insight into the 80's/00's youth/middle age 4) I'll pretty much read anything in comic book form ....
...well it's really not good! oh well. I mean, I guess I would recommend this if you are stuck somewhere and have to kill time, but it's full of uninteresting cliches, bad storytelling and doesn't have much to say, generally. I was thinking that the art, while not great, was probably the most interesting part, but then Pete Best picked it up and said "this art is terrible". ha! I mean, that could have been a stylistic assessment, but I took it to mean it wasn't done well, which is something I'm not really qualified to evaluate...still, I do think this drawing is the best part:

Anyhow this brings me back to one of my themes, which is, I'm not sure how to evaluate a work of fiction here, other than to express a personalized reaction to it. Your thoughts?
Also, I know there are some comics fans on here...taking suggestions! I think I have to stop checking out things featured in mainstream entertainment magazines.

Blogs/websites etc.

This blog has introduced me to a lot of good books. I really appreciate reading everybody's discussion of them, but with each new post I also get slightly dismayed, because my dream of reading every good book is made progressively more impossible.

This blog also made me realize I do a lot of reading on the internet. I know I'm not alone in this, so I was hoping people would let me know about what blogs/websites they love. I don't know if there are as many good websites I've never heard of as good books I've never heard, but I would sure like to find out. Please divulge away.

I'll start by plugging my newest exciting discovery. Its not a book or a blog, but since many of us went to Evergreen, lets just say its a text and include it. What I'm talking about is the Pacifica radio show Against the Grain. I had never heard of it until earlier today when a friend texted me assuming I had listened to the recent episode with Slavoj Zizek. After he told me what he was talking about, I downloaded the Zizek episode and an episode on Decolonization. Both were excellent. Now I can't wait to dig into the rest of the show's massive archive which includes topics like Social Movements, Feminism and War and Tolstoy's anarchism. They're gonna be awesome.

Reward & Punishment: American Hunger

since my office moved i've been listening to an assortment of library Books-on-Tape while filling orders. i've picked up a bunch at random, just whatever is on the shelf and i discovered i'm pretty picky. on our last tour, joaquin-the-roady & i listened to Crime and Punishment as read by some British dweeb. it was terrible (and annotated) and i knew it would be bad because i had already listened to the whole thing once-- on the spider and the webs europe tour--but on tour you get so sick of listening to each other talk that putting on a book on tape is sometimes the most effective way to achieve a moment's peace--so we endured it to the end and now i will never be able to read Dostoevski without hearing a British thespian pronounce Russian names in a snooty, over-dramatic accent! oh well, i have a tendency to dislike classics-in-translation but force them on myself as a regimen--still the audio book seems like cheating, if doing push up's on your knees is cheating--maybe it's just exercising different muscles?

well, this is all to say that all the audio books i have started have been insufferably bad and since i'm not in van-jail and have access to infinite pod-casts, radio shows and mp3 playlists, i haven't finished them. i did, however, check out a Book-on-CD of Louis Menand essays (which i don't recommend as an audio book) called American Studies and became intrigued by his piece on Richard Wright....I read American Hunger a few weeks ago, then discovered it is the second volume of a two-part biography that is now available in the revised-edition of Black Boy. American Hunger was censored by the Book-of-the-Month club. Wright was the first African-American novelist to have work available through the club, but when he submitted his autobiography for their consideration, he was told he needed to take out the parts about his involvement in the American communist party and that most of the sex would be censored--as a result, American Hunger (part 2 of Black Boy) was published as a separate edition, after he died. so I read the second part first and now am reading the first part second. i haven't read any of his fiction yet, but his life story is intense, as is his need to read as a means of psychic survival. the writing is pretty real, it will hit you in the gut. here's an example, he's writing about how his mother's early death impacted him:

"At the age of twelve, before I had had one full year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering."

i highly recommend spending an afternoon or two on it if you haven't read his work yet.

so the lesson is, even though these Books-on-whatever format other than paper seem to suck, you can still discover cool stuff, so i guess it's worthwhile and i'm going to keep exploring the medium. but i am taking suggestions for audio books! i have had bad luck even with books by authors i know i like. i think it is its own particular format and needs to be thought of in that way. clearly that is the case. does anyone listen to them regularly? please advise.

What comes first-the music or the words?

I've been reading Alan Moore, along with a bunch of other stuff.

joshua plague and local zinesters at the olympia timberland library

Vegan Cooking Demo & Zine Reading with Joshua Ploeg, aka "Joshua Plague"

my fabulous co-worker Kelsey has put this program together...

