Ideas Like Artichokes

preterite Economics, Metadissertating

Grump grump grump. I’m stuck at about the halfway point through the first draft of the final chapter — trying really hard to integrate open source practices with the rhetoric of the affective, trying really hard to figure out how to synthesize Benkler’s and Lindquist’s ideas of the personal dimensions of economic self-selection in the context of writing projects, and I know I need to write my way through it but right now it’s really huge and abstract and vague — so I’m switching gears and going back to previous chapters in heavy-duty revise revise revise revise revise revise revise revise revise mode (which I need to do anyway) in order to use that conceptual backtracking to shake loose the specifics of how I want to conclude.

I think one way I’m getting sidetracked is in wanting to explicitly contrast market-based economic approaches to open-source practices, and they’re not necessarily opposites or even all that opposed. My frustration, I think, comes from the ways in which laissez-faire free marketeers rhetorically construct markets as highly efficient self-organizing systems and then make the specious argumentative extension that all highly efficient self-organizing systems must be some species of market.

Nope. Doesn’t work that way, and folks who think it does clearly failed Logic 101 (and, yes, I’m aiming at a specific rhetorical target here, but I’m not willing to be much more specific until something I’ve got in the works sees publication): arguing that all schoolbuses are yellow is fine and good, but it does not mean that every yellow thing can be called a schoolbus. Open-source practices, as the work of Yochai Benkler indicates, can constitute highly efficient self-organizing systems, but that hardly means that they’re market-based systems — and the rhetorical invocation of the “marketplace of ideas” in economic argument is nothing more than the intellectually sloppy application of a bad metaphor: do you buy ideas like you buy artichokes?

Letters from Prison

preterite Asides

David lets me know I owe him a letter, which I’ll send out to him on Monday. According to his third-generation paraphrase, the parole commissioner at the file review hearing said something like, “I seldom see a case like this that is as well thought out and deserving of immediate parole.” The parole hearing itself has been moved to June, and David writes, “I’ve been down nine years; another month won’t kill me.” Along with the letter, I’ve got a box of comic books packed to ship his way: he likes David Mack’s Kabuki and he’s curious about the direction Marvel’s X-books are taking, as craptacular as they’ve lately been, and I’m still trying to convince him that Brian Michael Bendis is turning into a solid writer, pacing issues aside.

David’s lately been doing that prison-stereotype work, pushing mowers on the highway median strip and weed-whackers by the guard rails. My friend Jason has dropped off David’s resume at a few places. David’s returning to a community where his crimes gained him considerable front-page notoriety, and that complicates matters. He wants to be a chef, he says; to eventually have his own restaurant.

I’m hopeful for him.

May Day

preterite Asides

According to the good folks at Cornell, “a one-year-old cat is physiologically similar to a 16-year-old human, and a two-year-old cat is like a person of 21,” and “For every year thereafter, each cat year is worth about four human years.” By that math, Tink and Zeugma’s three-year birthday today makes them twenty-five in cat years. Tink’s celebrating by experimenting with the eject key on my computer’s keyboard; Zeugma is chattering at the chickadees, sparrows, titmice, and nuthatches who come to the back deck’s bird feeder.

How am I celebrating the day? Well, I’ve got a few options:

  1. Erect a large symbolic phallus in the back yard and get the neighbors to help me plait brightly colored ribbons around it in observance of Beltane’s celebration of the amorous act.
  2. Light a bonfire in the back yard commemorating the 1886 Haymarket Riot and celebrating the rights and contributions of workers (including immigrant workers) everywhere.
  3. Revise a dissertation chapter and work on my CCCC proposal.

Sigh. Yeah, it looks like I’m going with option 3. Which is not to say, however, that Julie Andrews singing Lerner and Loewe won’t make it onto the cd player at some point.

