Peter Kolchin: Whiteness Studies

(Courtesy of Bill)

Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America
Peter Kolchin
The Journal of American History Vol. 89, Issue 1 (posted by History Cooperative and Gregory S. Jay)

Suddenly whiteness studies are everywhere. The rapid proliferation of a genre that appears to have come out of nowhere is little short of astonishing: a recent keyword search on my university library's electronic catalog yielded fifty-one books containing the word "whiteness" in their titles, almost all published in the past decade and most published in the past five years.1 All around us, American historians and scholars in related disciplines from sociology and law to cultural studies and education are writing books with titles such as The White Scourge, How the Irish Became White, Making Whiteness, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, and Critical White Studies.2 Although the term "whiteness studies" might at first glance suggest works that promote white identity or constitute part of a racist backlash against multiculturalism and "political correctness," virtually all the whiteness studies authors seek to confront white privilege—that is, racism—and virtually all identify at some level with the political Left. Most of them see a close link between their scholarly efforts and the goal of creating a more humane social order. 1
Whiteness studies authors manifest a wide variety of approaches. In many of the disciplines outside history, prescriptive policy goals assume a central position; writing on whiteness in education, for example, Nelson M. Rodriguez calls for the creation of "'pedagogies of whiteness' as a counterhegemonic act" predicated on the need to "refigure whiteness in antiracist, antihomophobic, and antisexist ways."3 Although such didacticism is far from absent in the work of whiteness studies historians, their focus has been on the construction of whiteness—how diverse groups in the United States came to identify, and be identified by others, as white—and what that has meant for the social order. Starting from the now widely shared premise that race is an ideological or social construct rather than a biological fact, they have at least partially shifted attention from how Americans have looked at blacks to how they have looked at whites, and to whiteness as a central component of Americans' racial ideology. In doing so, they have already had a substantial impact on historians whose work does not fall fully within the rubric of whiteness studies but who have borrowed some of the field's insights, concerns, and language.4 2
This essay represents an effort by a sympathetic but critical outsider to come to grips with this burgeoning field. I will deal primarily with historical literature, although I will refer to works in other disciplines, and I will pay particular attention to two books that are among the best and most influential of the whiteness studies works: David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness and Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color.5 Because the two books differ from each other in important respects, they reveal both the diversity within and the common assumptions behind whiteness studies, and they suggest some of the insights and potential pitfalls of the genre. My aim is to produce not so much a final evaluation of a finished project as a tentative progress report on a literature still very much in evolution

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Also check out:

Whiteness Studies: Deconstructing (the) Race

Happy Birthday Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

Happy Birthday, all!

Kentuckians For The Commonwealth is 25 years old, and we're celebrating today with good food, fun, music, and birthday cake at Woodland Park at 3pm!

Things to bring if you can -
- A battery-operated CD player (I can't seem to find one)
- chairs or blankets
- a food item if available
- a camera
- anything you think would be fun to bring
- and mostly - Yourself!

KFTC Birthday Party! – Sunday, September 24th at 3pm at the Woodland Park gazebo. The Central KY Chapter will celebrate KFTC’s 25th Birthday with cake, stories, music and fun. We want members who’ve been involved for years and years to come as well as
members who joined just last week.

- Dave

Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC) is a grassroots citizens organization that believes in the power of citizens, working together, to challenge injustices, right wrongs and improve the a quality of life for all Kentuckians.

We meet locally on the 3rd Thursday of the month at 7pm at the Episcopal Diocese Mission House on the corner of 4th St. and Martin Luther King Blvd. Come join us!

To join our Central KY email listserv, send a blank email to KFTC-CKY-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Also, please visit our new website

Surviving a Mid-Life Crisis

Good luck, I sure need it:

The only answer, wrote Jung, is to turn directly toward the approaching darkness and "find out what it wants from you."

I usually find these MSN advice columns kind of ridiculous, but this one has some good suggestions:

How To Have a Mid-Life Crisis

Here's to staring into the abyss ;)

Until the End of the World/Fretless/Humans From Earth (Film by Wim Wenders/Song by R.E.M./T Bone Burnett/U2)

You know there are those crazy films that don't always make sense, but they stick with you... been listening to the soundtrack of this one, going to have to watch it again soon.



"Fretless" by R.E.M.

He's got his work and she comes easy
They each come around when the other is gone
Me, I think I got stuck somewhere in between
I wouldn't confide in the Prodigal Son
The die has been cast, the battle is won
The bullets were blanks, a double aught gun
I couldn't admit to a minute of fun

They come and they come and they come and they come
I accepted with a gentle tongue
No words spoken, no need to speak

Take it, stomp twice, ring the bell
Tether that ring and phrase
Enough with the rifle and talk already
We all know what it means
Take this conversation to your great divide
I can only swallow what I ate
And I don't hate him
And I don't hate her

They come and they come and they come and they come
I accepted with a gentle tongue
No heart broken, no need to speak

(Don't talk to me)
Don't talk to me about being alone
(Don't talk to me)
Don't talk to me about being alone
(Don't talk to me)
Don't talk to me about being alone

Reach for each other before you leave
Reach peace with an E-A-C
Don't threaten me with a gentle tease
Don't threaten me with angry
Please, please, please
Don't try to tell me what I am

They come and they come and they come and they come
I accepted with a gentle tongue
No words broken, no need to speak

(Talk to me)
Don't talk to me
(Talk to me)
Don't talk to me

------------------------------------------------------

Humans From Earth
T Bone Burnett

We come from a blue planet light-years away
Where everything multiplies at an amazing rate
We're out here in the universe buying real estate
Hope we haven't gotten here too late

[chorus:]
We're humans from earth
We're humans from earth
You have nothing at all to fear
I think we're gonna like it here

We're looking for a planet with atmosphere
Where the air is fresh and the water clear
With lots of sun like you have here
Three or four hundred days a year

[chorus]

Bought Manhatten for a string of beads
Brought along some gadgets for you to see
Heres a crazy little thing we call TV
Do you have electricity?

[chorus]

I know we may seem pretty strange to you
But we got know-how and a golden rule
We're here to see manifest destiny through
Ain't nothing we can't get used to

We're humans from earth
We're humans from earth
---------------------------------------------

Until the End of the World
U2


Haven't seen you FOR quite a while
I was down the HOLE just passing time
Last time we met was a low-lit room
We were as close together as a bride and groom
We ate the food, we drank the wine
Everybody having a good time
Except you
You were talking about the end of the world

I took the money
I spiked your drink
You miss too much these days if you stop to think
You lead me on with those innocent eyes
You know I love the element of surprise
In the garden I was playing the tart
I kissed your lips and broke your heart
You
You were acting like it was the end of the world

Love...love...love...love...love...love...
Love...love...love...love...love...love...
Love...love...love...love...

In my dream I was drowning sorrows
But my sorrows, they learned to swim
Surrounding me, going down on me
Spilling over the brim
Waves of regret, waves of joy
I reached out for the one I tried to destroy
You, you said you'd wait till the end of the world.

Merriam-Webster Word of the Day: Camraderie

camaraderie \kahm-RAH-duh-ree\ noun

: a spirit of friendly good-fellowship

Example sentence:
The sense of camaraderie among colleagues in the sales department is the main reason Julie enjoys coming to work each day.

Did you know?
"Camaraderie" comes from "camarade," the French word whose Middle French ancestor was also the source for our word "comrade." "Camaraderie" made its first appearance in English in the middle of the 19th century. In Middle French, "camarade" was used to mean "roommate," "companion," or "a group sleeping in one room." It derived by way of Old Spanish from the Late Latin "camera," meaning "chamber." We also have the word "comradery," which means the same thing as "camaraderie" but did not take the same etymological route as its synonym. That word, formed by attaching the "-ry" suffix (as found in "wizardry" and "citizenry") to "comrade," didn't appear in English until almost 40 years after "camaraderie."

Deleuze and Guattari: Anti-Oedipus

Background:

An introduction to the importance of May 1968 (as well as the aftermath) is essential to an understanding of this book and the development of contemporary French theory.

Guattari’s background as a radical psychiatrist is also very important.

Deleuze on their working relationship:

We are only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us. We stopped being “author.” And these “between the twos” referred back to other people, who were different on one side from on the other. ... In these conditions, as soon as there is this type of multiplicty, there is politics, micro-politics. (Deleuze and Parnet, 17)

Form/Style of the Book:

In D & G’s writings before and after Anti-Oedipus they develop an understanding of how theoretical perspectives can actually construct/create subjectivity. This is the critique of psychoanalysis in A-O.

Creating a theoretical model of subjectivity implies an ethical and aesthetic choice on the part of the theorist, in fact Guattari emphasizes this when he subtitles his later book Chaosmosis, “An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm”. Keeping this in mind how is the form/style of this book an attempt to create or construct a model of subjectivity? Is it successful in its attempt? Is Michel Foucault correct in calling this a ‘book of ethics’?

