Thursday, September 30, 2004

Autumn

I've flown back to my alma mater Penn State for a week to visit Kate, tie up some loose ends, and catch the first shudderings of fall. The oaks are yellowing, the virginia creeper and sumac are already bleeding from every pore, and the red maple are primed to fire-bomb the town. Diane Ackerman, a Penn State English alumnus wrote a gorgeous book called A Natural History of the Senses, which has a wonderful section on the chemistry behind and the literature surrounding the turning of the leaves. The most spectacular displays run up and down the upper east coasts of both the US and China. A particularly poetic passage of hers follows the last threads of the leaf stem as they separate from the branch, the falling that she likens to the 'falling leaf' maneuver that airplane pilots effect, exerting the slightest pressure of the will as they descend through years of memory, to layer and sweetly decay, perhaps to finally end up as a fossil imprint - a testimony to things that burn brightly and pass. I think the president (er, perhaps not the current president) ought to read this passage on national television every October 15. Each year I resurrect Ackerman's observation that the beauty of autumn - the exquisite combination of blazing leaves, the low sun, stretched blue sky, and contrasts of light - is entirely non-utilitarian. Autumn stand apart from the wonderfully contrived, seductive beauty of natural selection. Astoundingly, autumn is not selling anything. Autumn just is. Like Your Face.

\Au"tumn\, n. [L. auctumnus, autumnus, perh. fr. a root av to satisfy one's self: cf. F. automne. See Avarice




Wednesday, September 29, 2004

The September Tapes

A student of mine drew my attention to a new independent film entitled The September Tapes, which is at base a Blair Witch does Iraqistan faux documentary. In some of my other work, I talk about the survivalist motif and its relationship to post-9/11 pop culture. It appears The September Tapes occupy the liminal zone where military-themed reality TV, soldier blogs, embedded news, war film, and war video games meet. That it blasts the documentary format in much the same way Blair Witch did is illustrative of the "fictional times" that Michael Moore mentioned under hail of boos at the 2003 Oscars.

Blogistan and the Camera's Gaze

There is a flipside to a militaristic society of control and surveillance. The panopticism and ever-presence of the camera works power both ways. We ought to know that the camera is a neutral instrument. The cameras posted on the streetlights are balanced by the camera that filmed the Rodney King beating. State surveillance is met with the call for demonstrators of the WTO/FTAA to bring with them cameras to document police brutality. Indymedia produced the documentary "The Miami Model" out of these clips (the public premier of the documentary was raided by the NYPD; the FBI and US Secret Service is also harassing the website hosts for indymedia.org). There is evidence already of a kind of "politics of the gaze" as to who is allowed to take photos on the streets, in public, in commercial venues, etc. - and who may not.

What does the politics of the gaze have to do with free speech? This is a tough question. What kind of freedom is being violated by my not being allowed to document my surroundings? In other words, why was a friend of mine kicked out of the mall for taking photos? - and does this have anything to do with not being allowed to pass out political flyers there?

The politics of the gaze have very much to do with independent journalism - especially in times of war. Those not embedded with the U.S. military were viewed as fair game. It was even desirable for those in power that these journalists be shot down to prevent any free-range gazing.

A toned-down medium, the blog, is testing the limits of gaze politics. The original war blog was perhaps journalist Christopher Allbritton and his Back to Iraq blog. Unhitching himself from any corporate media enterprise, Allbritton raised $25,000 to spend some time on the ground after the invasion.

In Blogistan, soldiers themselves are testing the limits of the right to gaze/speak. This is getting tricky. The military is experimenting with allowing freedom, but it's beginning to show its slip. The first real conflict is the case of Al Lorentz, a 20-year commissioned officer on the ground in Iraq, who expressed grave reservations not about the ethics or legality of the war, but simply about the military's chances of winning what he surmises is a highly coordinated guerilla war. Now he's looking at 20 years in the can.

It is becoming clear that technology has made time much more "real". That is, the distance between the gaze and the ability to broadcast it to the world has evaporated. Has it become easier or more difficult to monitor and control information flow? How far are we from mandated "Loose Lips Sink Ships" desktop wallpaper? And, in the end, is there really a difference between witnessing and witnessing? Has there ever been?