Traveling vegan chef, food writer, musician and zinester Joshua Ploeg will demonstrate vegan cooking techniques. Joshua sang for hardcore bands Behead the Prophet and the Mukilteo Fairies, has published several cookbooks and zines, and worked as a food columnist. Local zinesters will read their work following the demo. If you're curious about independent publishing or vegan cooking, please join us!

the other three local zinesters who are reading:
Zach Mandeville (he writes funwater awesome)
Chelsea Baker (works at danger room comics and makes minicomix)
and Nicki Sabalu (wrote a zine about working in new orleans after hurricane katrina).

Event Type: Adult Program
Date: 9/6/2008
Start Time: 2:00 PM
End Time: 4:00 PM

green getaways with V.C. Andrews

Escaping from NY is a common theme for many of us who live here in the city. It's wonderful to have so many places to go within just a few hours of train or driving but everything requires lots of detailed planning and can be a pain in the butt! We decided to make this weekend "green" by taking our bikes on the train to go back and forth to the beach (only 3 miles from the hotel we were at.) Yay us!

Anyway, one of the sweet not too widely known about spots is Greenwich Point Beach, easily accessible from the Old Greenwich metro north train station. Besides being a relatively quiet beach visited by mostly locals, having a decent snack bar with veggie burgers as well as your standard dogs and fried clam sandwiches, it has a lending library of books beach goers have left behind. The pickings were pretty slim but I was happy enough to stumble upon Garden Of Shadows by V.C. Andrews.

I actually never read Flowers In The Attic when I was a kid although I did see some part of a movie version at some point. It seemed creepy and I never did like the idea of confinement, preferring tales of greenery and liberty like The Secret Garden and Ballet Shoes. Garden of Shadows is a fantastic read as in, it takes 2 seconds to finish and is super creepy (incest, god, sexism) therefore entertaining, but how can it be for kids??

Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire.

Here my the notes to the first chapter of Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Because of its similarity with Lefebvre, I am tempted to argue that Brown’s critique of the ubiquitous and vacuous term, tolerance, is a fitting example of a critique of everyday life.

These notes outline her argument. In the next few days, I will work on comparing her with Lefebvre, by discussing how the factors Brown attributes to depolicization mirror Lefebvre’s categories outlined in the earlier post of what should be critiqued. I will also try to draw both out into the concrete contemporary examples.

I post these notes in hope they will provide a general framework for discussing important matters and in hope they will encourage people to use these theories to construct their own critiques.


Chapter 1 Tolerance as a Discourse of Depoliticization.

Brown begins by posing the question “how did tolerance become a beacon of multicultural justice and civic peace at the turn of the twenty-first century?”

Following a discussion of how historically anomalous this is, ( ex. The civil rights movement was not concerned with tolerance ) and how tolerance is widely hyped and ambiguously used, Brown introduces her jargon laden hypothesis; “that the semiotically polyvalent, politically promiscuous, and sometimes incoherent use of tolerance in contemporary American life, closely considered and theorized, can be made to reveal important features of our political time and condition”

Thus, the central question of the study is…”what kind of political discourse, with what social and political effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and imperialism circulating thru Western democracies can analytical scrutiny of this talk provide? The following chapters aim to track the social and political work of tolerance discourse by comprehending how this discourse constructs and positions liberal and non-liberal subjects, cultures, and regimes; how it figures conflict, stratification, and difference; how it operates normatively; and how its normativity is rendered oblique almost to the point of invisibility.”

Brown then introduces her theoretical methodology. She will use Foucault’s political and historical notion of governmentality, which argues that governmentality “organizes the conduct of conduct at a variety of sites and through rationalities not limited to those formally countenanced as political.”

This is followed by a discussion of the history of the writing of the book. Originally Brown intended to focus on the domestic discourse of tolerance. But 9/11 and the “War on Terror” led her to expand it to examine the international discourse of tolerance. Her investigation led her to discover affinities between domestic and international forms of tolerance;

“Tolerance as a mode of late modern government that iterates that normalcy of the powerful and the deviance of the marginal responds to, links and tames both unruly domestic identities to affinities and non-liberal transnational forces that tacitly or explicitly challenge the universal standing of liberal precepts. Tolerance regulates the presence of the Other both inside and outside the liberal democratic nation-state, and often it forms a circuit between them that legitimates the most illiberal actions of the state by means of a term consummately associated with liberalism. “ 8


