Politics

Where Truth Gets Produced

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

Short post tonight. Hardt and Negri write, “Difference, hybridity, and mobility are not liberatory in themselves, but neither are truth, purity, and stasis. The real revolutionary practice refers to the level of production. Truth will not make us free, but taking control of the production of truth will.” (To which I ask: why, and how?) They continue: “Mobility and hybridity are not liberatory, but taking control of the production of mobility and stasis, purities and mixtures is. The real truth commissions of Empire will be constituent assemblies of the multitude, social factories for the production of truth” (156). Let’s assume for the time being that we can grant this. Particularize the theory into specifics: the emperor Tiberius took control of the production of truth. Weblogs are sites of production of a staggering multiplicity of truths. How do the diffuse truths of the many compare to the false and imperious truth of the one? Some will see in the truths of the many a hope for counterhegemonic and democratic freedom. Others will see in the truths of the many only solipsism, isolation, and ultimate political failure because of a reliance upon individualism rather than upon the insurrective rhetorical power of a collective univocity.
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A Confession

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

A confession: I didn’t post last night because I fell asleep reading Hardt and Negri. Yes. About 38 pages in, from the last Post-It note and the book’s position on the floor this morning. (I was on the couch, even. I mean, reclined, but on the couch.) And it’s doubly embarassing because I’ve always been a defender of difficult theoretical prose. Difficult? I like big words, and these guys manage a combination of the ethereal and the turgid that would give Fred Jameson theoretical nocturnal emissions.

Now: all that is not to say that the book ain’t useful. It warmed my cranky little heart to see that, while I think they mistranslated “solitudinem”, they chose as their epigraph for Chapter 1 a portion of the same quotation from Tacitus I recently found so compelling: “They make slaughter and call it peace” (3).
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Links and Losses

preterite Politics

Clancy, Derek, John, “Mikael”, and Torill all offer considered and insightful reflections on the atrocities of Abu Ghraib. The sources to which Derek links are especially worth a look, as are Mikael’s thoughts on the consequences of the scandal. I found John’s anecdote simultaneously disturbing and pathetic, but I agree with him on what it says about the chain of command. The comments to Clancy’s post are becoming a thoughtful dialogue on what constitutes torture (the subject of Derek’s post) and, furthermore, what constitutes appropriate punishment, and for whom: while I don’t entirely agree with Clancy’s perspective (I’m too disgusted by too many different aspects of this to be able to remain dispassionate), the discussion there is very much worth following. Finally, I find deeply compelling the connections Torill makes to deviant sexuality, and her conclusions that “what we see here [is] the very source of all images of pain: the human with too much power and no control”, and that “It is not like our culture does not recognize and know about the capability of cruelty inherent in humanity”.

Curtiss wrote a lot about power, control, and rhetoric, but he’s lately decided to hang it up. He’ll be sorely missed, especially since Hektor Rottweiler Jr now redirects to Wealth Bondage. To which I have to ask: how ’bout at least giving us access to your archives, Curtiss? There’s too much insight there to be discarded.

The Head Rots First

preterite Politics, Rhetoric, Rome

Done with the secondary sources: Benario’s Introduction, Dorey’s edited collection, and Mellor’s Tacitus. Syme’s magisterial two-volume work will have to wait until next summer, although I might do some JSTOR work within the next week or two, depending on how much time I find. I’ll say, though, that if you have any interest in ancient Rome, Tacitus is a wonderful read: his style glitters, especially (for English readers) in the Church and Broadribb translation, which only begins to capture the historian’s beautifully pointed brevity.

And Tacitus suits my left melancholia, writing of a time when “truth was regarded as treasonous” (Mellor 92). There are, certainly, truisms: “The lasting lesson of the Dialogue is that art and society are intertwined, and both depend on the structure of political life. It is a lesson that cultural critics have revived with great enthusiasm in our own time” (Mellor 19). Furthermore, “In our age of ‘disinformation,’ secrecy hardly seems extraordinary. Tiberius’s unforthcoming silence at meetings of the Senate is a form of control popular among Renaissance princes and modern business tycoons. Tyrants from political dictators to football coaches prefer to instill insecurity through control of information and calculated ambiguity” (Mellor 92). This, to me, seems a lesson that applies as well to the writings of Lawrence Lessig as it does to those of the proponents of composition’s critical pedagogy.