Mark Seem in his introduction following Henry Miller states that “No pain, no trouble—this is the neurotic’s dream of a tranquilized and conflict-free existence” and in reference to A-O that “What it attempts to cure us of is the cure itself” (xvi-xvii). Is the construction of this book centered around the authors’ resistance of the easy cure or strict (dogmatic) program? How are they attacking the “neurotic’s dream” ... keeping in mind that the psychoanalyst is the super-neurotic?

Claire Colbrook states that:

Rather than using reason and reasoned arguments, the book sought to explain and historicise the emergence of an essentially repressive image of reason. Rather than argument and proposition it worked by questions and interrogation: why should we accept conventions, norms, and values? What stops us from creating new values, new desires, or new images of what it is to be and think? This book was not a move within an already established debate; it shifted the entire criteria of the debate. Against justification and legitimation, it put forward the power of creation and transformation. It did not adopt the single voice of universal reason but, like a novel, ‘played’ with the voices of those traditionally deemed to be at the margins of reason ... (5)

Anti-Psychoanalytic Institution?:

It is often thought that Oedipus is an easy subject to deal with, something perfectly obvious, a “given” that is there from the very beginning. But that is not so at all: Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines. (A-O, 3)

One of the main questions raised in this quote and the accompanying footnote is: How did Freud appropriate the author(ity) of Greek tragedy to legitimize his psychoanalytic concepts? How does this relate to the second chapters critique of the institution of psychoanalysis as a new secular religion set up by the followers of Freud and institutionalized by the industrial-military complex?

It is as if Freud had drawn back from this world of wild production and explosive desire, wanting at all costs to restore a little order there, an order made classical owing to the ancient Greek theater. ... It is only little by little that he makes the familial romance, on the contrary, into a mere dependence on Oedipus, and that he neuroticizes everything in the unconscious at the same time as he oedipalizes, and closes the familial triangle over the entire unconscious. ... The unconscious ceases to be what it is—a factory, a workshop—to become a theater, a scene and its staging. And not even an avant-garde theater, such as existed in Freud’s day ..., but the classical theater, the classical order of representation. The psychoanalyst becomes a director for a private theater, rather than the engineer or mechanic who sets up units of production, and grapples with collective agents of production and antiproduction. (54-55)

Has psychoanalysis shut down the (expanding on D & G) continuously evolving production of an unconscious in order to provide an all-encompassing, static analytic backdrop? What about their referencing of mechanics/engineers who facilitate the flows of production and recognize the collective processes?

For we must not delude ourselves: Freud doesn’t like schizophrenics. He doesn’t like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says. They are apathetic, narcissisitic, cut off from reality, incapable of achieving transference; they resemble philosophers—‘an undesirable resemblance.’ (A-O, 23)

This position of D & G seems unfair until we read the notes on the bottom of pages 56 and 59. How does the analyst construct a position free from doubt/criticism (leaving aside that they are supposed to submit to even super-super neurotics for analysis) in order to construct the patient’s world? (is this an unfair view of the analyst?—what does the two notes supply us as evidence of the analyst’s position—or how about the writings of Lacan)

It is not a question of denying the vital importance of parents or the love attachment of children to their mothers and fathers. It is a question of knowing what the place and the function of parents are within desiring-production, rather than doing the opposite and forcing the entire interplay of desiring-machines to fit within the restricted code of Oedipus. (47)

Is it possible that, by taking the path that it has, psychoanalysis is reviving an age-old tendency to humble us, to demean us, and to make us feel guilty? ... [is it] completing the task begun by nineteenth-century psychology, namely, to develop a moralized, familial discourse of mental pathology ... keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effort to do away with this problem once and for all.... Hence, instead of participating in an undertaking that will bring about genuine liberation, psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level. (50)

D & G set out to develop schizoanalysis as their answer to this problem.

Schizoanalysis:

First important distinction is to remember that they are proposing an active schizophrenia that differs from the incapacitating medical designation of schizophrenia. D & G’s schizoanalysis grows out of their resistance to institutionalized psychoanalysis that has infiltrated all parts of society with a totalizing theory that masks humanity’s true relationship to the world:

From the moment we are measured in terms of Oedipus—the cards are stacked against us, and the only real relationship, that of production, has been done away with. (A-O, 24)

We cannot say that psychoanalysis is very innovative in this respect: it continues to ask its questions and develop its interpretations from the depths of the Oedipal triangle as its basic perspective, even though today it is acutely aware that this frame of reference is not at all adequate to explain so-called psychotic phenomena. (14)

A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic laying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world (A-O, 2)

We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. We believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately. (42)

To withdraw a part from the whole, to detach, to ‘have something left over,’ is to produce, and to carry out real operations of desire in the world ... The whole not only coexists with all the parts; it is contiguous to them, it exists as a product that is produced apart from them and yet at the same time is related to them. (41, 43-44)

An important part of schizoanalysis is the development of a “schizoanalytic cartography” (A-O, 273-382). Guattari in another work states:

From my own perspective, which is guided by a shift of human and social sciences from “scientistic” paradigms to ethico-aesthetic ones, the question is no longer one of knowing if the Freudian unconscious or the Lacanian unconscious offers scientific solutions to the problem of the psyche. The models will only be considered as one among others for the production of subjectivity, inseparable from the technical and institutional mechanisms that support them, and from their impact on psychiatry, on university teaching, the mass media. ... In a more general way, one will have to admit that each individual, each social group, conveys its own system of modelling unconscious subjectivity, that is, a certain cartography made up of reference points that are cognitive, but also mythic, ritualistic, and symptomatological, and on the basis of which it positions itself in relation to its affects, its anxieties, and attempts to manage its various inhibitions and drives. Moreover, today, our question is not only of a speculative order, but has practical implications: do the models of the unconscious that are offered us on the “market” of psychoanalysis meet current conditions for the production of subjectivity? Is it necessary to transform them, or to invent new ones? What processes are set in motion in the awareness of an inhabitual shock? How do modifications to a mode of thinking, to an aptitude for the apprehension of a changing external world, take effect? How do representations of the external world change as it changes? The Freudian unconscious is inseparable from a society that is attached to its past, to its phallocratic traditions, and its subjective variants. Contemporary upheavals undoubtably call for a modelization turned more toward the future and to the emergence of new social and aesthetic practices in all areas. On the one hand, the devaluation of the meaning of life provokes the fragmentation of self-image: representations of self become confused and contradictory while, on the other hand, the conservative forces of resistance oppose themselves to all change, which is experienced by a secure, ossified, and dogmatic consciousness as an attempt at destabilization. (Guattari, “Subjectivities”: 197)

Deleuze adds:

... the diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. (Deleuze, Foucault: 34)

After setting up the problem as they see it in A-O they will later attempt to propose a mutable method for approaching this problem. Of course this will not be a solution that must be seized and made one’s own in order for it to have any effect:

The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between the field, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a mediation. (A Thousand Plateaus, 12)

On Capitalism:

Capitalism is schizophrenic because it is interested in profit and it must subvert/deterritorialize all territorial groupings such as familial, religious, or other social bonds. At the same time it relies on the continuous appearance/mythification of social groupings in order to continue functioning smoothly and to re-enforce social ordering needs. Thus, capitalism attempts to re-constitute the need for traditional/nostalgic, or, even, newer forms of social groupings or religious/state institutions. This deterritorialization/reterritorialization and decoding/recoding is happening at the same time—thus the schizophrenic nature of capitalism.

Does this schizophrenia of

1) consume, be an individual, be unique, may the best man win, the cream rises to the top, the romantic creative individual

2) religious revivalism, family values, community first, moral majority, neighborhood watch (and snitch), etc...

cause some of us to break under the strain of an absurd society?

Desire

... desire is revolutionary in its essence ... and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised. (A-O 116)

Socius:

Primitive territorial machine:
Everything is coded and ritualized. Territory is clearly marked out and understood. Everything is social.

Barbaric territorial machine (despot):
The social group is somewhat deterritorialized by the despot who continues to maintain order through a re-inscription of a highly coded production centered around the ruler (what he says goes). Part of the coding (ordering) process is carried out through ritualized dramas of bodily punishment that (re)territorialize (re/produce) the despot’s authority (for a good description of this read the first section of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. NY: Pantheon Books, 1977.)