Brown then shifts to the next section where she lays out

Tolerance as a discourse of power and a practice of governmentality

The utilization of her critical and theoretical framework “ aims to comprehend political deployments of tolerance as historically and culturally specific discourses of power with strong rhetorical functions. Above all, it seeks to track the complex involvement of tolerance with power. As a moral-political practice of governmentality, tolerance has signifigant cultural, social, and political effects that exceed it surface operations of reducing conflict or of protecting the weak or the minoritized, and that exceed its formal goals and self-representation. These include contributions to political and civic subject formation and to the articulation of the political, the social, citizenship, justice, the nation and civilization. Tolerance can function as a substitute for or as a supplement to formal liberal equality or liberty; it can also overtly block the pursuit of substinative equality and freedom. At times, tolerance shores up troubled orders of power, repairs state legitimacy, glosses troubled universalisms, and provides cover for imperialism. There are mobilizations of tolerance that do not simply alleviate but rather circulate racism, homophobia, and ethnic hatreds; likewise, there are mobilizations that legitimate racist state violence. Not all deployments of tolerance do all of these things all the time. But the concern of this study is to consider how, when, and why these effects occur as part of the operation of tolerance, rather than to ignore them or treat them as ‘ externalities’ vis-avis tolerance’s main project. 10

With this definition of how the discourse of tolerance stated, Brown moves to discussing Tolerance and/as depoliticization;

For her “Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and political solutions, as a personal and individual on one hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the other. Tolerance works along both vectors of depoliticization- it personalizes and it naturalizes or culturalizes- and sometimes it intertwines them. Tolerance as it is commonly used today tends to cast instances of inequality or social injury as matters of individual or group prejudice. And it tends to cast group conflict as rooted in ontologically natural hostility toward essentialized religious, ethnic, or cultural difference. That is, tolerance discourse reduces conflict to an inherent friction among identities and makes religious, ethnic and cultural difference itself an inherent site of conflict, one that calls for and it attenuated by the practice of tolerance. “

further

“Depoliticization involves removing a political phenomenon from comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce and contour it. No matter its particular form and mechanics, depoliticization always eschews power and history in the representation of its subject.”

Not realizing this leads to essentiaism.

Another linked definition of depoliticization is; “that which substitutes emotional and personal vocabularies for political ones in formulating solutions to political problems.” 16

ex when a “justice project is replaced with a therapeutic or behavioural one.

However, tolerance is not the only discourse of depoliticization. Here are the others. Please note they are remarkably similar to the catergories Lefebvre outlines as the target for his Critique of Everyday Life!

Liberalism: “ The legal and political formailism of liberalism, in which most of what transpires in the spaces designated as cultural, social, economic and private is considered natural or personal ( in any even independent of power and political life), is a profound achievement of depoliticization. Liberalism’s excessive freightining of the individual subject with self-making, agency, and a relentless responsibility for itself also contributes to the personalization of politically contoured conficts and inequalities. These tendencies eliminate from view various norms and social relation- especially those pertaining to capital, race, gender, and sexuality- that construct and position subjects in liberal democracies. In addition, the reduction of freedom to rights, and of equality to equal standing before the law, eliminates from view many sources of subordination, marginalization, and inequality that organize liberal democratic societies and fashion their subjects. Liberal ideology at its most generic, then, always, eshews power and history in its articulation and comprehension of the social and the subject. 17-18

Individualism; “The American cultural emphasis on the importance of individual belief and behaviour, and of individual heroism and failure, is also relentlessly depoliticizing. An identification of belief, attitude, moral fiber, and individual will with the capacity to make world history is the calling cared of the biographical back stories and anecdotes that so often substitute for political analyses and and considerations of power in American political culture ( her ex are demonized welfare mothers, Jessica lynch etc. but we should also include mccain and obama. Just watch the democratic convention and the perpetuation of obama’s biographical narrative) we are awash in the conceits that right attitudes produce justice, that will power and tenacity produce success, and that everything else is, at most, background, context, luck, or accidents of history 18

Market Rationality “The saturization of every feature of social and political life with entrepreneurial and consumer discourse…When every aspect of human relations, human endevour, and human need is is framed in terms of the rational entrepreneur or consumer, then the powers constituve of these relations, endevours and needs vanish from view. As the political rationality of neoliberalism becomes increasingly dominant, its depoliticizing effects combine with those of political liberalism and cultural narratives of the individual to make nearly everything seem a matter of individual agency or will, on the one hand, or fortune or contingency on the other. “ 18