Drugs Done in Words

I've been giving some thought to the interface between language/rhetoric and drugs. There are a few well-known examples of thinkers closely comparing the two. Plato's dialogue, The Phaedrus, likens the written word (inferior, for Plato, to more organic speech) to a drug - the word is "pharmakon," which means both poison and medicine. This is all elaborated in a well-known essay by Jacques Derrida called "Plato's Pharmacy" - a whirlwind tour of inebriants, medicines, poisons, technologies, writing, speech, and the gods Thoth and Hermes. There are also the references to good rhetoric as an enrapturing drug in Gorgias' Encomium to Helen. Gorgias was a famous teacher of rhetoric in Greece and elsewhere (a real Mediterranean cosmopolitan).

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
-Fdriedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "Expeditions of an Untimely Man"

If we expand our definition of rhetoric to envelop communication technology as a whole - speech, text, hypertext, moving and still images - we often find the conflagration of drugs and rhetoric in the idea that television is "addictive" or that art is a kind of drug designed to produce flights of fancy or is in itself a hallucination. We find this notion at work in the art-world of The Matrix, where Neo, the main character, is offered one pill to remain in the hallucination, and another to fall from it. (But there are different takes on this art-world as the series progresses; in my estimation, it goes I: Baudrillard, II: Foucault, III Hegel).

I think we find it much easier these days to see the relationship between rhetoric and drugs thanks to new French posty conceptions of power - that discourse and indeed all achitectures of living comprise "power" - both regulation and production of life. In fact, the growth of the self-help pharmaceutical business is only matched by the pace of change in the world of communication technology. If the little pill-boxes of Xtreme mints in the grocery store checkout aisle are any indication, we are a pill-popping culture. The Internet, moreover, aside from the charge that it is itself a drug, has facilitated the explosion of the free international trade of prescription drugs - anything from phentermine to oxycontin to psychedelic research chemicals. I'm not the only one who holds the incipient thesis that the twain will one day meet. But we also have what I call the "cubicle enhancing drugs" - Prozac, Zoloft, and the gang - that function to preserve the management hub of the global economy. That is, these drugs overcome the alienation of the post-industrial office in much the same way as the discourse of the protestant work ethic functioned to sustain industrialism - heaven is simply brought to earth.

But drugs aren't drugs. David Lenson, in his book On Drugs, suggests that there are some drugs that push one to consume more - i.e. alcohol, caffeine, cocaine, nicotine, heroin - and some drugs that are expressive rather than consumptive - psychedelics, mostly; the Native American peyote cults, for example, consider peyote to be the spiritual antithesis of alcohol, and can break addictions, reboot the addictive mechanism of the brain and/or help one fine spiritual connection beyond the addiction.

So what does this mean in terms of rhetoric, discourse, and language? Can we find an analogue and make simular distinctions? I don't know. I'll work on it.




Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Institutional Memory of War

Poll Finds A Nation Chastened by War

The reality of war seems to be finally catching up with the public. We can tell this not only through polls but through the tenor of the mainstream corporate media, whose business interests make them the last to display any criticism - even behind smaller, supposedly more "conservative" small-town Midwest media. On the other hand, it might be that the "reality of war" is a harsh economic reality at home, what Noam Chomsky argues was the main force that brought a turn in public conscience regarding Vietnam in 1968. Hard to say. Something's happening.

This box has a false bottom though: The 9/11 Committee's whitewash, Abu Ghraib, the 60 Minutes' controversy (the one about the CBS-forged 'Nam documents, not the BushAdmin-forged Niger yellowcake uranium documents, the latter of which was killed to air the former) - all suggest a trick made famous by the CIA: show a little to hide a lot.

What's the lot? This video has been making its way around the world, and you can see it virtually everywhere except the U.S. Also, try this one, an airing of a Irish documentarian Jamie Doran's "Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death" regarding the torture and killing of 3000+ Taliban soldiers who gave themselves up. Also, note that twice as many Iraqi civilians are being killed by U.S. troops than by the resistance to the occupation. Mainstream media gives the opposite impression at best.