Civilized capitalist machine (disciplinary society):
Radically deterritorializes and reterritorializes social life. This radical deterritorialization is played out in conjunction with a continuous reterritorialization (re-coding) of traditional/ancient/nostalgic forms of authority. The nation (state), the family (father), God (religion or ideology), education (schools), media (societal super-ego?), etc ... re-appear in modified forms to shore up a shaky social grid and continue the smooth process of production/consumption. (A-O, 33-35) This society creates order through disciplinary institutions that house both the young initiates in order to train them to operate according to custom and the failed individuals that opt to pursue non-legitimized occupations/identities (for the moment let me use this designation—I’m fully aware that there are those who present a serious danger to others and thus must be dealt with, but the disciplinary society represents and treats them as morally weak individuals rather than as products of this society). The development and celebration of the myth of the private individual comes into play in this territorial situation.

Although some excitable critics (both from the left and right—e.g Baudrillard/Fukuyama) see this stage as the ‘end of history’, Deleuze, expanding on Foucault, sees us moving into a new socius stage (plateau?):

It is true that we are entering a society that can be called a society of control. A thinker such as Michel Foucault has analyzed two types of societies that are rather close to us. He calls the former sovereign societies and the latter disciplinary societies. He locates the typical passage of a sovereign society to a disciplinary society with Napolean. Disciplinary society is defined—by the accumulation of structures of confinement: prisons, schools, workshops, hospitals. Disciplinary societies require this. This analysis engendered ambiguities in certain of Foucault’s readers because it was believed that this was his last thought. This was certainly not the case. Foucault never believed and indeed said very precisely that disciplinary societies were not eternal. Moreover, he clearly thought that we were entering a new type of society. To be sure, there are all kinds of things left over from disciplinary societies, and this for years on end, but we know already that we are in societies of another sort that should be called, to use the term put forth by William Burroughs—whom Foucault admired greatly—societies of control. We are entering into societies of control that are defined very differently from disciplinary societies. Those who look after our interests do not need or will no longer need structures of confinement. These structures—prisons, schools, hospitals—are already sites of permanent discussion. Wouldn’t it be better to spread out the treatment? Yes, this is unquestionably the future. The workshops, the factories—they are falling apart everywhere. Wouldn’t systems of subcontracting and work at home be better? Aren’t there means of punishing people other than prison? Even the school. The themes that are surfacing, which will develop in the next forty or fifty years and which indicates that the most shocking thing would be to undertake school and a profession at once—these themes must be watched closely. It will be interesting to know what the identity of the school and the profession will be in the course of permanent training, which is our future and which will no longer necessarily imply the regrouping of school children in a structure of confinement. A control is not discipline. In making highways , for example, you don’t enclose people but instead multiply the means of control. I am not saying that this is the highway’s exclusive purpose, but that people can drive infinitely and “freely” without being at all confined yet while still being perfectly controlled. This is our future. (Deleuze, “Having An Idea of Cinema”: 17-18)

For more on this also check out Deleuze’s essay in October #59 (1992): 3-8 and excerpts of D & G’s writings in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. ed. Neil Leach (NY: Routledge, 1997: 309-18.)

Schizo-Politics:

D & G resist a molar politics that frames its operations in a “already” determined future, thus they keep to the idea of a molecular politics that is open to change:

Schizoanalysis, as such, has no political program to propose. If it did have one it would be grotesque and disquieting at the same time. It does not take itself for a party, and does not claim to speak for the masses. No political program will be elaborated within the framework of schizoanalysis. (380)

D & G see a central paradox in our fascisms:

As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themeselves? (A-O, 29)

This makes all authoritarian and dogmatic movements suspect in that they dictate and predict:

... no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.” (A-O, 29)

Traditionally many writers have posited that subjects of bloody states are ignorant of the true processes behind-the-scenes that produce orderly societies ... D & G are contradicting this belief ... why do they see fascism as answering a perverted desire of the masses? What causes this perverted desire? Can we see any signs of fascism in the contemporary American culture/societies? Can we recognize the fascist impulse in totalizing revolutionary theories? Is this another problematic of the “totalizing” impulse as manifested in liberatory/resistive movements? Is this a legitimate complaint from marginalized groups?

D & G are calling for a resistance that is molecular, not molar (machinic, not mechanistic). Universal mass movements are not the goal, but they are not denying their potential, rather that mass movements would be forged through alliances/bridges, that are temporary, mutable, and situational.

Machines:

Pgs. 36-41 introduces the “three breaks” or interruptions of machines. When thinking of the bodies in these operations we must learn to alter our emphasis on the individual ‘body’ and recognize social, economic, political, juridical, etc ... bodies in these descriptions.

Claire Colebrook on “machines” in A-O and Deleuze’s theory in general:

In Anti-Oedipus they insist that the machine is not a metaphor and that life is literally a machine. This is crucial to Deleuze’s ethics. An organism is a bounded whole with an identity and end. A mechanism is a closed machine with a specific function. A machine, however, is nothing more than its connections; it is not made by anything, is not for anything and has no closed identity. So they are using ‘machine’ here in a specific and unconventional sense. Think of a bicycle, which obviously has no ‘end’ or intention. It only works when it is connected with another ‘machine’ such as the human body; and the production of these two machines can only be achieved through connection. The human body becomes a cyclist in connecting with the machine; the cycle becomes a vehicle. But we could imagine different connections producing different machines. The cycle becomes an art object when placed in a gallery; the human body becomes an ‘artist’ when connected with a paintbrush. The images we have of closed machines, such as the self-contained organism of the human body, or the efficiently autonomous functioning of the clock mechanism, are effects and illusions of the machine. There is no aspect of life that is not machinic; all life only works and is insofar as it connects with some other machine.
We have already seen the importance Deleuze gives to the camera; it is important as a machine because it shows how human thought and life can become and transform through what is inhuman. By insisting that the machine is not a metaphor Deleuze and Guattari move away from a representational model of language. If the concept of machine were a metaphor, then we could say that we have life as it is, and then the figure of machine to imagine, represent of picture life. But for Deleuze and Guattari there is no present life outside its connections. We only have representations, images or thoughts because there have been ‘machinic’ connections: the eye connects with light, the brain connects with a concept, the mouth connects with a language. Life is not about one privileged point—the self-contained mind of ‘man’—representing some inert outside world. Life is a proliferation of machinic connnections, with the mind or brain being one (sophisticated) machine among others.
Neither philosophy, nor art, nor cinema represent the world, they are events through which the movement of life becomes. What makes philosophy and art active is their capacity to become not just mechanistically, being caused by outside events, but machinically. A mechanism is a self-enclosed movement that merely ticks over, never transforming or producing itself. A machinic becoming makes a connection with what is not itself in order to transform and maximize itself. (56-57)

Schizo-Environmentalism:

D & G denounce the human/nature division and insist that humans cannot be thought separate from nature. Or as they later paraphrase Marx “he who denies God does only a ‘secondary thing,’ for he denies God in order to posit the existence of man, to put man in God’s place” (A-O, 58). Guattari later re-emphasizes the importance of this attempt to recognize the falsity of the division of human/nature:

Our survival on this planet is not only threatened by environmental damage but by a degeneration in the fabric of social solidarity and in the modes of psychical life, which must literally be re-invented. The refoundation of politics will have to pass through the aesthetic and analytical dimensions implied in the three ecologies—the environment, the socius and the psyche. We cannot conceive of solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to global warming due to the greenhouse effect, or to the problem of population control, without a mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society. (Chaosmosis, 20)

Where are the friends that ask questions of the dominant and seek the impossible?

(Part of a longer essay titled "Monsters, Spectres, and Differences: A Transperspective Waiting." In my mind, friendship is a radical engagement... )

I suffer from a Deleuzian stutter, or a Derrida-da-da, in which my language is stifled by my own personal ghosts. “We have lost the friend . . . the friend of the perhaps . . . of respectfully experiencing that friendship." So many dead, some institutionalized, and some just disappeared back into the void. “I will continue to begin again … and I’ll have to wander all alone in this long conversation that we were supposed to have together.”

These spectral visitors stay my hand reminding me that the only answers are in questions that produce more questions: “I know why you hardly sleep. Why you live alone and why night after night you sit at your computer. … I know because I was once looking for the same thing. … It’s the question that drives us."

They point out those that have escaped into the amnesia of recycled consumer pleasures, who can blame them for choosing the steak over the gruel? “Your soul is like an appendix! I don’t even use it!”

Still I am listening for the emergence of a being, another who escapes my comprehension, this listening requires a transition to a new dimension of understanding. I am listening to you: although I do not understand what you are saying, I am attentive to your silence amongst history’s mentions, I am attempting to understand and hear your intention. Which does not mean: I comprehend you, or that I know you … No, I am listening to you as someone that I do not truly know … with you but not as you … I reside in a realm of absolute silence in order to hear what you have to say or what is left unsaid or what reverberates from the unknown. I quest for new words, for new meanings, for new modes of understandings that will bridge this river of silence … for an alliance of possibilities that will not reduce the Other to an item of property or a subject to be mastered. This unspeakable silence is a rift that shatters the boundaries of my life in order to produce a conflagration of nothingness that sears the forest of my consciousness clearing the way for new growths. Perhaps, as the borders of my psyche that restrain my various selves breaks-up there will be the productive explosion of new life spreading across my interior landscape. Chaos enters my realm and produces … impossibilities. “Perhaps the impossible is the only chance of something new, of some new philosophy of the new … Perhaps friendship, if there is such a thing, must honor [faire droit] what appears impossible here." Where are the friends that ask questions of the dominant and seek the impossible?