Thus

“Tolerance as depoliticizing discourse gains acceptance and legitimacy by being nestled among those other discourses of depoliticization, and it draws on their techniques of analytically disappearing the political and historical constitution of conflicts and subjects….like above factors….tolerance masks its own operation as a discourse of power and a technology of governmentality. Popularly defined as respect for human difference there is no acknowledgement of the norms…no avowal of the means by which certain peoples, nations, practices or utterances get marked as beyond the pale of tolerance, or of the politics of line drawing between the tolerable and the intolerable, the tolerant and the intolerant. 18“

Contemporary culturalization of politics reduces non-liberal political life (including radical identity claims within liberal regimes) to something called culture at the same time that it divests liberal democratic institutions of any association with culture. Within this logic, tolerance is invoked as a liberal democratic principle but for what is named the cultural domain, a domain that comprises all essentialized identities, from sexuality to ethnicity, that produces the problem of difference within contemporary liberalism. Thus, tolerance is invoked as a tool for managing what are construed as (non-liberal because ‘different’ and non-political because ‘essential’) culturalized identity claims or identity clashes. As such, tolerance reiterates the depoliticization of those claims and clashes, at the same time depicting itself as a norm-free tool of liberal governance, a mere means for securing freedom of conscience or (perhaps more apt today) freedom of identity. 24.


Culturalization of Politics.


“more then being merely ambiguous, tolerance today is often invoked in a manner that equates or conflates non commensurable subjects and practices, including religion, culture, ethnicity, race, and sexual norms. In toleranc talk, ethnicity, race, religion, and culture are especially interchangeable.” 19

ex. A film on terror at the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance conflates religion, ethnicity and race by moving from “islamists” to “racial and ethnic profiling”

“Fundamentalism as one name for the post-cold war enemy of the “free world” is assigned a shifting site of emanation that floats across culture, religion state, region and regime.” 19

Brown argues this is a result of the “culturalization of politics” which is “the assumption that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it and then explains politics as a consequences of that essence.”

For

“This reduction of political motivations and causes to essentialized culture ( where culture refers to an amorphous polyglot of ethnically marked religious and nonreligious beliefs and practices) is mobilized to explain everything from Palestinian suicide bombers to Osama Bin Laden’s world designs, mass death in Rwanda and Sudan, and the failure of democracy to take hold in the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq….the culturization of politics analytically vanquishes political economy, sates, history, and international and transnational relations. It eliminates colonialism, capital, caste or class stratification, and external political domination from accounts of political conflict or instability. Instead their culture is summoned up to explain the motives and aspirations leading to certain conflicts (living by the sword, religious fundamentalism, cultures of violence) as well as techniques of weapons deployed (suicide bombing, decapitation)… the West’s cold war reduction of political conflict to ideology has been replaced by its post-cold war reduction of political conflict to culture.

But crucially Brown sees an orientalist facet to the culturalization of politics’ “culture is understood to drive Them politically and to lead them to attack our culture, which We are not driven by but which we do cherish and defend.” 20

Thus ironically; “This division into those who are said to be ruled by culture and those who are said to rule themselves but enjoy culture renders culture not simply a dividing line between various peoples or regimes or civilizations, and not simply the explanation of political conflict, but itself the problem for which liberalism is the solution.” 21

This works because of the uniqueness of liberalism. “Liberalism…presumes culture and politics to be fused unless culture is conquered- politically neutered- by the universal, hence noncultural, principles of liberalism” Without liberalism, culture is conceived by liberals as oppressive and dangerous not only because of its disregard for individual rights and liberties and for the rule of law, but also because the inextricability of cultural principles from power, combined with the nonuniversal nature of these principles, renders it devoid of judicial and political accountability. Hence culture must be contained by liberalism, forced into a position in which it makes no political claim and is established as optional for individuals. Rather then a universe of organizing ideas, values, and modes of being together, culture must be shrunk to the status of a house that individuals may enter and exit. Liberalism represents itself as the sole mode of governance that can do this.” 21-22

Ex. Liberal governance imagined to be free of capital and cultural values. Thus human rights is free from stigma of cultural imperialism allowing them to be evoked to protect culture