Mellor remarks that “Tacitus’s account of the first century of the Empire makes it clear that ‘private profit is preferred to the public interest.'” (59) We gain our words capital and capitalism from the Latin caput, capitis. It means “head”. We seem to have largely forgotten the Roman proverb that Of the fish, the head rots first.

The Photos

preterite Politics

I hadn’t seen the photos until today. I hadn’t wanted to.

But I did, today, and I’ll say now: if you haven’t seen them, you can’t understand why you need to be outraged. You can’t understand how absolutely despicable this is.

I’ll ask you: as a citizen, please, look, if you haven’t.

I was a soldier. I was a sergeant, who taught five-hour training sessions on the Geneva Convention and the Laws of War. And I’m disgusted, and I hope you’ll let me tell you why.
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Two Links from PLSJ

preterite Culture, Economics, Politics

From the super-smart Anne Galloway, two links of interest.

“World’s poor to get own search engine.”

Great. So now the world can shunt the poor into slums online as well as offline. Instead of diddling with the symptoms, folks, why not have a go at the causes? Does the assertion that “people in poor countries are short of money but have time on their hands, whereas people in the West are cash-rich but time-poor” strike anyone else as problematic?

Real Life: The Full Review

A nice joke, that’s been kinda done before (check out the site for Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet; the book itself offers some interesting insights, and some less-interesting obfuscations), but most engaging to me for what the review says about the author’s/audience’s view of the world. Would most folks characterize the following quotations as indicative of mainstream American ideology? (It’s an honest question, and given my previous post, I acknowledge that my selective quotation is a form of fisking, although I’d protest that my intent isn’t to demolish whatever I may see as reviewer Greg Kasavin’s “argument” in the joke review, but to ask other folks who might read this for their sense of the prevalence of the ideology behind Kasavin’s descriptions. Not trying to be nasty, Greg; I thought the faux-review was kinda fun in spots.)
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The Uses of Dragon’s Teeth

preterite Economics, Education, Politics

Initial note: I wrote this yesterday, but in my runnings around all day, I didn’t get a chance to post it. On the good side, I spent some time in and around Maryland and DC with family and with Jennifer and Jason. Jennifer and Jason and I got to goof off and take some pictures, which was great fun and which I won’t post here, partly because I worry that having any pictures of myself on the Web might invalidate me to a search committee (in the early wake of EEOC, racist employers managed to get around laws forbidding them to ask potential employees about race by asking for pictures with resumes, and so some employers have made a habit of discarding any resumes or vitae that come with pictures attached: more ways for the Web to complicate our lives), and partly because, well, while Jason’s good-looking and Jennifer’s stunning, chronically non-photogenic is the kindest way I’d put it for my own grill. But it was a fine day and a fine evening, and I didn’t make it back downtown until late, and subsequently really didn’t feel finding public Web access at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night. Which is actually part of what this post is about.

I’m going to start in a roundabout way, though. In 8 Mile, Eminem/Rabbit has problems with transportation that make it hard for him to get to work on time. One could say that this is a simple, uncomplicated problem that means nothing outside itself, or one could talk about the ways people with less money are more vulnerable to and concerned with changes in their material circumstances. Keep it simple or make it complicated.

The simple way to get underway would be to say that time and money affect the way I write, especially when I’m traveling and paying for internet access. Call time and money “materialities” and I’m suddenly risking accusations of obfuscatory language, but I don’t think that makes what I want to say any less valid.

In the past two days, I’ve run into the problem of metered internet access imposing restrictions on the way I write. The materialities of clocks (the time at which Jennifer and I agreed to meet on Saturday) and money (paying six dollars for an hour online) led me to compose significant portions of my entries before going online to post them, and have kept me from doing any more than skimming other peoples’ words. They’ve also kept me from the sort of deliberative Web surfing that I find useful and pleasant while I’m trying to refine an idea and see how it interacts with other ideas, to the point where yesterday’s post had no links whatsoever. I intend to remedy a lot of this when I get home — I’ll go back and edit these entries, add links, devote some much more careful attention to what other folks have been saying, and so on — but even the way in which this relatively insignificant change in my material circumstances has a large effect on my Web writing practices gives me slight hope that all this might have a point and a use for students, too.
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