Sources:

Jacques Derrida’s eulogy for Gilles Deleuze: “I’ll Have to Wander Alone.”
The character Trinity speaking to Neo in the movie The Matrix
Michael Kelso on That 70s Show
Jacques Derrida's Politics of Friendship

Sprinkled throughout:

Personal Pain Suffered By Thivai at Various Times

Additional inspiration:

Rebecca Saunders course "Mourning of Modernity"

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: The Big Question

The big question is--why!???:

... the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly ... : 'Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?' How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: 'More taxes! Less bread!'? ... after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? (29)

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1984)

Film and the Meaning of Life

I'm always revising my film courses and would like to hear about any suggestions about films that explore the "meaning of life" or good essays that analyze films along these lines.

By "meaning of life" I'm thinking on many levels:

1) Following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari I believe that the ultimate philosophical question is "how might we live?" and I am particularly interested in any attempt to think about this as an open-ended question. A key in their philosophy--and mine--is the idea of possibilities, so I am also fascinated, and worried about, those that seek to erase all difference through instituting their response as "the answer" that erases all other possibilities. These are movies that move us on a deep level causing us to ask questions that go to the root of what it means to be alive and "conscious" in this world... (for a great summary of this check out Todd May's intro to his book Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction)

2) What is needed in order to better our lives on a collective struggle level... I'm thinking of Matewan or Iron Jawed Angels that remind us of how many people put their lives on the line in order to ensure their lives would finally have meaning (especially in the sense of creating real social change)... what was their inspiration and what was their sense of the meaning of life? How did they forever change the meaning of our lives?

3) On a much more individual level I would even think of the simple struggles we face each day in which we are faced with what the "meaning of life" is for each of us on a personal level. Perhaps a movie like Whale Rider or Schizopolis?

4) Deep spiritual questions of course are a part this as well... Contact, with its combination of science and spirtuality through a character that doubts, is a good example of this type of movie, or more philosophically driven searches, like I Heart Huckabees and Waking Life. I think it is important that we not be afraid to ask those big religious questions and face our existential dilemmas--whether we are believers or doubters.

5) Following Doug Mann I'm also thinking about the potential of cinematic visions of alternate realities that cause us to question what is the "meaning of life."

Californians

(Humor from my mom--a Californian)

Subject: CALIFORNIANS

So as not to be outdone by all the redneck, hillbilly, and Texan jokes, you know you're from California if:

1. Your coworker has 8 body piercings and none are visible.

2. You make over $300,000 and still can't afford a house.

3. You take a bus and are shocked at two people carrying on a conversation in English.

4. Your child's 3rd-grade teacher has purple hair, a nose ring, and is named Flower.

5. You can't remember . . . . is pot illegal?

6. You've been to a baby shower that has two mothers and a sperm donor.

7. You have a very strong opinion about where your coffee beans are grown, and you can taste the difference between Sumatran and Ethiopian.

8. You can't remember . . . is pot illegal?

9. A really great parking space can totally move you to tears.

10. Gas costs $1.00 per gallon more than anywhere else in the U.S.

11. Unlike back home, the guy at 8:30 am at Starbucks wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses who looks like George Clooney really IS George Clooney.

12. Your car insurance costs as much as your house payment.

13. You can't remember . . . .is pot illegal?

14. It's barely sprinkling rain and there's a report on every news station: "STORM WATCH."

15. You pass an elementary school playground and the children are all busy with their cells or pagers.

16. It's barely sprinkling rain outside, so you leave for work an hour early to avoid all the weather-related accidents.

17. HEY!!!! Is pot illegal????

18. Both you AND your dog have therapists.

19. The Terminator is your governor.

20. If you drive legally & do something wrong, they take your driver's license. If you're here illegally, they want to give you one.

Professor and Students Hack Into Diebold Accuvote-TS Machine

Princeton prof hacks e-vote machine: Students uploaded viruses able to spread to other machines
Associated Press
MSNBC

TRENTON, N.J. - A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel Wednesday to claims that electronic voting machines used across much of the country are vulnerable to hacking that could alter vote totals or disable machines.

In a paper posted on the university's Web site, Edward Felten and two graduate students described how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines.

The marketing director for the machine's maker — Diebold Inc.'s Diebold Election Systems of Allen, Texas — blasted the report, saying Felten ignored newer software and security measures that prevent such hacking.

"I'm concerned by the fact we weren't contacted to educate these people on where our current technology stands," Mark Radke said.

Radke also question why Felten hadn't submitted his paper for peer review, as is commonly done before publishing scientific research.

Felten said he and his colleagues felt it necessary to publish the paper as quickly as possible because of the possible implications for the November midterm elections.

About 80 percent of American voters are expected to use some form of electronic voting in the upcoming election, in which the makeup of the U.S. House will be decided, as well as 33 Senate seats and 36 governorships.

The AccuVote-TS is commonly used across the country, along with a newer model, the AccuVote-TSx. While Felten wasn't able to test the new machine, he said he thought much of what he found would still apply.

The machine Felten tested, obtained in May from an undisclosed source, was the same type used across Maryland in its primary election Tuesday, according to Ross Goldstein, a deputy administrator with the state's Board of Elections. Goldstein said he couldn't comment on the report until he read it.

Diebold and other machine manufacturers, including California-based Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. and Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software Inc., have been the subject of lawsuits, claiming the machines are vulnerable to hacking and breakdowns that can assign votes to the wrong candidate.

To Read the rest of the article

FCC Ordered Media Ownership Study to Be Destroyed

Media ownership study ordered destroyed: FCC draft suggested fewer owners would hurt local TV coverage
Associated Press
MSNBC

WASHINGTON - The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.

The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. received a copy of the report "indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public," according to Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.

'Every last piece' destroyed
Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that "every last piece" of the report be destroyed. "The whole project was just stopped - end of discussion," he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC's Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said.

In a letter sent to Martin Wednesday, Boxer said she was "dismayed that this report, which was done at taxpayer expense more than two years ago, and which concluded that localism is beneficial to the public, was shoved in a drawer."

Martin said he was not aware of the existence of the report, nor was his staff. His office indicated it had not received Boxer's letter as of midafternoon Thursday.

Local ownership benefits
In the letter, Boxer asked whether any other commissioners "past or present" knew of the report's existence and why it was never made public. She also asked whether it was "shelved because the outcome was not to the liking of some of the commissioners and/or any outside powerful interests?"

The report, written by two economists in the FCC's Media Bureau, analyzed a database of 4,078 individual news stories broadcast in 1998. The broadcasts were obtained from Danilo Yanich, a professor and researcher at the University of Delaware, and were originally gathered by the Pew Foundation's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

To read the rest of the article

What Happens When You Ask Difficult Questions of the President?

Bush Unravels at Press Conference

Bush Unravels at Press Conference, Part II

What is a Muckraker

What is a Muckraker?

Eric Schlosser: The Fine Art of Muckraking

Fast Food Nation and McDonaldization

Michelle Leder: How the Other Half Banks

Kembrew Mcleod: Freedom of Expression

Rebecca Solnit: The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigan

What is the Meaning of Radical Democracy?

Daniel Brook: How Sweden Tweaked the Washington Consensus

Eric Schlosser: A Writer’s Life

US Prison Boom

Audio Interview of Wendell Berry

Mark Engler: Six Essays on War and Peace

Why Wendell Berry Matters

Ron Powers: The Apocalypse of Adolescence

T.C. Boyle, Orion, Wendell Berry, Fear, Local Economy, James Howard Kunstler, Prozac, and A Friend of the Earth

Nicholas Klassen: Fast Food Nation Redux

Fast Food Nation Redux
by Nicholas Klassen
Adbusters (July/August 2006):

Five years after he released his bestselling Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser is back to bedevil the fast food industry.

First off is Chew On This: Everything You Didn't Want to Know About Fast Food, a book that educates children about the dark side of McDonald's et al, from sketchy slaughterhouse practices to the negative effects too much fast food can have on growing bodies.

Next up is the fictionalized movie adaptation of Fast Food Nation Schlosser co-wrote with director Richard Linklater, whih premiered this year at Cannes. In it, Don Henderson--a corporate executive at Mickey's fast food restruant chain, home of the "Big One"--tries to figure out why there's so much contanimated meat in the restraunt's frozen burger patties. To track done the answer, he leaves the cushy confines of the company's Southern California boardroom for the immigrant-staffed slaughterhouses, teeming feedlots and cookie cutter strip malls of Middle America.