But Liberalism is cultural …..”the theoretical claim here is that both the constructive and repressive powers we call those of culture- the powers that produce and reproduce subjects relations and practices, beliefs and rationalities, and that do so without their express choice or consent- are neither conquered by liberalism nor absent from liberalism. Liberalism is not only itself a cultural form, it also is striated with nonliberal culture wherever it is institutionalized and practiced…it is impure, hybridized, and fused to values, assumptions and practices, unaccounted by it and unaccountable within it. Liberalism involves a contingent, malleable, and protean set of beliefs and practices about being human and being together; about relating to self, others, and world; about doing and not doing; about valuing and not valuing select things. And liberalism is always institutionalized, constitutionalized, and governmentalized in articulation with other cultural norms- those of kinship, race, gender, sexuality, work, politics, leisure and more. This is one reason why liberalism, a protean cultural form, is not analytically synonymous with democracy, a protean political practice of sharing power and governance. The double ruse on which liberalism relies to distinguish itself from culture- on the one hand, casting liberal principles as universal; on the other, juridically privatizing culture- ideologically figures liberalism as untouched by culture and thus as incapable of cultural imperialism. In its self-representation as the sole political doctrine that can harbor culture and religion without being conquered by them, liberalism casts itself as uniquely tolerant of culture from its position above culture. But liberalism is no more above or outside culture than is any other political form, and culture is not always elsewhere from liberalism. Both autonomy and the the universality of liberal principles are myths, crucial to liberalism’s reduction of questions about imperial ambitions or practices to questions about whether forcing others to be free is consonant with liberal principles. “

In sum;
“The contemporary culturalization of politics” reduces nonliberal political life (including radical identity claims within liberal regimes) to something called culture at the same time that it divests liberal democratic institutions of any associations with culture. Within this logic, tolerance is invoked as a liberal democratic principle but for what is named the cultural domain, a domain that comprises all essentialized identities, from sexuality to ethnicity, that produce the problem of difference within contemporary liberalism. Thus tolerance is invoked as a tool for managing what are constituted as (non-liberal because “different” and “non-political” because “essential”) culturalized identity claims or identity clashes. As such, tolerance reiterates the depoliticization of those claims and clashes, at the same time depicting itself as a norm-free tool of libral governance, a mere means for securing freedom of conscience or (perhaps more apt today) freedom of identity. “ 24

Brown then unveils the standpoint of her critique;

“This book seeks to lay bare this political landscape. It contests the culturalization of politics that tolerance discourse draws from and promulgates, and contests as well the putatively a-cultural nature of liberalism. The normative premise animating this contestation is that a more democratic future involves affirm rather then denying and disavowing liberalism’s cultural facets and its imprint by particular cultures. Sucn an affirmation would undermine liberalism’s claims to unversalism and liberalism’s status as culturally neutral in brokering the tolerable. This erosion, in turn, would challenge the standing of liberal regimes as uniquely, let alone absolutely, tolerant revealing them instead to be self-affirming and Other-rejecting as many other regimes. It would also reveal liberalism’s proximity to and bouts of forthright engagement with fundamentalism. ….this…..makes explicit the inherent hybridity or impurity of every instantiation of liberalism, it underscores the impossibility of any liberalism ever being ‘only liberalism’ and the exent to which both form and content are potted, historical, local, lived. It reveals liberalism as always already being the issue of miscegenation with its fundamentalist Other, as containing the Other within, and thus as having a certain potential for recognizing and connecting with this Other with out. In this possibility may be contained liberalism’s prospects for renewal, even for redemption, or at the very least for more modest and peaceful practices.” 24

Exciting Readings

If your in the Seattle area mark these dates on your calendar. The entertaining, thought provoking and occasionally brilliant Slavoj Zizek will be speaking about violence on Sept 8th and the street fighting writer/ editor and all around leftist icon Tariq Ali will be speaking on Sept. 24th. about Pakistan. Zizek is better live then on record and Ali's talk on Pakistan at the Left Forum in March was great, so do try to go. They will be informative and stimulating and miles better then the other readings with the hackneyed folkysism of Garrison Keiler or the latest reactionary liberal twaddle by Bernard Henri-Levy.

about what i'm reading

i have been reading Jacqueline Carey's "Kushiel's Legacy" series since February - 6 giant books, all told over 5000 pages. I am almost to the end of the 5th book. It appeals to the same part of my readerpersonality that enjoys Anne Rice books. She definitely knows how to keep you turning the pages. In addition to just being good escapism and pure reading enjoyment, it is one of the most interesting "alternate history" scenarios I have encountered - a Medieval France whose nobility are the descendents of "Elua," a deity who was the son of Jesus and Mary. Christians are the stubborn hebrew minority who maintain their traditions no matter what country they live in. Rome is ruled by a senate, as there is no pope, of course. lots of other interesting minor and major variations from "actual" medieval european history. really fun to read.

http://www.jacquelinecarey.com/books.htm

elsewise i have been reading a lot of periodicals and non fiction. i will post more about that later.