It’s May, the lusty month of May
That darling month when everyone throws self-control away
It’s time to do a wretched thing or two
And try to make each precious day one you’ll always rue

It’s May, it’s May, the month of ‘Yes, you may’
The time for every frivolous whim — proper or im-
It’s wild, it’s gay, a blot in every way
The birds and bees with all of their vast amorous past
Gaze at the human race aghast
The lusty month of May

Postcapitalist Politics

preterite Economics, Politics

Julie Graham, who constitutes one half of the feminist economic geographer author-function known as J. K. Gibson-Graham, gave an excellent talk tonight about her/their new book, A Postcapitalist Politics. And as I struggle/race/work to finish the final chapter of my dissertation, my head’s abuzz with their ideas. Some are familiar from The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), which — by the way — is in print again, in a new and more affordable edition, in case you missed it the first time. But I won’t here try to sort out the old from the new: suffice to say it’s all good, and if you’re interested (and maybe even if you’re not) in alternatives to mainstream discursive constructions of the all-consuming all-commodified wholly market-based economy, they’re well worth your attention.

Here’s why.

Read more

SERE and the Essay

preterite Politics, Writing

There was a decent episode of The Unit tonight that dealt with SERE training: scary stuff, from all accounts, and training I simultaneously found myself grateful that I never had to do and at the same time very much wished I’d had the opportunity to try and prove myself in. I was a lowly non-elite active-duty soldier and NCO, but I had some opportunities to train with guys from the 1st of the 75th, and they and the 3rd of the 160th SOAR were a visible presence where I was stationed, and my friend Daniel was Special Forces. (OK, so all that makes me sound like even more of a wannabe. Guilty as charged.) Out of all of them, Daniel and the two Rangers who’d done SERE training were the only ones who didn’t have that JSOC swagger; who didn’t have that cock-of-the-walk strut. And it’s funny, because that swagger was so much what I wanted to have: when I was getting near the end of my enlistment and thinking about how much I liked books, how much I liked reading and writing and how appealing being in higher education might be, the one thing that almost made me re-up was when the reenlistment NCO told me, “Sergeant Ed, I can get you a Special Forces contract.” But I went for the books instead, and now — years later — I’m happy to be headed to West Point as a civilian professor. (With the occasional second-guessing of what I might’ve done.)

Though the show never uses the word, The Unit is of course about Delta. The show’s a David Mamet project, and his writing made the first episode’s dialogue particularly snappy and engaging, but in the succeeding episodes, the writers and producers have clearly done their research. With the focus split between conflict abroad and wives waiting at home, the show’s cultural and political ideologies are very much designed to appeal to a conservative demographic — but I’d argue, as a political liberal, that that’s not much of a reason not to watch it. The show focuses on the tactical rather than the strategic perspective, and in fact often uses the tactical perspective to question the strategic perspective, as many soldiers do. The proliferation of supportive wives is overdone and reinforces unfortunate gender stereotypes, and in some ways moves the representation of post housing a little bit closer to Stepford with each episode — divorced JSOC soldiers are plentiful, for obvious reasons, so why aren’t they represented on the show? — but also makes a necessary statement about all the difficulties that military spouses manage to endure.

And then there’s the flip side to the way that the popular media tries to thrill you with representations of covert war: “The Desert One Debacle.” The story is yet more impressive reporting from Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down (forget the movie: if you want to know what really went on, read the book, and even the book is considerably sanitized). Read it all the way through, and you’ll see how stuff never works the way it’s supposed to in the military. People simply don’t learn that things never go the way you expect them to go. Nobody who’d been through SERE training ever talked about it much. They wanted those who hadn’t done it to not know, to not anticipate. And dive training? The first thing they do, we were told, is drown you. You’re held under water, at the bottom of a pool, until you take a breath, two breaths, more, and fill your lungs with water. They do it to get you over your fear of drowning, and then they rescuscitate you.

So I wonder, as I move from a deeply liberal civilian institution to a rather more conservative military institution of higher education: how might one ask a student who’s been drowned or gone through SERE to write the personal essay?

I’m Ted Kennedy

preterite Class (Economic), Politics

Ted Kennedy was on Jon Stewart tonight, and he needs to fire every member of his idiot staff.

Republicans had a field day with John Kerry’s relationship to privilege in the last presidential election, and yet Kennedy showed up with a fussy three-point folded pocket square and did everything he could to wipe his cufflinks across viewers’ faces. And the worst part was the heavy gold linked bracelet that Kennedy seemed to want to jiggle in front of the cameras at every opportunity.