McDonald's is bracing for the bad publicity Schlosser's exploits will cause and has set up an election-style "war room" to lash back. An internal company memo, initially reported by Dow Jones, said the movie "is a big concern to us" and promised a "full scale media campaign ... to tell the real story." That included mobilizing a "truth squad" and seeking to "discredit the message and the messenger."

And McDonald's isn't alone. Fast food industry funded front-groups are trying to smear Schlosser and have even organized protests at book signings. The right-wing Heartland Institute issued a news release arguing that Schlosser was: "tricking young people ... to lead them away from capitalism into his failed socialist ideology." Presumably they won't like the movie either.
-----------------------------

Check out the Trailer for this film--this is going to be interesting.

Also check out for some background:

Nicholas Turse: The Pentagon's 12-Step Program to Create a Misfit Military

The Pentagon's 12-Step Program to Create a Misfit Military
By Nicholas Turse, Tomdispatch and AlterNet

Iraq is driving down the number of new enlistees, and in desperation recruiters are bringing in a motley mix of underage teens, foreign fighters, neo-Nazis, and ex-cons.

Military recruiting in 2006 has been marked by upbeat pronouncements from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, claims of success by the White House, propaganda releases by the Pentagon, and a spate of recent press reports touting the way the military has made its wo/manpower goals.

But the armed forces have only met with success through a fundamental "transformation," and not the transformation of the military -- that "co-evolution of concepts, processes, organizations and technology" -- Rumsfeld is always talking about either.

While the Secretary of Defense's longstanding goal of transforming the planet's most powerful military into its highest tech, most agile, most futuristic fighting force has, in the words of the Washington Post's David Von Drehle, "melted away," the very makeup of the Armed Forces has been mutating before our collective eyes under the pressure of the war in Iraq. This actual transformation has been reported, but only in scattered articles on the new recruitment landscape in America.

Last year, despite NASCAR, professional bull-riding, and Arena Football sponsorships; popular video games that doubled as recruiting tools; TV commercials dripping with seductive scenes of military glory; a "joint marketing communications and market research and studies" program actively engaged in measures to target for military service Hispanics, drop outs, and those with criminal records; and at least $16,000 in promotional costs for each soldier it managed to sign up, the U.S. military failed to meet its recruiting goals. This year those methods have been pumped up and taken over the top in twelve critical areas of recruitment that make the old Army ad-line, "Be All That You Can Be," into material for late night TV punch lines of the future.

To Read the Rest of the Article and the Twelve New Tactics of Military Recruiting

Recall on Bagged Spinach: E Coli Outbreak

(This is "all" spinach--just thought people should be aware of this. Thanks to Stephanie who works at my favorite food store Good Foods Co-Op for spreading the word and Earthbound Farms for posting a warning for consumers.)

A statement from Samantha Cabaluna of Earthbound Farm

SAN JUAN BAUTISTA, CALIF.; September 15, 2006: We are aware that there are reports of some illnesses in several states and one death, possibly related to e coli in spinach. Along with others in the produce industry, we are currently working with federal and state authorities to assist them in their investigation to identify the source of the bacteria, providing them unfettered access to our facilities and product for testing and investigation. We will do whatever is necessary to help protect the health and safety of the public.

In view of this situation, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently recommending that consumers not eat bagged fresh spinach. So any consumers that have Earthbound Farm brand packaged spinach in their homes who choose to follow the FDA’s recommendations at this time may contact us at 800-690-3200 for a refund or replacement coupons.

Everyone at Earthbound Farm is terribly upset about these illnesses and death and their potential relationship to a product that is ordinarily a very healthy food choice. We are committed to producing exceptionally fresh and healthy produce. Quality and food safety continue to be our top priorities.

For more information, consumers may contact us at (800) 690-3200

I'm confused

Can someone explain this to me?

"Despite having confessed to killing Ramsey, Karr was released after investigators found no evidence tying him to the case."

The Article

Republicans Oppose Bush

McCain ‘will risk presidency’ over CIA jails
By Demetri Sevastopulo, Caroline Daniel and Holly Yeager in Washington
Financial Times

John McCain, the perceived Republican frontrunner for the 2008 presidential election, has dramatically raised the stakes in a fight with the White House over secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons by saying he is unwilling to back down on the issue even if it ruins his chance of becoming president.

The Arizona senator, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, strongly opposes Bush administration legislation that he believes would redefine US obligations under the Geneva conventions. The White House on Thursday attempted to downplay the escalating dispute, which mirrors a similar battle Mr McCain last year won against the administration.

But two people briefed on conversations Mr McCain had with his staff said the senator told aides he was willing to risk the presidency, because of possible loss of support from Republican lawmakers and voters.

“At this point, Senator McCain has not made a determination whether he will run for president,” said Eileen McMenamin, his spokeswoman. “His decision to take a stand on this issue is not based on a political calculation. He believes this is the right thing to do to protect American servicemen and women, and our values.”

To Read the Rest of the Article

Also:

Senate Panel Defies Bush

Anne Colby and Thomas Ehrlich: From Ideology to Inquiry

From Ideology to Inquiry
By Anne Colby and Thomas Ehrlich
Inside Higher Ed (June 2, 2006)

Two years ago — before David Horowitz, the Academic Bill of Rights, and other pressure points on political and ideological bias made the topic such a hot one — we were speaking at a national conference in Washington about a study that we are now just finishing. The study is called the Political Engagement Project and examines 21 undergraduate courses and programs that aim to strengthen the understanding, the skills, and the motivation needed to be politically engaged citizens.

As a way to make the work in these courses and programs come alive, we told what we thought was a compelling story about a Duke University student in one of the programs, called Service Opportunities in Leadership. The student interned in a New York City textile workers union, and subsequently helped organize Students Against Sweatshops at Duke, which led to a new code of conduct for Duke licensees, the first in the country.

We finished the talk at the national conference that included this tale, turned to questions, and were faced with this one at the outset. “What,” the questioner asked, “does the Duke program do to ensure that conservative students have opportunities if they want to work in businesses or with conservative political or Christian organizations for their summer internships? Why,” the questioner went on, “did you refer only to a liberal group and not a conservative one?”

The question was a good one, and it forced us to stop and think, not just on the podium, but for some time thereafter. Fortunately, the program leader was in the audience, and she was able to say that she did make special efforts to ensure a range of internship opportunities, including some with conservative organizations. The question caught us off guard, however, and caused us to reflect hard on issues of ideological and political bias. Without intending to do so, we had implied that working in a union and protesting sweatshops were ideological prototypes of the kinds of political engagement that we were promoting. We should have used some other examples as well, and we should have explicitly addressed the issues involved in encouraging student political engagement without promoting particular ideologies or political positions.

We have come to see those issues as critical, and we are addressing them at length in a book on educating for political engagement, to be published by Jossey-Bass. In that book, we encourage colleges to make education for political development an explicit goal for undergraduate learning and suggest ways to accomplish that goal. We underscore that, in order for this agenda to be legitimate, it is crucial to create a harmonious relationship between the political development goals we are advocating and the special character and core values of higher education. These values include academic freedom, norms of faculty professionalism, standards of intellectual discourse, open-mindedness, and civility.

Academic freedom implies that, within the boundaries of departmental and institutional needs, it is up to professors to determine the specific goals and content of the courses they teach and to decide what material and assignments will best accomplish those goals. This includes making judgments about whether and how to address controversial issues in whatever domains are relevant to the course, including political and public policy issues.

But academic freedom is not unlimited. It is bounded by another central cluster of academic values, which establish standards for both scholarship and teaching. These standards represent a shared understanding of academic discourse as requiring reasoned justification of claims, presentation of evidence, and consideration of plausible alternative explanations of the evidence and of objections to proposed interpretations. When education for political development is introduced into academic coursework, it must conform to these standards — just like any other subject matter is.