Vivre sa Vie

The more one talks, the less words mean.

The Critique of Everyday Life

Historically speaking, Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume The Critique of Everyday Life was a great influence on the New Left, ’68 and all that. Lefebvre also continues to be an influence on the work of David Harvey, Fredric Jameson etc. Rather then discussing Lefebvre’s historical importance, this summary will outline Lefebvre’s argument and emphasizing The Critique of Everyday Life’s contemporary relevance.
Lefebvre’s premise is that “the only real critique was and remains the Critique of the Left…Because it alone is based on knowledge.” Lefebvre acts on this premise by arguing for a Marxian endevour at odds with the vacuous formalism of the official Stalinist Marxism of his time. Emphasizing the sociological basis of Marx’s thought and the central importance of Marx’s concepts of alienation, fetishism and mystification, Lefebvre’s argues these categories should by used to critique everyday life.
These extended quotations demonstrate how Lefebvre conceptualizes and formulates the critique of everyday life.

“We need to think about what is happening around us, within us, each and everyday. We live on familiar terms with people in our own family, our own milieu, our own class. This constant impression of familiarity makes us think that we know them, that their outlines are defined for us, and that they see themselves as having those same outlines. We define them. and we judge them. We can identify with them or exclude them from our world. But the familiar is not the necessarily known. “ 14-15

“For us, in our society, with the forms of exchange and the division of labour which govern it, there is no social relation- relation with the other-without a certain alienation. And each individual exists socially only by and within his alienation, just as he can only be for himself within and by his deprivation (his private consciousness.) 15-16

“To sum up, work, leisure, family life and private life make up a whole which we can call a ‘global structure’ or ‘totality’ on condition that we emphasize its historical, shifting, transitory nature. If we consider the critique of everyday life as an aspect of a concrete sociology we can envisage a vast enquiry which will look at professional life and leisure activities in terms of their many-sided interactions. Our particular concern will be to extract what is living, new, positive—the worthwhile needs and fulfilments- from the negative elements; the alienations.” 42

“so to reach reality we must indeed tear away the veil, that veil which is forever being born and reborn of everyday life, and which masks everyday life along with its deepest and loftiest ambitions” 57

“The true critique of everyday life will have as its prime objective the separation between the human (real and possible) and bourgeois decadence, and will imply a rehabilitation of everyday life. 127

To undertake this Critique of everyday life, Lefebvre articulates how the critical knowledge contained in six Marxian categories can be utilized as a “beacon” in the critique of everyday life. These six categories are still issues of utmost importance in contemporary theory. They are of contemporary relevance and share striking affinities with Wendy Brown’s contemporary work Tolerating Aversion. Following my posting of notes on Brown’s work, I will compare Lefebvre and Brown and discuss why they are remarkably relevant and important.

A) Critique of Individuality. (Central theme; the ‘private’ consciousness’)
“And nowadays we are still struggling with this deep- in other words everyday-contradiction: what makes each of us a human being also turns that human being into something inhuman. More biological than truly human, this organization ( i.e. capitalism ) smothers the individual, dividing him and stunting his development at the very moment it is striving to create him as a human individual….How can this organization be superseded? By practical and theoretical participation in work and in the knowledge of work, in the social and human totality. If the world is to be transformed, this is one of the fundamental problems…we must supersede the “private consciousness.” 150


B) Critique of Mystifications (central theme: the ‘mystified consciousness)

“the private consciousness and the mystified consciousness go hand in hand, reinforcing each other and becoming increasingly entrenched as a result of instabilities which have their origins in real life and not in pure ideas” 153


C) Critique of Money ( central theme: fetishism and economic alienation)

“Although deprivation and alienation are different for the proletarian and the non-proletarian, one thing unites them; money, the human being’s alienated essence. This alienation is constant, i.e. practical and everyday.” 161


D) Critique of Needs (Central theme; psychological and moral alienation)

Consumpton does not satisfy a need. Nor do the needs the culture industry creates.


E) Critique of Work ( Central theme: the alienation of the worker and of man)

“Analysis must therefore distinguish between the real ‘human world’ on the one hand, the totality of human works and their reciprocal action upon man, and, on the other, the unreality of alienation.

