Not Necessarily Complicitous

I’ve been on a paper-grading binge the past week and I’ve got company this weekend, so the next update concerning Cadet Casey will be delayed a few days.

Which isn’t to say I’m not thinking about her. Certainly, neither she nor I are under any illusions about our roles as arms of the twenty-first century’s new imperial hegemony. We want to believe we’re making a difference, raising consciousness, contributing to the evolving understanding of the military as peacekeepers rather than warfighters under a regime of ubiquitous and ongoing distributed conflict, but we understand as well that ideological and economic and geopolitical pressures exerted by our own government and others work to sustain that regime. We are, we know, agents of capital.

Which isn’t to say we’re wholly complicitous.

We understand — we assert — we want to believe, at least, that it’s possible from the inside to work against “the assertions that capitalism really is the major force in contemporary life, that its dominance is not a discursive object but a reality that can’t simply be ‘thought away,’ that it has no outside and thus [our] so-called alternatives are actually part of the neoliberal, patriarchal, corporate capitalist agenda” (Gibson-Graham 2). The clickstream is an economic space, with its transactions of value and its signaling behaviors, and as such, it’s a site of intervention. It’s a space where multiplicitous economies can take root, have taken root, have in fact spread and dispersed from node to node with remarkable haste. In observing this behavior, perhaps writing teachers might move further towards understanding writing as an economy of circulation, and towards understanding “economy as a site of decision, of ethical praxis, instead of as the ultimate reality/container/constraint” (Gibson-Graham 87).

More on Mala soon.

Not Necessarily Complicitous