In this way, academically based education for political development contrasts sharply with political advertising and with much informal political discourse in everyday life. Often those non-academic forms of political “education” use all available means to achieve their goals, whereas education for political understanding in the academy has to be shaped by reasoned argument, warrant or evidence for one’s views, consideration of alternative points of view, and a knowledge base that is as free of ideological bias as possible. In good teaching, faculty members back up their claims and assertions and take seriously alternative points of view for which a credible case can be made. In a course on U.S. immigration policy, for example, a professor may offer evidence that undocumented workers in this country do not take jobs away from U.S. citizens and legal aliens, but he or she should also expose students to the views of economists who have a different view. The responsibility to teach in conformity with standards of academic discourse also means that students are free to put forward ideas that conflict with positions taken by the faculty member, and those ideas will be judged on their merits.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

UK Gender and Women’s Studies Fall 2006 Film Series

UK Gender and Women’s Studies Fall 2006 Film Series
Family Familia Mag-anak Umndeni

Family Name (Macky Alston; 1997; 89 min.)
Tuesday, September 19, 7:00 p.m.
Gaines Center’s Bingham-Davis House, 218 E. Maxwell Street

As a child growing up in Durham, North Carolina, Macky Alston never questioned why all the other Alstons in his elementary school were black. But in his early 30’s Alston went back to unravel the mystery. “Above all, Family Name is a genealogical detective story [that] reminds viewers that the era of slavery and its horrors wasn’t that long ago. But it also suggests that forgiveness for those crimes is possible and that acknowledging the past, then moving on, is a far healthier approach to painful historical truths than slamming the book shut and pretending to forget.”—Stephen Holden, New York Times
Commentary and discussion led by Nikky Finney, poet and Professor of English, and Kathi Kern, Associate Professor of History.

Chain of Love (Marije Meerman; 2001; 50 min.)
Wednesday, October 4, 7:00 p.m.
Gaines Center’s Bingham-Davis House, 218 E. Maxwell Street

The demand for domestic help is increasing in the West because in many families both parents work outside the home. In turn, escalating numbers of women in the Third World are leaving their own children to take care of kids in the West. Chain of Love is a film about the Philippines' second largest export product – maternal care - and how this export affects the women involved, their families in the Philippines, and families in the West.

Commentary and discussion led by Deborah Crooks, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, whose research in Belize, the Philippines and, most recently, Zambia, focuses on the relationship between complex household livelihood strategies and child well-being.

My American Girls: A Dominican Story (Aaron Matthews; 2001; 63 min.)
Wednesday, November 1, 7:00 p.m.
Gaines Center’s Bingham-Davis House, 218 E. Maxwell Street

In vivid vérité detail, Matthews’ documentary captures the joys and struggles over a year in the lives of the Ortiz family, first generation immigrants from the Dominican Republic. From hard-working parents who imagine retiring to their rural homeland to fast-tracking American-born daughters, caught between their parents’ values and their own, the film encompasses the contradictions of contemporary immigrant life. "Intense and beautiful portrait"-- La Raza "Aaron Matthews captura la dicotomía de las vedas de la familia Ortíz y la historia del inmigrante en los Estados Unidos…”-- Tatiana Pina, Providence Journal
Commentary and discussion led by by Francie Chassen-Lopez, Professor of Latin American history whose research focuses on Mexico and gender in Latin America.

Shouting Silent (Renee Rosen and Xoliswa Sithole; 2002; 50 min.)
Tuesday, November 14, 7:00 p.m.
Gaines Center’s Bingham-Davis House, 218 E. Maxwell Street

Exploring the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic, Xoliswa Sithole, an adult orphan who lost her mother to HIV/AIDS in 1996, journeys back home in search of other young women who have also lost their mothers to HIV/AIDS and are now struggling to raise themselves (and, in many cases, their siblings) on their own. Sithole lyrically interweaves their unsettling stories with highly stylized imagery to help convey her own painful memories and document the grim statistics of HIV infection in Africa. “Grand Jury Prize”--Washington D. C. Independent Film Festival
Commentary and discussion led by Marie-Antoinette Sossou, Assistant Professor in Social Work, whose research interests include international social work, immigration and refugee issues, and human rights. She is currently developing a research project about HIV/AIDS orphans/women project in Africa.

All films free and open to the public

Documentary: Black Diamonds (Lexington, Spetember 27th)

A new documentary film, Black Diamonds: Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice, will premiere in Lexington on September 27th at 7:00 p.m. at the University of Kentucky’s Taylor Education Building auditorium located at the corner of Upper and Scott Streets.

Black Diamonds, by sisters Ann and Catherine Pancake, explores the transformation of our nation’s oldest mountain ranges, presenting a survey of West Virginia surface mining and mountaintop removal practices and how they affect the land and people. A riveting portrait of community resistance, this 70-minute film shows an American region fighting for its life, caught between the national appetite for cheap energy and an enduring sense of Appalachian culture, pride, and natural beauty. Black Diamonds includes testimony from Julia Bonds, West Virginia citizen turned activist who received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2003. Ken Hechler, former West Virginia Secretary of State, William Maxey, former Director of West Virginia Division of Forestry, and many other West Virginia citizens also share their experiences and expertise.

The film was written, directed, and produced by West Virginia natives Catherine and Ann Pancake. Catherine is an experienced filmmaker whose work has been screened at The Baltimore Museum of Art, the Philadelphia International Film Festival, and New York City’s Millennium Theater among other venues. She won a Maryland States Arts Council Individual Artist award for Black Diamonds. Ann Pancake is a writer who explores cultural conflict in contemporary West Virginia in her fiction and non-fiction. In 2004 she was awarded a Pushcart Prize.

Following the screening, Catherine Pancake will discuss her film with the audience. Erik Reece, UK English instructor and author of the critically acclaimed Lost Mountain, a work about mountaintop removal, will introduce Pancake and her film.

Sponsored by the University of Kentucky’s Appalachian Studies Program, the event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow. For more information, contact Kate Black at 859-257-4207 or at kate.black@uky.edu.

“…a searing documentary…mixes history, sociology, advocacy journalism, and personal portraits vividly depicting the catastrophic ecological and cultural effects wrought by mountaintop removal.”—Michael Yockel, Baltimore Magazine, May 2005

“Black Diamonds is the ‘Harlan County USA’ of the 21st century.”—Steve Fesenmeier, writer, film programmer, and WV 2006 Hero of History

2006 Bale Boone Symposium: Lexington, October 8-14

2006 Bale Boone Symposium, to be held in Lexington, October 8-14.

This symposium seeks to counteract negative stereotypes of Kentucky by investigating and publicizing a period in our history when Kentuckians were at the forefront of American culture in a wide variety of fields (education, politics, medicine, architecture, music, religion, agriculture, and other fields): the period from roughly 1792 to 1852. I hope you will forward this to anyone you know that might be interested, announce it to your classes, and consider coming to one or more of the events yourself. All info is on the attached flier, and is also available at here

Ralph K.M. Haurwitz: U.S. education chief backs panel's call for college reforms

U.S. education chief backs panel's call for college reforms: Margaret Spellings, visiting Austin, supports financial aid boost, increased accountability
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
The Austin American-Statesman

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, visiting Austin over the weekend, all but endorsed a special panel's sweeping recommendations to increase financial aid for college students, measure student learning with standardized tests and require colleges to disclose data on graduation rates, spending and other matters.

Spellings, in town to address community leaders at a luncheon and attend the football game between the University of Texas and Ohio State University, said that none of the panel's recommendations had given her pause, including a much-criticized proposal to create a national database for tracking individual students' progress through higher education. She said she was prepared to seek a significant increase in the federal government's $80 billion annual outlay for financial aid, provided that colleges and universities become more trans- parent about their operations.

The remarks were the most detailed Spellings has offered publicly on the recommendations since the Commission on the Future of Higher Education issued the last in a series of draft reports a month ago. A final report with only minor changes is expected shortly, and Spellings said she plans to outline a plan for acting on the recommendations at a news conference in Washington on Sept. 26.

"I think the commission's work obviously was high quality, very much on point," she said. "It did exactly what it was supposed to do, and that is frame the big issues and precipitate discussion and interest. I consider this kind of the beginning of the beginning of all the discussion on higher education. And it's high time and overdue."

Spellings formed the commission a year ago in an effort to improve the affordability, accessibility and consumer friendliness of higher education. She named Charles Miller, a Houston investor and former chairman of the UT System Board of Regents, to lead the panel. A friend of President Bush's, Miller was something of a mentor to Spellings when she served as Bush's education adviser during his term as governor of Texas.

Miller, who accompanied Spellings in Austin, said he took issue with some leaders of private colleges and universities who have criticized the report, especially a provision calling for a national "unit record" database to track students' progress and thereby hold schools more accountable for fulfilling their educational mission. Critics say such a system would endanger students' privacy.

Miller and Spellings rejected that argument, asserting that names and Social Security numbers would be protected. Miller said private colleges "are afraid of transparency, and yet they take a huge amount of federal money. What do they have to hide? A private college doesn't have any more right to that data than the government does."

Spellings said the database would help assess higher education outcomes, because current records only track first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students. The proposed database would also track cross-state transfer students and returning students.

To Read the Rest of the Report

Memory is a process...

(Reading Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead; Post 9/11 reflection, and other modes of "seeking" the individual within the collective)

memory, a process that depends on forgetting
labyrinths within our conscious mind(s)
are echoes of unconscious traces

my other selves speak to me
of memories buried deeply inside
re-membering is re-cognizing

conflict of selves
coming to terms
with oneself

by Michael Benton

Sabi Diri: September 29th and 30th

(Aminata Cairo is a professor at Bluegrass Community and Technical College--she is an amazing dancer--she participated in a dance at the 1st Annual Lexington Peace Fair that brought me to tears--powerful)

They’re back!