But this unreality appears to be infinitely more real then anything authentically human. And this appearance contributes to alienation; its becomes real, and as a result a great abstract ‘idea’ or a certain form of the State seems infinitely more important than a humble, everyday feeling or a work born of man’s hands. “ 169

F) Critique of Freedom (Central theme; man’s power over nature and over his own nature)

The Marxist definition of freedom is concrete and dialectical. The realm of freedom is established progressively by ‘The development of human powers as an end in itself)…it is won progressively by social man. For Power, or, more exactly, the sum total of powers which constitute freedom belong to human beings grouped together in society, and not to the isolated individual….in the realm of necessity, human needs become degraded…they just keep on working, and their lives are spent just staying alive. This, in a nutshell, has been the philosophy of everyday life—and still is.
Freedom needs;

(a) “the associated producers must…govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power.”
(b) The material and moral parameters of practical (everyday) life, which are determined by private property, must be transformed.
(c) Through activities devoted to satisfying and controlling immediate necessities, there must be a growth in the sphere of ‘the true realm of freedom, the development of human powers, as an end in itself, [which] begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.’ This sphere, this ‘spiritual’ domain of man, consists in the first place in a social and rational organization of free leisure. As Marx asserts in Capital; ‘ the reduction of the working day is the basic requisite.’


This utilization of Marx results in Lefebvre’s programmatic sketch for a critique of everyday life;

(A) It will involve a methodological confrontation of so-called ‘modern’ life on the one hand, with the past, and on the other- and above all- with the possible, so that points or sectors where a ‘ decadence’ or a withdrawal from life have occurred- the points of backwardness in terms of what is possible- the points where new forms are appearing, rich in possibilities can be determined.
(B) Studied from this point of view, human reality appears as an opposition and ‘contrast’ between a certain number of terms; everyday life and festival- mass movements and exceptional movements- triviality and splendour- seriousness and play- reality and dreams, etc.
The critique of everyday life involves and investigation of the exact relations between these terms. It implies criticism of the trivial by the exceptional- but at the same time criticism of the exceptional by the trivial, of the ‘elite’ by the mass- of festival, dreams, art and poetry, by reality.

© Equally, the critique of everyday life implies a confrontation of effective human reality with its ‘expressions’; moral doctrines, psychology, philosophy, religion, literature.
From this point of view, religion is nothing but a direct, immediate, negative, destructive, incessant and skilful criticism of life- skilful enough even to give itself the appearance of not being what it really is.
Philosophy was an indirect criticism of everyday life by an external (metaphysical) ‘truth.’ It is now appropriate to examine the philosophy of the past from this perspective—and that is the task facing ‘today’s’ philosopher. To study philosophy as an indirect crticism of life is to perceive (everyday) life as I direct critique of philosophy

(d) The relations between groups and individuals in everyday life interact in a manner which in part escapes the specialized sciences. By a process of abstraction these sciences infer certain relations, certain essential aspects, from the extraordinary complexities of human reality. But have they completed this task? It seems that once the relations identitifed by history, political economy or biology have been extracted from human reality, a kind of enormous, shapeless, ill-defined mass remains. This is the murky background from which known relations and superior activities (scientific, political, aesthetic) are picked out.
It is this ‘human raw material’ that the study of everyday life takes as its proper object. It studies it both in itself and in its relation with the differentiated superior form that it underpins. In this way it will help to grasp the ‘total content’ of consciousness; this will be its contribution towards the attempt to achieve unity, totality—the realization of total man.
Going beyond the emotional attempt by philanthropists and sentimental (petty-bourgeois) humanists to ‘magnify’ humble gestures, and beyond that allegedly superior irony which has systematically devalued life, seeing it merely as back-stage activity or comic relief in a tragedy, the critique of everyday life- critical and positive- must clear the way for a genuine humanism, for a humanism which believes in the human because it knows it.” 251-252

laila lalami

this novel by moroccan american, laila lalami, follows the story of four moroccans attempting to emigrate from morocco. i loved this book.


lalami used to live in portland and we were lucky enough to get her to do a reading and signing here at olympia a few years ago. she now lives in l.a., a professor at the u.c.l.a., and before that she was in morocco for a year, as a fullbright scholar, working on her second novel.

she also writes one of my favorite lit (and culture and politics) blogs:
http://www.lailalalami.com/blog/

lalami also wrote an important article/review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book "Infidel" and Irshad Manji's "The Trouble with Islam Today".

excerpt:
"These days, being a Muslim woman means being saddled with what can only be referred to as the "burden of pity." The feelings of compassion that we Muslim women seem to inspire emanate from very distinct and radically opposed currents: religious extremists of our own faith, and evangelical and secular supporters of empire in the West." full article here

what are your favorite lit blogs?