Yeah, Ted, you’re a fat cat. Your family is extraordinarily wealthy, and you benefit more than anyone else from those tax cuts for the rich. And tonight, you displayed your privilege–in those cufflinks, in that fussy pocket square, in that heavy and ostentatious gold link bracelet–in a way that reveals the genuinely plutocratic nature of the United States Senate.

I’m a Massachusetts liberal, and I have to say to Senator Kennedy: thank you for losing my Democratic vote. Partly because of what you’re saying, yes, but more because of how you’re saying it: you’re one of the most important Democrats in the Senate, and yet you and your staff are sufficiently stupid to think it’s a good idea to prominently display all the emblems of economic privilege that you possess.

I’m Ted Kennedy. Vote for me because I’m rich.

Why We Need Tacitus

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric, Rome

The recent Kairos Call for Webtexts has me interested. The CFW says, “we focus on the connections between classical Greek and Roman rhetoric and contemporary digital communication” — and yet the CFW’s three examples (Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates) are all Greek.

Composition doesn’t like the Romans, and especially not the Romans under Empire. (In our disciplinary literature, though not in Classics scholarship, Quintilian gets a pass for his collusion with brutality.) And I wonder whether seeing the rhetorical impulses of a massively powerful and deeply conservative agrarian world power makes teachers uncomfortable. The Greeks were about knowledge; the Romans, power. Questions of true and false versus questions of right and wrong. With such polarities, of course the Sophists might seem like more appealing allies with which to rhetorically align ourselves.

But if you look at Roman rhetoric under the stresses of imperium, you start to see a much more significant connection to the way words work in the world today. You start to see Leo Strauss as the contemporary theorist of the vicious and amoral Roman delatores, and the hopeful rhetoric of the Greek Sophists as an ultimate instantiation of contemporary critical relativism — and perhaps a reason why rhetoric as theorized in relation to power functions differently from rhetoric as theorized in relation to knowledge.

So what might we learn from imperial Rome contra democratic Greece? First: the Sophistic privileging of knowledge (and today as it functions in composition) is naïve under imperium. Like the later Romans — like Tacitus, like Juvenal, like Pliny, like Plutarch — we need a discourse that concerns itself with rhetoric’s relation to power. American rhetoric today carries an impulse towards stripped-down forthrightness characteristic of the early rhetoric under Augustus. Certainly, the style of Tacitus is glittering and pointed, breathtaking in its compression (ask any amateur who’s ever tried to translate him and for pages sought a verb), but unique for its time in its elisions. Most other imperial rhetoric carried a style that lectured and hectored and said what it meant, because it was able to, because it held no political importance. The rhetoric of empire was literary, and fraught with epideictic qualities, because — under imperium — it could not be deliberative.

I figure it’s clear where I’m going with this, and the parallel I’m drawing. The problem is just that imperium, now, is distributed and in fact enacted through distributed rhetorics. Could it be, though, that lecturing and hectoring in the American rhetorical mode that privileges so-called “plain speech” is forthright because it’s easy to oppose? What if we use Tacitus to turn Strauss on his head and argue for a difficult political discourse, an ambiguous political discourse, a problem-posing political discourse that asks questions rather than answers them?

About That Seder

preterite Culture

I’m not sure whether to characterize myself here as gentile or goy, since one term seems to carry offensive connotations and the other seems to name one as either Christian or non-believer, none of which I’d entirely want to apply myself — but as my last name likely indicates, I’m not of the Jewish heritage. Welsh and Scots, mostly. Raised Unitarian but with Methodist and Episcopal grandparents, atheist as a teen and agnostic for a time after that, but now I’d characterize myself as having an uncertain and nondenominational but ultimately believing capital-f Faith.

And when I look at religion, I think my instinctive desire for order and my love for ritual and history and esoterica make traditions like those of Catholicism and Judaism deeply appealing to me. But this started out for me as a post about food, which is to say: I’m deeply curious about the ritual aspects of the Passover Seder. Albeit with a nod to the necessary heterogeneity of religious and cultural tradition, I feel impelled to ask: traditionally, the z’roa and the beitzah are cooked but never handled or consumed? Can the z’roa, as a roasted lamb shank bone, be used in the preparation of other Seder foods, e.g. in soup broth — or does it carry its own necessarily independent semiotic value? Does the same hold true for the roasted egg beitzah? Is there a symbolic distinction between the things consumed and the things not consumed?