Sabi Diri,
so be it

Sabi Diri, s.b.i. and Friends
Coming Out/Fundraiser

Performance
Friday and Saturday September 29th and 30th
ArtsPlace 161 N. Mill Street at 7:30pm
Cost: $10 adults, $5 children (ages 4 – 12)

Sabi Diri Experience Workshop: (Song/Dance/Drama)
Sunday October 1
Mecca Live Studio Gallery 451 Chair Avenue
from 2:30 – 5:00 pm Cost: $25
This program is presented with the support of LexArts

Sabi Diri, s.b.i. Dance Company

The newly formed Sabi Diri, s.b.i. dance company is the rebirth of Sabi Diri, which originated in 2001. Drawing from their multi-ethnic heritage and cultural pride, Sabi Diri, s.b.i. aims to be an example of celebrating the human spirit and of “creating spaces without apologies”. Under the artistic Direction of Aminata Cairo and Jason Thompson, and the musical direction of Tripp Bratton, the company produces performance pieces rooted in traditional and contemporary African, Afro-Surinamese, and other ethnic dance forms, but are multi-dimensional and inclusive of song, poetry, visual arts, and live music.

Aminata Cairo

Aminata Cairo, Ph.D. (former Sandra Cairo Baruti) is the founder of Sabi Diri, s.b.i. Born and raised in Amsterdam, Netherlands, she stands on her rich heritage and ancestral culture from Suriname.

Using her background in dance, community arts, physical education, clinical psychology, and medical anthropology, Aminata has designed a multi-faceted program based in the arts and cultural traditions. The dance company is one department of the Sabi Diri, s.b.i. organization.

She has worked internationally, locally, regionally, and state wide in Kentucky and Maryland as a dance artist, teacher, choreographer, and consultant. She has been a dance company member with Syncopated Inc. (Lexington, KY) and the Sankofa Dance Theater (Baltimore, MD).

She received training in the healing arts from Nata’ska Hasan Hummingbird, and arts as a tool for civic change from the Urban Bush Women Summer Institute. Her most intensive training she received during her two year stay in Suriname, where she studied traditional Afro-Surinamese dance forms, and Afro-Surinamese mental well being structures.

Call for Artists: 2006 Bluegrass Energy & Green Living Expo, October 14 & 15

Call to Artists
--------------------
For an art showing to take place at the 2006 Bluegrass Energy & Green Living Expo
October 14th-15th
Bluegrass Energy Expo

Now accepting submissions for artwork in any media.
Free, open to all. Deadline Sept. 29th.
Notifications of selected entries will be made by October 6th.

Submission details
---------------------------
digital submission:
info@citizenscreate.org
(please keep files under 2 megs)

slide submission:
PO BOX 1293 Lexington, KY 40588-1293
(attn: artwork jury)

Title, Dimensions, Name, Phone/Email must accompany all submissions.
Artwork themed closest to the event will take priority.
Lexington, Green Lexington (renewable energy, sustainability, environment, conservation, healthy community, local goods, personal responsibility, etc...)

Curated by citizensCREATE! For the guidelines for submissions

Lexington, September 16: Calling Dance Lovers and Lounge Lizards

Calling Dance Lovers and Lounge Lizards,

Saturday September 16th, Mecca presents: HAFLA PURA, a showcase of local, regional, and international dancers. To be more specific, we're putting on a show featuring Carolena Nericcio of FatChanceBellyDance of San Francisco, Megha Gavin of Devyani Dance Company, Rakadu Gypsy of Lexington, Sabi Diri, Anaya Gypsy, and Taletha from
Louisville, KY.

All these dance companies and dancers represent some of the most talented and innovative forces in the realms of belly dance and multiculturally fused dance these days.

The show follows the 1st day of workshops presented by Carolena and Megha on Tribal Pura- Carolena's format for American Tribal Style Belly Dance.

HAFLA PURA
Saturday, Sept. 16th, 2006
@ Mecca
451 Chair Ave.
Lexington, KY. 40508
tickets- $15 (can purchase online through Paypal make payments to info@meccadance.com)

doors open @ 8pm- 8-9pm cocktail hour with music by Mick Jeffries' Laptop Lounge showtime- 9pm beautiful dancing presented by the above named dancers and dance companies dancetime- 11pm - dance to the music of THE BIG MARACAS!!

all in all a HUGE night of beauty, fun, dance, and shimmies!!

for more information visit: Mecca Dance or ring 859.254.9790

hope this finds you well and aching to get out!!
peace,
teresa

I've Been Looking For a Book Like This For a Long Time

People's Movements, People's Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements
Author: Bob Ostertag



America was born in an act of rebellion, and protest and dissent have been crucial to our democracy ever since. Along the way, movements for social justice have created a wide array of pamphlets, broadsides, newsletters, newspapers, and even glossy magazines. In People’s Movements, People’s Press, Bob Ostertag brings this hidden history to light, examining the publications of the abolitionist, woman suffrage, gay and lesbian, and environmental movements, as well as the underground GI press during the Vietnam War. This fascinating story takes us from the sparse, privately owned media environment of the nineteenth century to the corporate media saturation of the present.

Within these publications, we find powerful debates about the direction of a movement; impassioned cries for rights and civil liberties; lonely voices reaching out to others after being alienated by the mainstream press and the unaccepting world around them; and demands that now seem surprisingly reasonable but were at one time quite revolutionary. With both plain language and rigorous scholarship, Ostertag tells the story not only of the publications but the many colorful characters who created them.

The story of the social justice movement press is deeply intertwined with the story of the movements themselves. In fact, Ostertag shows how reliance on the printed word fundamentally shaped what we now know as social movements. People’s Movements, People’s Press, then, offers a new view—from the ground up—of social transformation in America and raises the question of how social movements will change as they move from print to the Internet as their primary means of communication.

As large corporations take over every media outlet available, People’s Movements, People’s Press reminds us of the great value and historical importance of independent, activist-driven media.

Bob Ostertag has written widely on political subjects, particularly those concerning Latin America. He is an associate professor of technocultural studies at the University of California at Davis and lives in San Francisco.

Site for the book; Read the Introduction

The Ground Truth

'The Ground Truth'
Posted by David DeGraw
AlterNet Blogs



New documentary gives a shocking inside look at the problems facing soldiers on the ground in Iraq and the difficulties they face when returning home.

To Read About the Documentary and Watch the Trailer

Jesus Camp: Training a New Generation of God's Soldiers

(Courtesy of Proper Study of Mankind)

I have to be honest, this scares me more than the possibility of a Muslim terrorist attacking me... check out this new documentary:

Jesus Camp Trailer

IMDB Description and Reviews

Incestous Amplification: The Best War Ever

PR Watch

“Lies got us into this war. Only the truth will get us out.”

The Best War Ever, by the best-selling authors of Weapons of Mass Deception, is a vital account of why America is losing in Iraq and the Middle East. We have met the enemy—and it's our own PR machine. One of the most tragic consequences of the Bush administration's reliance on spin, the authors argue, is its disdain for realistic planning. Repeatedly, when faced with predictions of problems, policymakers dismissed the warnings of Iraq experts, choosing instead to promulgate their own version of the war through conservative media outlets and PR campaigns. And as the book reveals, they're still doing it—as the people who sold us the war in Iraq are now trying to sell an expansion into Syria and Iran.

Read an Excerpt and Watch the Video Then Find the Book

Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki: 2005)

Why We Fight is my favorite documentary of the 21st century and should be required viewing as a consideration of post 9/11 trends and events.

Watch it with your friends and your enemies! Watch it now!

Merriam Webster Word of the Day: Réchauffé

réchauffé \ray-shoh-FAY\ noun

*1 : rehash
2 : a warmed-over dish of food

Example sentence:
"[It] is a réchauffé, ... lifted and stitched from 'The Gastronomical Me' and other books." (Victoria Glendinning, The New York Times Book Review, June 9, 1991)

Did you know?
We borrowed "réchauffé" in the early 19th century from the French; it is the past participle of their verb "réchauffer," which means "to reheat." Nineteenth-century French speakers were using it figuratively to designate something that was already old hat — you might say, "warmed over." English speakers adopted that same meaning, which is still our most common. But within decades someone had apparently decided that leftovers would seem more appealing with a French name. The notion caught on. A recipe for "Réchauffé of Beef a la Jardiniere," for example, instructs the cook to reheat "yesterday's piece of meat" in a little water with some tomatoes added, and serve it on a platter with peas and carrots and potatoes. "Réchauffé" shares its root with another English word, "chafing dish," the name of a receptacle for keeping food warm at the table.