Parable of the Sower & How to Cook Your Daughter

i just finished two books in the past week or so. the first was Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which i'm reading for my 2-person bookgroup. i've read a couple other Octavia Butler books (Kindred and Fledgling) but this is the one that everyone always tells me i should read. I like Butler's writing because it's conceptually really deep and whole, and structurally it just moves and moves. this is supposedly science fiction but there's nothing very far-fetched in it, it's just about the u.s. (california in particular) after shit has really started to fall apart - economic and environmental collapse, severe food and water shortages, most people are living/dying on the street, etc. the main character is a teenage girl who is working really hard to describe what is real for her, to find words for something that she can believe in, and share it with other people who might be open to it. she has a 'disorder' they call 'hyperempathy syndrome' which means she feels other people's pain. which is too bad for her because she lives in a seriously violent world. i like the part where she wonders if things would be different if more people felt each other's pain. in the end i thought it was a good book and good metaphor (or is it even a metaphor? maybe i should say 'extrapolation') but i had a hard time really attaching emotionally to the characters and the storyline, maybe because there was so much death, maybe because the religious framework she creates (and the 'logical' conclusion she draws from it) felt kind of cold and almost anti-earth.

the second book i read is called How to Cook Your Daughter by Jessica Hendra. her dad was a semi-famous comic writer and actor in the seventies and eighties (he played the band manager in 'Spinal Tap'). he wrote a book a few years ago that became a best-seller, which was supposedly a 'confessional' and a 'spiritual memoir,' but conveniently left out the fact that he molested his daughter. so Jessica wrote her own book. i'm proud of her for telling her truth and giving up on the hope of ever getting him to acknowledge and deal with their past. i appreciate the complicated way she tells the story - how much she loved him, how much hope she had that things could be resolved, the pain she went through in finally facing the damage he did, and the enormous risk she took by going public with her story. of course he publicly denies it but what do you expect. the title actually comes from a pedophilic article he wrote for the National Lampoon a couple months before he first molested her. the writing itself is nothing spectacular (she had a ghost writer to help write it) but i thought the story was powerful and relateable, and this was the right time for me to read it.

Light Summer Reading

I just read a novel by my friend Stephanie Kuehnert (pronounced Keenert) called "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone". Some of you may recognize the title. It's lyrics from a Sleater-Kinney song. The novel is very well written and it's about these two young girls, Emily Black and Regan Parker. Their epic journey into young adulthood as punk rock girls in the small town of Carlisle, Wisconsin carrys them from high school into their young adult lives as they become semi famous punk rock stars. All while Emily searches for her mother, Louisa, who left her and her father Michael when she was just four months old.


Emily almost ruins her punk rock career as she goes on a search for Louisa for a year, travelling the country on a drug bender going from city to city in search of the mother she never knew. Leaving behind her band, She Laughs at the height of their smashing debut as punk rock newcomers in the Chicago scene.

Of course there are love stories entwined in this fascinating tale as Emily gets mixed up with an abusive and stalkery boyfriend who rides on her coat tails as a flailing musician. And Regan and their bandmate Tom successfully have a happy relationship together.

I won't give away the ending but it's not altogether happy. But it is kind of a twist.

This book is a good light summer read for those of you reading all these heavy political books. Stephanie has produced several feminist zines in her day and was a Riot Grrl. She still believes in the power of grrls. This is her first novel. You can get this book almost anywhere because it is out on MTV Books. I highly suggest it.

An Interview with Vijay Prashad

"The importance of Vijay Prashad's book, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, lies in its ability to trace the trajectory of the "Third World Project" - its genesis, growth and crisis - amidst the cacophonous range of local political economic structures and their varied articulation with global capitalism and the metropolitan world. "The book shows us that beyond the simplistic orientalist image of the Global South as just being on the receiving end and reactive, there has existed definite protagonism with all its contradictions grounded in the peoples' struggle against domination, oppression and exploitation. The following discussion with the author of The Darker Nations is an attempt to retrieve some of the salient insights in this formidable work."
click here to read an interview with Vijay Prashad:

third world history blog