Slavoj Zizek: On Hollywood's 9/11 Films

On 9/11, New Yorkers faced the fire in the minds of men: Hollywood's attempts to mark the 2001 attacks ignore their political context and the return to history they symbolise
Slavoj Zizek
The Guardian (September 11, 2006)



Two Hollywood films mark 9/11's fifth anniversary: Paul Greengrass's United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. Both adopt a terse, realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There is undoubtedly a touch of authenticity to them and most critics have praised their sober styles and avoidance of sensationalism. But it is the touch of authenticity that raises some disturbing questions.

The realism means that both films are restrained from taking a political stance and depicting the wider context of the events. Neither the passengers on United 93 nor the policemen in WTC grasp the full picture. All of a sudden they find themselves in a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it.

This lack of "cognitive mapping" is crucial. All we see are the disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake. What if the same film took place in a bombed high-rise building in Beirut? That's the point: it cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as "subtle pro-Hizbullah terrorist propaganda". The result is that the political message of the two films resides in their abstention from delivering a direct political message. It is the message of an implicit trust in one's government: when under attack, one just has to do one's duty.
This is where the problem begins. The omnipresent invisible threat of terror legitimises the all-too-visible protective measures of defence. The difference of the war on terror from previous 20th-century struggles, such as the cold war, is that while the enemy was once clearly identified as the actually existing communist system, the terrorist threat is spectral. It is like the characterisation of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction: most people have a dark side, she had nothing else. Most regimes have a dark oppressive spectral side, the terrorist threat has nothing else.

The power that presents itself as being constantly under threat and thus merely defending itself against an invisible enemy is in danger of becoming a manipulative one. Can we really trust those in power, or are they evoking the threat to discipline and control us? Thus, the lesson is that, in combating terror, it is more crucial than ever for state politics to be democratically transparent. Unfortunately, we are now paying the price for the cobweb of lies and manipulations by the US and UK governments in the past decade that reached a climax in the tragicomedy of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Recall August's alert and the thwarted attempt to blow up a dozen planes on their way from London to the US. No doubt the alert was not a fake; to claim otherwise would be paranoiac. But a suspicion remains that it was a self-serving spectacle to accustom us to a permanent state of emergency. What space for manipulation do such events - where all that is publicly visible are the anti-terrorist measures themselves - open up? Is it not that they simply demand too much from us, the ordinary citizen: a degree of trust that those in power lost long ago? This is the sin for which Bush and Blair should never be forgiven.

What, then, is the historical meaning of 9/11? Twelve years earlier, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell. The collapse of communism was perceived as the collapse of political utopias. Today, we live in a post-utopian period of pragmatic administration, since we have learned the hard lesson of how noble political utopias can end in totalitarian terror. But this collapse of utopias was followed by 10 years of the big utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy. November 9 thus announced the "happy 90s", the Francis Fukuyama dream of the "end of history", the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal community was around the corner, that the obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely local pockets of resistance where the leaders have not yet grasped that their time is over.

September 11 is the symbol of the end of this utopia, a return to real history. A new era is here with new walls everywhere, between Israel and Palestine, around the EU, on the US-Mexico and Spain-Morocco borders. It is an era with new forms of apartheid and legalised torture. As President Bush said after September 11, America is in a state of war. But the problem is that the US is not in a state of war. For the large majority, daily life goes on and war remains the business of state agencies. The distinction between the state of war and peace is blurred. We are entering a time in which a state of peace itself can be at the same time a state of emergency.

When Bush celebrated the thirst for freedom in post-communist countries as a "fire in the minds of men", the unintended irony was that he used a phrase from Dostoevsky's The Possessed, where it designates the ruthless activity of radical anarchists who burned a village: "The fire is in the minds of men, not on the roofs of houses." What Bush didn't grasp is that on September 11, five years ago, New Yorkers saw and smelled the smoke from this fire.

· Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Link to the Essay

Book Meme: Important Books in My Life

(This book meme was passed on to me from Spontaneous Rising, I'm not going to formerly pass it on to anyone, but I would be interested in the lists of anyone that care to share)

A Book that Changed my Life

This may be a shock to some:

The Bible

This is what comes to my mind first b/c I discussed it with a new friend yesterday. By the time I was twelve years old I had read it stright through six times, annotated it, developed arguments about it, committed many passages to memory, and mapped out contradictions. I was a very shy kid and I started to develop my own voice by asking questions of everyone about the inconsistencies in the Bible. Questions that I notcied were very disturbing to the adults who believed it was gospel truth. I observed their evasions and their fear/anxiety. I began to watch closely (listen to) how people used the text and misinterpreted it (or were ignorant about what it actually said). Eventually devastated by an inability to come to terms with what I was seeing/reading/hearing I abandoned my faith. A rift that left a huge whole in my life and left me damaged for a long time (you could actually say it is something I still haven't totally come to terms with). While I suffered a great disappointment in my relationship to this text and the religion--I also learned a lot from it. It also left me with a thirst for more knowledge and the lack-of-fear of questioning anything and a healthy skepticism of received/naturalized/reified doctrines/beliefs/knowledge.

Others:

The Cunning of History by Richard L. Rubenstein for when I was wrestling with the nature of evil in the world it gave me some clues about how evil can truly develop out of the slow progression of institutional/legalistic decisions (the link includes other books that helped).

Studs Terkel's interviews (in particular C.P. Ellis on how a truly despicable person can change and do good through having experiences with those they hate)

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky and We Are Everywhere by The Notes From Nowhere Collective. For providing lessons on localized and global resistance.

War and Revolution in Vietnam by Kevin Ruane and People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Beginning to read history against the grain.

Situationist International Anthology. If you don't like the dominant culture--critique it, rewrite it, and begin to create your own. Very important were the concepts of derive and detournement.

Doggy Bag by Ron Sukenick

While I'm not a fan of avant-pop fiction. This book did hammer in the way in which media can fill in the gaps of our consciousness (in particular pages 121-140)

A Book I've Read More Than Once

See above.

Also:

Ideas for Action by Cynthia Kaufman

A book that I would also give to young people as a beginning map of current social issues and movements.

Literacies of Power by Donaldo Macedo

When I was trying to understand the problems of academia, and, in particular, the reproduction of knowledge in my discipline: English Studies.

The Botany of Desire--Michael Pollan

Because I am fascinated by the subject and admire his writing style.

Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia Butler

What happens when survivors of a post-apocalyptic Earth come into contact with a truly "alien" "other" species and are forced to adpat in order to survive.

A Book I Would Take With Me if I Were Stuck on a Desert Island

The Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life. Edited by Tim Ingold.

Wow, this book is coming in the mail and I can't wait--but when will I find the time to read it? If I was stranded on a desert island I would have the time necessary to grasp the various threads of this book.

A Book that Made Me Laugh

The last one I remember:

Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs (uncomfortably)


A Book that Made Me Cry

The Vietnam Reader. Edited by Stewart O'Nan

I'm reading this for a peace studies course I am teaching. Such a waste of young lives on both sides of the war and a documentation of the dark side of humanity (with glimpses of those struggling to overcome it/come terms with it). Powerful literature...

also:

Culture of Make Believe--Robert Jensen

A long history of the dark side of humanity set down in an attempt to do something about it.

Writing War in the Twentieth Century by Margot Norris

The sections on the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

A Book I Wish had been Written

War: A Look at an Archaic Form of Human Relations

A Book I Wish had Never been Written

Mein Kamp by Adolph Hitler

Books I've been Meaning to Read

Performance Studies: An Introduction by Richard Schechner

Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink for Beginners

U.S.A Trilogy by John Dos Passos

Ethno-Techno by Guillermo Gomez-Pena

A Force More Powerful by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall

I'm Currently Reading

I'm half way through the Vietnam Reader mentioned above. Also I'm just finishing Writing War in the Twentieth Century by Margot Norris. My current fiction read is Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Meriam Webster Word of the Day: Poltroon

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

poltroon \pahl-TROON\ noun

: a spiritless coward : craven

Example sentence:
In the end, their leader proved to be a traitorous poltroon whose main concern was saving his own skin.

Did you know?
When you get down to synonyms, a "poltroon" is just a "chicken." Barnyard chickens are fowl that have long been noted for timidity, and the name "chicken" has been applied to human cowards since the 17th century. "Poltroon" has been used for wimps and cravens for even longer, since the early 16th century at least. And if you remember that chickens are dubbed "poultry," you may guess that the birds and the cowards are linked by etymology as well as synonymy. English picked up "poltroon" from Middle French, which in turn got it from Old Italian "poltrone," meaning "coward." The Italian term has been traced to the Latin "pullus," a root that is also an ancestor of "pullet" (a young hen) and "poultry."

Cliffs at Natural Bridge, KY